Mon 26/11-2012 Day 341

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Beautiful arch with plenty of wildlife

Pos: here
Loc: Punta Gramadal
Acc: tent
Dist: 57,1 km
Start: 5:55 End: 15:45

Tomorrow:
Estimated landing:
Estimated starting time: Right after sunrise
Estimated landing time: Well before sunset

The night was calm at this remote village beach – it had actually a fence at the rear, and the jetty besides was only accessible form of entry. To get to our spot, you’d have to bend under the jetty or to enter from a far away other side.

So apart from a bunch of workers walking out on the jetty at 4 am to get loaded into barges to ship to their floating platforms for the workday and who prevented me from finding a safe bathroom spot besides simply *under* the jetty, no one was there in the early dark morning.

We both got out through the low surf all right, and actually all day was nothing really exciting happening…but the landscape was nice to watch, paddling today a bit closer to shore. First it was a green river valley with a steep dumping gravel beach, then just after a magnificent arch on an outside rock, the desert dunes looked pretty colorful and had many different sizes and shapes. If desert, then this!

Our landing spot was unfortunately only blurry on Google Earth, so we had to trust our chart and intuition that this was to be a sheltered landing corner…

Our first aim from what we thought we could see was a bay after Punta Corona. The short high and steep cliff section before the point itself had more than seven deep caves, nice! The bay came up, and it was looking like a steep gravel beach in there – we were not sure if this would be sheltered enough to land.

Rather luring us was to turn around Punta Gramadal just a few hundred meters further, which had a nice low sandy beach. The surf couldn’t be bad in the “sheltered corner”, we thought…

The “sheltered corner” was looking on the chart nice (Google was also blurry what we saw later), but as we could see around the corner, it had a pleasant point break, ideal for surfers. We knew it may be possible to sneak behind and to still find a calm landing, but simply straight ahead the surf looked very low, despite the spray on top in the now up to 20 knots headwind here. This can’t be too bad! We even rather paddled a bit more to the corner, still looking for the “shelter” there…

I went in first as usual, being the “crash test dummy”  :-)) Well, to be honest, I didn’t really take this surf serious, a shallow beach, a reasonable low swell, the spray on top from the headwind made it bigger than it is…and I went in without waiting too long. Almost…a quite low wave somehow caught me from the side, and I was too stupid to brace in any way. I capsized close to shore, and was so pissed about myself I didn’t even attempt to roll, as this was in the knee deep shallows…hahaha! My first bailout in this trip leg…well…I got washed calmly to shore, caught my boat, and watched Peter who surely took the warning now seriously and made it in safe.

What we saw and realized later was actually a very strange constellation on this beach – we were landing just were the surf was the *highest*!!! The “sheltered corner” was not sheltered at all, but just 100 meter *down* the beach, the break was lower, and in 200 m down the beach it was almost *nothing*…I could have kicked my own ass…but actually couldn’t understand this constellation at all. It was still south westerly swell like always…

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Low sand swept dunes at Punta Gramadal

We camped on a sand swept shallow beach with low sandy dunes and then some green stuff before the highway in maybe two km distance. Our outer tent zippers are meanwhile playing up after camping for three months now on sandy beaches, and are not working properly any more, but on a sandy windy beach there is no way of changing the sliders. So we opted to use one side only, a had to leave the lee side open. Fortunately it’s never raining here!!!

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