Pos: here
Loc: Tocopilla
Acc: tent
Dist: 24,9 km
Start:7:40 End: 12:45

Tomorrow:
No paddling tomorrow due to high winds and swell

There was a crunching noise in the apsis last night around 10 pm – we were just asleep, when I woke. Who was eating what out there? I carefully took my flash light and shone through the fly mesh – a fat cat was checking the garbage bag! Sure there must be some plastic sachet with rests of tuna oil from last night’s dinner and some candy-smelly zip lock bags in there…

I chased her away, and Peter opted to put the trash bag into the boat. But he overlooked two zip lock bags, and the cat was back 1/2hr later while Peter was already snoring  with earplugs in. I chased her away again and took the bags in…glad we don’t have bears or raccoons here (yet…)

Launching io our rocky slide was easy, as usual with good timing to not damage the boat too much on rumpling down the rocks. Rather getting lifted by some swell and getting softly carried out…

It turned out to be a very warm calm morning, and we enjoyed paddling with shirts only again. Still, there was strong wind forecast in the afternoon!

We had to land in Topocilla anyway to fill up with water, but basically decided to paddle another 14 km to a nice looking headland. Coming closer to the very industrial looking city, there were six huge ships waiting anchored offshore to be loaded, only two others were at the jetty. Not sure if anything happenes there on a Sunday…

But we just looked for the safest beach to land, and wanted to be gone again as soon as possible here. For us it didn’t look like a very pleasant place to stay longer.

The beach in the very corner around the headland was steep and rocky, and the swell didn’t make it the ideal landing place. Plus we thought there was some old industrial buildings kind of blocking the exit route.

We paddled a bit along, looking for a better beach to land, found another rocky beach in a reef gap, but considered this also not good enough. On Google Earth, we picked the beach after the last jetty, and Peter said, there must be another one behind those rocks there, lets just have a look…

Yes, there was at least a sandy beach, but the “jetty” was not there, just a small rocky headland. At least the sandy beach looked mostly free of rocky obstacles, but it had some surf…

I decided, it can’t be worse than two days ago, one dumper, and a flat beach with a shallow calm zone…basically this was correct, but this dumper was wayyyy more fat and even the foamy water running up the beach had wayyyy more power than all other beaches before…I should have guessed, this far away from the “sheltered corner”…

As usual, you *always* underestimate the surf. I opted to go in first as most times, but this time it was me getting trashed! I got away with no roll yet in the new kayak, when I decided to paddle in, the fat breaker behind me came too early and too high…basically I didn’t expect a breaker to come at all and was thinking it was an almost lull now…I thought wrong!

The fat breaker just crashed over me, pitch poled me while I was obviously lucky not to hit the ground, but it trashed me upside down. I rolled up all right, but found myself facing the next just broken wave rushing in with a huge pile of foamy water…I just made a quick turn now facing the flood at least sideways, and had a wild ride in with a side broach on to the beach. I got out of the boat, a bit shaky, but all right, and dragged it up higher with the help of the next one rolling in.

On facing the foamy flood after the roll, I saw something orange floating in the waves, and was wondering what it was, convinced it must have come off from my boat…later I found my small bag of tiny carrots flooded to the shore, being washed off the deck net! Everything needs to be secured or under deck on such landings!

Peter was understandably wary now, having seen me rolling in, and contacted me via VHF about the conditions, and whether or not to land on that rather rocky beach…but I thought with my vantage point higher on the beach over the rolling in waves I could signal him to find the right lull. It took a long time, watching, waiting, and eventually he sprinted in with just a small broach at the end. Lucky Peter today!

But the plan was actually just to load water, and to continue… but I was soaking wet, the wind had meanwhile increased to the forecast 20 knots, and the surf looked from this end not really inviting to also paddle out again…we also checked the next next week’s forecast, and it turned out to be windy and high swell Monday and Tuesday, after that it will be all easy going! Do we really have to stay on this ugly city beach for two and a half days? It seems to be reasonable… 🙁 We eventually also discovered some stress on the rudder from this landing which we needed to fix…so stay here and “enjoy” the city life! I rather have time off in the bush…