Hello from Paul Caffyn’s house. I’m sitting at Paul’s computer looking out the window at about 1 metre surf ( ‘You are SO lucky”, Paul keeps telling us! “This is SUCH a good Summer – that’s about as good as it gets!”). We were hoping for a windy rough day today so we could have a day off chilling out with Paul, Deb and Jim ( 2 Tsunami Rangers who are staying with him), but the weather is really settled right now with low surf and almost no wind so we feel we should take advantage of it to make more progress up this surf coast.

We’ve had a lovely few days up the coast from Hunt’s Beach – a day’s paddling and then a day’s rest twice. At Okarito we were put up by Tristan and Matt, a lovely couple who were staying there while Matt did some work on Tristan’s dads house. It was fun to chat to them and great to sleep in a bed and have hot showers. Matt carried the boats up to his house on their quad bike and trailer which saved us a lot of work heaving them. We took their dog, Zeus for a walk on the beach and out to the pretty lagoon and had an afternoon nap. Leaving through the surf is always tense, Barry made it out fine at Okarito and got a few large waves in the face at our second spot, the start of Green’s beach. One of them knocked him over and he had to roll up. I went second both times as I wanted to film Barry and my kayak got turned sideways by the waves 3 times before I managed to make it out. I also got a few hefty waves in the face.

We wanted to say thanks to Glen and Marie at the Haast Beach Holiday Park who put us up for the night for free when we were in Okuru – it’s much appreciated. Also thanks to Rob and his mates who were staying there for a few days fishing – we met Rob in Moeraki at the start of our trip so it was fun to bang into him again ( thanks for the beer and port!!)

Well, time to start thinking about getting on the water. We hope to paddle about 50km to Seal island today – hopefully we’ll do it in about 7 hours if we manage to sustain yesterday’s pace, but ideally we’ll be on the water before noon so we won’t be landing in the dark!


Thanks to Deb Volturno for the photos.

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