Bawley Point to Maloney’s

Shearwaters, whales, wind, and sausages.

29-oct-2016

wx: partly cloudy, warm, light winds => periods of rain => cloudy, 15+ knot northerly, easing.

Wildey had originally advertised this as a weekend trip, hopefully to the Tathra area. In response to not-so-stellar marine forecast, it was later downgraded to an overnight trip in the Batemans Bay area, but with a forecast for strong winds and rain on Sunday, it eventually went as a Bawley Point to Maloney’s day trip. Sandy was showing uncommon sense and skipped the paddle due to tendinitis in her elbow, so it was just 7 sausages: the usual suspects (John, Mike, Mark, Peter, me) plus Roy Harvey and Guy Reeve from Canberra.

It all started innocently enough (credit: Guy Reeve)

After meeting at Maloney’s at 9:00 (these guys would be terrible alpinists) to leave some vehicles, it was 10:15 before we hit the water. It was partly cloudy, but lovely and warm as we set off. The low southerly swell and light winds made for mellow paddling (if paddling like a madman trying to keep up to these seniors can ever be mellow). Almost immediately whales were spotted offshore which spread the group out, but we regrouped again after passing through the narrows west of Brush Island – navigating through said passage required a bit of care as the bigger sets were breaking most of the way across.

It was a fairly agreeable but uneventful paddle to our lunch stop at Snake Bay – except for the unwelcome rain that had set in making everyone cold as rain gear had seemed superfluous when we launched. The landing at Snake Bay was a piece of cake, and just in time for me, as my Raynaud’s had kicked in big time and I couldn’t feel my hands. Interestingly, during the May – Oct time period I have seen the beach at Snake Bay go from 100% pebbles to 80% sand and then back to 80% pebbles.

Lunch stop (credit: Guy Reeve)

Fortuitously, the rain stopped for our lunch, and everyone was able to warm up. I put on all my clothes, and whilst eating my lunch alternated between drinking my tea and soaking my fingers in it. Near the end of lunch, Wildey was complaining about the absence of the forecast north wind; I, of course, was quietly rejoicing that I had got this far without any near death experiences, and wouldn’t mind one bit if it continued that way for the rest of the day. Then Killer observed that the clouds above us were starting to move, and soon after that the first whitecaps were seen.

We launched off the beach, and by the time we were out from the shelter of Clear Point, the seas were whipped up into a confronting frenzy – how could a calm sea become so messy so quickly? It must have been blowing a gale offshore because the 15-20 knots winds we experienced were insufficient to explain the very steep 2m breaking wind waves that had apparently materialized out of nowhere. I rafted up to Peter and reefed my sail down to its “storm sail” size and with great trepidation let ‘er fly. The stock Pacific Action sail is 1 m**2, but our modified storm sail is but a third of that, and was perfect this day – I could not have handled the full sail, and even the middling 0.7 m**2 size could have been too much for me. It’s not that it was so crazy windy, but with the very steep and breaking following sea, everyone was finding conditions exciting – even crusty old Wildey had a near capsize when a big one decided to break on his head. Well that’s not quite true – Peter with his quiet competence, hardly noticed a ripple.

I was feeling solid, but a tad intimidated by the conditions, so asked Peter to keep an eye on me, and after that, bless his heart, he shadowed me like a hungry dog at mealtime. Having Peter standing by to pick up the pieces should I come a cropper made it so much easier to relax and just focus on the paddling, which of course, made the paddling easier.

Bunch of kayakers hidden in the waves (credit: Guy Reeve)

And then came the whales. And I don’t mean the often sighted spout a km away. Large adult whales were launching themselves clear out of the water, and landing with loud BOOMs sounding very much like fired cannons. Over and over again at close range they hurled themselves skyward only to fall back to earth that a thundering boom.

By the time we had got around Point Upright, Roy had had quite enough and declared he was pulling out at Durass North. To my surprise, Killer was happy enough to join him, and when the group elders (Mike, John, Peter) decided we should continue on without our sails raised, Guy also decided to pull the pin so as to not re-injure his shoulder recently damaged in a mountain biking accident.

And so it was just the four us from Point Upright to Maloneys. With affirmations to stick close together and keep the sails safely stored on our decks, we left the comparative shelter of Durras Bay heading for the scary looking sea to our east. In a silent show of hands (behind my back) I was voted most likely to capsize (true enough!), so the three senior members of crew hung back keeping an eye on me waiting to provide assistance. I figured it would be hard to find a more capable and trustworthy trio of paddlers to be watching my back (literally, as it turned out), so I actually felt quite relaxed about heading off into what I feared would be a building gale – very unlike me. Despite being the youngest in the crew, I was also the slowest, so was paddling like a demon trying to stay ahead of my support crew … until I happened to shoulder check on my compatriots to find not one, but three sails deployed and catching a glorious tail wind! So much for that plan! Up went my sail and off we went.

Ironically, since three members of our party had pulled out, the wind slowly began to fade, and the steepness of the waves decreased making this section of trip far less harrowing than the one that preceded it.

We hadn’t gone far before the whales entertained us yet again with impressive feats of aerobatics. At times they came up behind us and given the sea conditions it was tricky to keep an eye on them, so we paddled on listening to the boom, Boom, BOOM getting louder and louder … wondering if we needed to take evasive action.

After the whales finally tired of alternately thrilling and scaring us, we thought the nature show was over, but no, we then paddled and sailed into an area of rafting shearwaters – a huge area where thousands upon thousands of birds, exhausted from their long journey from the north Pacific, were resting on the water. We paddled on and on through an enormous flock of birds who were both bobbing in the water and flying all around us threatening to slam into our sails. They fly very close to the water’s surface and almost give the appearance of water skippers (the really tired ones were in fact water skippers, but I don’t think that was their plan). They make no noise, and the silent swarm of birds skimming across the choppy water gave an eerie other-worldly feel to the experience.

I understand the shearwaters are only in these waters for a very short time en route to their summer holidays in Tasmania. Mike has been paddling these waters for a considerable length of time and never experienced the shearwater flotilla before.

The wind and seas continued to ease as made our way to The Bay. Except for a bit of rebound as we approached North Head, rounding into Batemans Bay proved no drama. Once past North Head my support crew decided that against all odds I was going to keep the slippery side down, so pulled up their sea anchors and left me in their spray. Just as I was thinking I had actually made it and could relax, the three of them went through a gap at the end of the reef off of Three Isle Point … my heart sank. I knew how this was going to end. I am an incredible rogue wave magnet, and despite seeing the Three Musketeers sail through the gap unmolested, I knew in my heart that my passage would not be so easy. As I approach the narrowest part of the gap, there was a loud sucking sound, and a huge rock reared up out of the water directly in my path. It is a good thing my mother wasn’t around to hear my Tourette’s flare up. I madly back-paddled and against all odds slowed my progress just long enough for the next wave to catch me and cover the rock literally in the nick of time. But the fun was only just starting: I heard a roar behind me and quickly shoulder-checked: the predicted tsunami of white death was rising high above me with clear plans to make me pay for a lifetime of past sins. I paddled like my life depended upon it (it didn’t) and prayed for an inner strength to save me from the ignominy of screaming like a girl. Fortuitously the wave broke before reaching me, so I was only left with side-surfing the foam through the gap … and I was done. And in more ways than one, as I was starting to feel a bit weary.

A quick flat water paddle into the teeth of a much re-invigorated north wind deposited us onto Maloneys beach, 28km and 6:15 after we started.

An amazing paddle I won’t soon forget.

Rain, beautiful rain

Having spent the first five decades of my life in Canada, I have became on very close terms with rain at a young age. Lots and lots of rain. Recreating in the mountains of Western Canada was my thing, and in Canada, summer or winter, that is all about the weather. I feel comfortable in saying I have suffered at the hands of the Canadian climate. Oh, how I have suffered. Rain and I are not good friends.

Rain, responsible for foot rot ... and life.

Like most mountaineers and skiers in Canada, I became an enthusiast amateur meteorologist. The Internet traffic from just the ski touring community in western Canada has been known to bring down the Environment Canada web servers when the BC snow machine is getting fired up. I developed some heuristics in attempt to simplify the interpretation of the weather situation, and since moving to Australia, have had to modify those. I have found there is one simple rule that explains 80% of observed weather in both countries:

Canada: absence of a high pressure system = bad weather

Australia: absence of a storm = good weather.

While those two rules may seem the same rule expressed differently, the difference is profound. In Canada, the weather typically sucks; in Australia, is is typically pretty good.

My intense dislike of rain has needed some refinement down under. Australia’s most famous rock climbing area is Mt Arapiles in the Wimmera district of east-central Victoria. It is justifiably famous with loads of fantastic climbing, and over the past two years, we have spent about four months in the area. The Wimmera is grazing and wheat country. And it is dry – most years the agriculture must be very marginal. 

Over the past couple years, as is the way in Australia, the Wimmera has been experiencing drought. In our time there, it rarely rained, and when it did, it was typically only a couple mm or less, which evaporated before it had a chance to even properly wet the ground. The place looked parched. The grounds of our favourite camping area was mostly dirt as the grass had died and was then beaten to nothing by the traffic of the few campers who come through. The lake is dry. I found it depressing, year after year, to see the poor farmer’s fields wilting and dying under the relentless sun as the spring temperatures approached 40C.

When I listened carefully, I almost expected to hear the land crying out for water … but all I heard was the buzz of the loathsome fly.

Much of the coastal areas of Australia are actually reasonably well watered, and in your average year the landscape is green for much of the year. On the flip side, much of the interior is desert, which makes for a stark landscape, but it is beautiful in its own way, with the land and its inhabitants seeming to have come to terms with the consistent lack of water. It is the areas that lie on the margin that bring the life-giving nature of water into clear focus: in the lands bordering the deserts, enough rain falls some years that trees try to grow, lakes try to form, creeks try to run, and farmers try to farm. But inevitably, and frequently, the rains don’t come, the land suffers, and it is a depressing sight. You can almost feel the land's pain.

And then one day at Arapiles this year, it rained. For real. Water, pure life-giving water, was literally falling out of the sky. What the farmers and the natural landscape so desperately needed, but couldn’t get for love nor money, was freely falling. At that moment I had a bit of an epiphany: what I had come to so dread, actually made the difference between life and death. And sometimes it just fell out of the sky.

After three years in Australia, I looked out at the pouring rain, and thought “what a beautiful thing, a gift.”

Perspective is everything.