Pos: here
Loc: Samborombon Bay
Acc: paddling on the water
Dist: 35 km
Start: 16:45 End: 00:00

I woke as usually at 6 am to find a bush, just to crash back into my warm sleeping bag…I decided to give it a rest day. A full night resting and paddling on the water the previous night took it’s toll…though I had yesterday afternoon off. To catch up on recovery, yes…

And – amazingly there was no water out there anyway!

Alejandro launched last night from visiting briefly my campsite with still high water, so with regular tides there should be again high water in the morning anytime soon…but this bay has no regular tides!

There is only one tide a day – if you are lucky…my tide table in my GPS couldn’t deal with that and gave confusing answers. So look out and watch! No water this morning…no launch possible…ok, back to bed anyway. No bad conscience about not paddling with the quite nice almost following wind! 🙂

But the water came late afternoon…I felt rested enough to decide to give it a go – to get out of this mud hell with the one and only chance this day – and next days wouldn’t be much better, rather worse!

The gear was nice and dry to pack,I had my dry suit to wear, nice and cosy warm (Thanks, Ale, for bringing it for me!), the forecast was very favorable for the night and next day – easy following winds, calm seas, it was a bright clear sky – so what’s the problem?

Yes, the “problem” was I was not supposed to paddle at night, but certain situations require an exception. But I had no other choice to get out of that campsite and bay. Very sorry…

And that night’s paddle was one of the most beautiful and easy ones I ever had!

Imagine clear sky with 1000’s of stars, half moon shining bright on a calm sea, a light breeze is pushing you along even without paddling at 2 km/h, and there was even some bioluminescence for an hour after midnight!

I really had much tougher paddles during daylight! Besides I don’t really enjoy shifting constantly my biorhythm, so if I can avoid it, I rather *sleep* at night and paddle during the day!

It started with a sign of luck: A fat 50 cm fish was jumping directly on my spray deck and enjoyed cuddling on my lap for a while…or such…you like to be a fish? At least I could take some nice pictures! The only thing was that my spray deck was smelling almost all night like a fish…but it reminded me to get to the “real” ocean soon…

I paddled easily along, happy to be done with mud landings…well, for now…the continent is BIG!

My hands hurt from all the blisters, and are swollen every night, but this will get better soon when the blisters turn into hard skin. But my body worked as usual…