Saturday morning and Julie had the girls at dance practice A few hours of freedom beckoned, the gentle rhythm of the ocean was calling and it would have taken a stronger man than I to resist. Marty and I launched at the Entrance Channel and went out on the end of the rising tide. It was a beautiful morning and the fishos were out in force. There were lots of lines in the water for us to avoid; not an easy task with the rising sun in our eyes. The channel is very shallow where it feeds into the sea and it dumps water out at an angle to the beach. When it flows strongly this and the diffraction patterns of the waves reflecting and interfering with each other make for some quite confused water, particularly on the ebb. As the swell was fairly small and the channel was flooding, we got out with no problems at all and turned south.
I used my euro paddle today, mainly because I don’t paddle enough anyway and I want to stay familiar with both my paddles. Being lucky enough to own two beautiful paddles, this is no hardship. After using the wing on my last few paddles, I really noticed the difference in the catch and it took a few minutes to get back into the swing of things with the euro.
We got down to Toowoon Bay and decided to keep going past it and Blue Bay, past Shelleys Beach and have a break and a swim at Bateau Bay beach. This is a beautiful sheltered beach tucked in on the Northern side of Crackneck and protected from Southerly swells. The beach isn’t visible from the road and there are a few steps for people to negotiate so it seems to be a very quiet beach and while we didn’t have it all to ourselves, we certainly didn’t have to fight for space.
After a swim and a drink we headed back to the north, hugging the coast. We stopped in at Toowoon Bay where a host of stand up paddle boarders had congregated just off the shallows near the rocks. They were there to catch the same wave that I would have had my eye on. Looking in at the forest of human skittles, I thought better of it and went in to the beach to do a few rolls. As luck would have it the strap on my mask snapped so my sinuses got a pretty good flushing out. Just the thing to get rid of all the paint fumes from the last few nights.
After a few rolls, we headed north again and made our way back into the channel. The ebb was flowing quite strongly now and although the waves weren’t big they were standing up and seemed to have a bit of punch. We frolicked there for a while and both had a wet exit. Clearly more practice is needed to get that roll in the surf completely bomb proof. The paddle back up the channel was pretty hard going, I decided to cheat and walk up the bank towing the boat on the tow line. As the bank was quite steep and sandy this turned out to be harder work than paddling. If the other bank hadn’t been chock full of anglers, I would have had an easier time of it there, but that would have meant disrupting about twenty people with lines in the water.
We managed to run the fishing line gauntlet back to the car park with only one muttered comment about “people trying to fish here”. Considering that the guy didn’t even have a line in the water at the time, I thought that was a pretty good laugh. I always try to give fishermen a wide berth but as a few of them seem to own the entire width of any waterway that they drop a line in, you can’t please all of them all the time. All up a great way to spend a sunny morning and thanks Marty for posting the event.
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