Bosh. 50 miles on day 100. How about that for round numbers? Well actually the gps read 49 nautical miles but Sarah maintains that she paddled a half century.

Thanks goodness we had the gps lent to us by Travis from Venturess as the tides were strong and unpredictable making today’s paddle to the barren islands and onto the kenai peninsula challenging. Billy Pepper identified a weather window for us this morning and he was right, although we set off tentatively after turning back the other day. The Sea state was less this morning and the wind light although once we were 3 miles from shore the east going current turned SE which meant we made really slow progress, a lot of which was to the East rather than North. Once the flood kicked it took us NW which was more useful and we managed to hold a course taking us North right up the centre of the Barren Islands where the tide gave us a great push right behind us.

As soon as we’d made the decision to make the most of having 4 more hours of flood to try to get 13 more miles to the peninsula, the conditions got more challenging. A 15 knot headwind picked up and we passed through some feisty tidal races. That wasn’t too bad but suddenly the current was whizzing NW at 4 knots, despite a prediction of a maximum current of 2.9 knots today. At our speed of around 3 knots in choppy warter, we couldn’t find a course to take us towards land. Whatever bearing we tried had us heading NNW. We settled on a bearing of 45 true as that had us heading NNW at the fastest speed of 4 knots. Since land was North and NE of us, this was worrying, but at least we could try to get as far north as possible before the ebb started taking us SE so we could hopefully ferry glide to land. After 5 miles our heading was worrying me enough that i suggested we turn back for the Barren Islands. I thought we should be able to reach the westernmost Island. However when w e tried
the tide was too strong for that and we were heading West not SW as needed. So we reversed our track again. I could see Sarah was really worried when I said we weren’t able to get back to the barren Islands. We could have done eventually if we’d heels or best course until the ebb kicked back in but if we were going to do that then wet might as well do it in the right direction.

Fortunately after 2 or 3 hours the flood weakened and we were able to make good progress towards land. The ebb was also almost 2 hours later than expected which also allowed us to get further up the coast than we’d expected. Bonus!

I didn’t mean to write so much technical stuff, or to write much at all as I’m pretty tired after 16 and a half hours in the kayak.

We got up at 5am and it’s now after 1.30pm. We’re 32 miles from Homer. We’ll try to reach it tomorrow although we don’t know if the weather will allow that yet. It won’t be a mega early start as we’re tired and the current should be with us after midday. Watch the tracker on Sarah’s website if you want to see if we make it. It’s updated every hour. Www.sarahouten.com/the-mission/journey-tracker

From tired, achy but satisfied paddlers!