Sticking my sleepy head out of the tent early morning 6am to find a bush, I was surprised to see a “visitor” already waiting in front of my tent…Will, a local kayaker and boat builder from Sandy Beach was waiting for me to raise and shine!

I was asking him how he knew I was here…”from your website”…SPOT did a good job to keep people instantly updated! I felt a bit like a geo cache, a treasure found by entering the GPS coordinates to your machine, and then let’s see if I can look her up!

He admitted he was already up since 4.30 am not to miss me…well, it’s sometimes interesting to be somehow a popular kayaking lady!

Will has called already two other guys from Coff’s Harbour to meet and greet me that early morning, and it didn’t take long Freddo and Ray showed up as well!

Will brought me some Blueberries and Bananas for breakfast – thanks! This was well worth to be a geo cache J

And Ray took up the chore to post some surplus stuff for me going back to Peter Treby’s logistic base camp in Melbourne – thanks, Ray!

All three of them were pleased to get a hand signed promo card and plenty of pictures. I was hoping I made their day!

Anyway, I asked to delay the publication of my GPS location for the night by 24 hrs – these three were friendly and nice fellow kayakers, there may be other guys out there…

Headwinds were supposed to freshen up today – not sure how far I could go…actually, at 10 am it was blowing that much that I felt after two hours battling hard into the headwinds, slowing down to 4 km/hr, to call it quits for the day – I was eyeing already a tiny little bay on my map, and the headland and reef protecting it showed to be big enough to give some shelter. Landing was easy through low surf on low tide. Most beaches now are very shallow, that the breakers, if any, outrun themselves in multiple lines. But you never know…usually from NZ I was always *under*estimating the surf…here in OZ I kind of more *over*estimate it – luckily so far. 

This was my first half private day off since long days paddling! It’s nice to stay with people, but to have some hours on a more or less remote beach in sunny, but windy weather, was a luxury!

I knew I had plenty of chores to do, but I took about an hour of my precious time off paddling for a walk around and to take some pictures. It was a beautiful spot! Only two couples were passing by on a beach walk, then it was quiet…I kind of first time felt I was really in Australia! The water I am paddling on could be anywhere, but the land is somehow special, as I do have so little time to explore! But you can’t do it all on one trip…

Then it was chores time…repairing my tent zipper took about three hours of fumbling around and cussing…I should have known you can wear a zipper slider down by not brushing off the sand carefully before operating it…but eventually I managed to exchange the slider from another corner I am not always opening. Eventually I had two working entrances again!

Other little gear repair stuff took it’s time, plus important “body repairs” like painting toe nails and shaving legs and such… 🙂 – the “free” afternoon was over quickly.

Message via satellite phone:

29.56 153.15 Pebbly Beach 25km only half day off strong headwinds repaired gear, body and soul. High time for some private hours!