Articles
A sail from Brunswick to Wooyung and back
- Category: Brunswick Heads
- Published on Tuesday, 26 January 2010 21:37
- Written by Holger
- Hits: 1045
Today's reasons for our offshore kayak fishing trip were manifold. First and foremost was to get Steve 'Balls' out on the ocean for his first time. Testing the spray skirts was another motivation, and then – of course, catching a fish was high on the agenda too. Steve was keen to go out for a sail as he got his AI a couple of weeks ago. We had it all planned for last Monday, but mother nature didn't agree and there was no wind at all on that day. For today everything looked perfect, wind from 10- 20 knots, swell around a meter, and a well-behaving bar. We met at 7am, put our AI's together and off we went. After a brief stop to check the bar, we paddled straight out without any dramas. Our course took us north through blue-greenish water with lot's of cornflake weed. We peddled for about half an hour until the wind picked up and we were able to sail, tacking high into the North-Easter. In the following 2 hours we passed Ocean Shores, and followed the coastline all the way up to Wooyung.The wind continuously gathered strength, and the waves steeped and started to get a bit sloppy.So we decided to turn around and head back. With wind, waves, and current in the back it took us only 45 minutes to return, and safely cross the bar into the calmness of the sheltered river. Despite the fact that we trolled our lures for 20km ( Rapalla CD11 & RMG crazy deep 8m+ ) , we couldn't come up with a single fish.
The Spray skirts work a treat, though. They really do a great job of keeping the spray away and keeping me dry. I didn't notice them creating any lifting / tilting force as a windward tramp does. They also seem to stop the bow from cutting so deep into a wave, keeping it closer to the surface. All in all I am really happy with them at this stage. After my first test run I made some minor changes to make them user-friendlier (like replacing the inner 'hull' rope with a 5mm bungee cord, and adding some clips so as to be able to clip the skirts on and off ). The current design has one disadvantage though, I can't fold my amas back, just forward. Not perfect for fishing... but leave that with me, I already have a solution for this in mind. Evolution and testing goes on...