Our man Colin organised a paddle on Saturday 9 May. We, the brave crew of FNCCC, set out to circumnavigate Ballina, with a short visit to the mangroves on the shores of South Ballina. From the sailing club, it’s a short paddle across the bay, past the oyster leases with friendly signs warning that anyone caught oyster rustling will be subjected to heavy shelling, and into the trees and pungent smells of the mangroves.
Despite promises, there was not much scope for limbo dancing under the trees, but it was sobering to note that if the tide had been at all lower, we would have been pedestrians. Black and muddy, but still pedestrians.
From there, it was back across the bay with a short stop for some of us to navigate the wall that had been conveniently placed just under the water. Never mind Colin, scratches on your brand new and jewel beautiful kayak don’t really matter until the water starts coming in!
We entered the canal just past all of the nice fishing boats and cruised past all of the surprisingly many houses that line the banks. It’s one of the nice things about boating, you get to see under the skirt of society, and some of those houses were really well worth a look. The canal eventually leads to North Creek just near Prospect Bridge, and it was a hard right to the main river on the way to Missingham Bridge with a brisk current carrying us along very nicely.
Colin had advised me to wear a skirt on the trip, but I had managed to leave it at home so he lent me one of his. My advice is to always go out with a man that always carries a spare skirt. The reason became apparent as we approached the bridge, and the water went from gentle undulations, to corrugations, to waves and then to breakers.
I have not had terribly much experience with sea kayaks in waves, but I can now say that for smallish waves the boat will simply go up and over like a roller coaster. As they get bigger, it will crash down on to the back of the wave, and once they start to break it will simply give it up as a bad job and punch its way through. It’s not a problem really, as the kayak knows what it’s doing, but it can be disconcerting to have waves pounding into your face. And if anyone sees my second best hat, I would like it back, please. Once through the worst of the waves, we hugged the beach as much as we possibly could (seriously, we went under some guy’s fishing rod!) and dodge the millions of sailing boats back to the club.
Total trip distance by GPS was 16.5Km with a total time traveling time of 3 hours, which goes to show that social trips are not an Olympic sport, and our thanks to Colin for his plannin’ and organisin’.
