This long weekend (Anzac weekend) we had planned a three day, two night kayaking trip with our friends, Rod and Vanessa.
The original plan was to leave Melbourne Thursday night, after fixing two (hired) double sea kayaks on the roof of Rod’s car, drive to Port Welshpool and make an early morning crossing (catching the tide-change and low winds) across to Wilson’s Promontory.
The first hitch in the plan was the kayaks not fitting the roof and having to also rent a trailer. The second hitch was the weather forecast. From a relatively good forecast on Wednesday evening the 4pm Thursday forecast was decidedly less auspicious with two fronts coming through and 30-35knot NW winds forecast for Saturday and possibly extending on to Sunday morning, when we would be crossing the channel, against the tide, back to Port Welshpool. After a bit of dithering and wavering, some pressure from the kayak rental guy and a few other good points (we hadn’t paddled together before; we hadn’t paddled these particular kayaks before; I wasn’t 100% certain that my shoulder would not fatigue by the third day; if the forecast was too conservative we’d be screwed; we were not familiar with how much swell would be coming through that particular channel, how swift the tidal current was or how much a wind would chop up against a tide and ocean swell; it’s a relatively remote place to be stuck) we changed plans to paddle the length of the Nooramunga Coastal Park.
Nooramunga is a series of low sandy islands just East of Wilson’s Promontory. Ross and I did an overnight paddle lastOctober in Eggy Bread. The kayak rental guy gave us the name and number of a man that he uses for car shuffles and Friday morning we got in touch with him and he confirmed that he would be able to pick us up at the eastern-most landing (McLaughlin’s beach) of the park around midday on Sunday.
So, late Friday morning we paddled out of Port Welshpool in ‘Banjo’ and Wobbegong’ stuffed to capacity with 10L of water per person and a huge amount of (very yummy :) food. Given the forecast, I was anticipating cold and wet. But, Friday was warm, sunny, blue skies as far as we could see and even the evening barely required more than one extra layer. This may also have been because we were too onvolved in the great meals that we had all made to share (Thai green curry with chicken, turkey madras, sag aloo and basmati rice. Yum). Saturday the winds didn’t kick up until fairly late in the day but we were cold and wet on arrival at our second campsite. After a lull that was almost perfectly timed for dinner (just the last mouthfuls of some excellent gnocchi and chorizo rigatoni and, of course, the clean up remained), the second front arrived with rain and strong winds.
The winds had dropped by Sunday morning and we decided that our original route plan would not have been too awful. However, heading across the final stretch, a weld fatigued and broke on our rudder system. Not too much trouble in this shallow water with only a short distance remaining but a more serious problem out in the channel.