Pos: here
Loc: Punta Rasa/ Cabo San Antonio
Acc: tent
Dist: 30 km
Start: 00:00 End: 6:30

I had a bit of a hard time staying awake paddling once the calm water shifted to some lightly bumpier stuff due to some currents. It was like a baby getting rocked to sleep…but I’m used to keeping myself awake in such situations by singing songs, eating lots of different things, doing this and that between paddling. I had no hurry to arrive, when I stopped paddling to fiddle around, I was still moving into the right direction with 2-3 km/h. Not too bad…actually, I didn’t really paddle at all that night, rather bathing my paddle only 🙂

I really wanted to arrive at Punta Rasa/ Cabo San Antonio lighthouse with at least some daylight to see what’s going on there, and to land safely in a possible surf beach. So the last two hours I barely paddled at all, having to decide whether to get chilly not to doing anything or to paddle too fast and arrive in darkness…well, it was always light enough to see well with the stars sparkling bright after the moon set at 2.30am! Just a magic night…

At 6 am the first grey sky showed up, slowly developing into the new day – this time without thunderstorm and  laterwith a beautiful sun rising! But then I was already easily landing through very low surf on my first SANDY beach in South America! I felt like I was on a different continent, like being back in Australia! Out of the mud hell bay!

But in the very early morning it was freezing cold, and I urgently had to strip my dry suit for a dump…COLD! But oh well…I was soooo glad to eventually have it on! It’s so comfortable on an expedition with reasonable chilly weather, I almost forgot! No drysuit in Australia…just the peeing seated through the male pee zipper I had to practice again with my freshette funnel device – and for sure I once took some sea water through the zipper when I was working on it with a small wave flushing into my cockpit! That’s expeditioning life…I’m sure men peeing have the same risk… 🙂 Time to be able to do the job blind under the spray deck cover…

As usual, when the first light comes up after a night’s paddling, I felt revived and took actions to make camp in the dunes and organize my gear to dry. I even followed Alejandro’s advice to find the hot thermal spings here at the lighthouse! But my campsite was on the seaside, and I couldn’t get there through a river inlet…maybe later tonight when it may be dry.

I rather slept the morning, had lunch now and did some office work. My hands are swollen and it is painful to touch anything…but that will go away soon!