The drive to the take out and launching point became longer every day, staying in Albany as a base camp. We got up at 5am, and I was on the water some time after 7am. The launch from Two People’s Bay was dead easy through some seaweed on the beach, but I started the day with quite a tired and overworked feeling in my body. Two long previous paddling days, too much excitement since Greg arrived, and too many chores to think of on outfitting our rolling home. And I had simply not enough sleep, driving back and forth to Albany every night!

The goal was to paddle past Cheyne Beach, 30 km away, and to land on Willyun Beach, another 35 km. 65 km in nicely following winds, starting relatively early, no big deal, as I did that the last two days as well. But the wind freshened up quite a bit, and the seas were rising accordingly. My sense of balance in the empty boat this morning was no good due to my overtiredness and (positive) stress the last days.

When I was approaching the gap between Bald Island and Channel Point, the rebound of the high cliffs added another bit of a challenge to the already quite high seas, and I decided to call it a day on the first landing possibility at Cheyne Beach. For sure having passed the gap between the island and the headland the sea was much calmer again, but I felt I was well done for that day and slowly paddled around some more cliffs into the sheltered Cheyne Beach.

I tried calling Greg already 10 km before Bald Island, wanting to tell him to pick me up at Cheyne Beach. After he was dropping me this morning, he drove to Willyun Beach to check on the landing there. I was expecting him to be back around 9 am in Albany, to finish the woodwork on the van. So why didn’t he pick up his mobile phone when I was calling him three times?

Greg simply forgot the phone in our apartment this morning! And he was actually having quite some trouble to find the beach access to the planned take out point. Greg eventually hooked up with a local farmer, who showed him the way over his private farmland towards Willyun Beach, where the farmer’s family had a holiday tin shack. We would be very much welcome to stay there! He was back in Albany late then, at around noon.

Greg’s mobile phone kept ringing from my calls in our apartment, and luckily Adrian was busy around the rooms and saw on the display the calls were coming in from my sat-phone. On the fourth call he eventually picked up the phone and told me Greg’s phone is left in our room, but he’ll see if he can find him at the van-work shed place of Greg’s brother’s father-in-law Geoff.

Geoff is a retired carpenter, who has been helping Greg to put the sleeping platform into the van including constructing the storage space for the big plastic boxes in one day only. Today they wanted to finish the last bit of fine tuning. Thanks a lot to Geoff!

Adrian luckily was able to look up Geoff, but Greg wasn’t there yet. So he left a message that I’d be arriving at Cheyne Beach around 11am. Thanks to Adrian doing the research to find Geoff!

Greg, just back from the long drive to Willyun Beach, had to leave already to pick me up again at Cheyne Beach…quite some busy driving for my support crew this morning! But he was happy I was pulling out at Cheyne Beach, as driving back again to Willyun Beach would have included even more driving!

I was not only dead tired today, but a long list of chores were waiting to be done in Albany as well to get our vehicle fully set up for the next 2-3 month of support driving along the coast. The sleeping platform was already built, but this afternoon we were shopping then for a mattress, duvet and sheets, plus some other “mobile household” bits and pieces.

My happy job for tonight, despite being overtired, was to organize all our gear reasonably into the 13 storage boxes which go underneath the bed. This was a task I really enjoyed! Only the food was missing, which we were planning to buy on the next day. My trip became now quite a different, comfortable setup!

Text message from Freya:

34.52 118.24, Cheyne Beach. 30 km, 7:oo am to 11:30 am. A short hop only today with later some stronger rough following winds and seas. Next safe landing Cheyne Inlet is 50 km away.