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S46°08.58' E166°37.76'

Rounded Pyusegur Point, hurrah! Covered 70km in 12hrs! Tired, but rare low wind and swell prompted us to take our chance. In hut in stunning fjord. Lie in called for tomorrow!

[alex on behalf of jc]

This just in from satellite phone again!:

Give me a kayak any day! 6hr walk down lovely coastline. Sore hips but energy back! Fueled by great cake from Jaqui. Back in schoolhouse. Will paddle first chance we get.

[alex on behalf of jc]

Paul Caffyn phoned Barry and I up here shortly after we arrived back in Riverton and kindly pointed out that we’d actually gone over 50km backwards this week! Tomorrow we start to nudge back in the right direction. The Andersons have been fantastic and they are kindly driving us to where the road ends tomorrow and then we’re going to walk about 20km back to Port Craig along a marked trail. We could have paid for a helicopter ride and taken about 6 minutes to get there, but the weather is looking windy for a while yet and the walk is meant to be beautiful. It will also be a good test for how well I’m recovered. I’d rather test myself out on a fairly flat walk where I can stop at any time, than run out of energy on a committing 50km paddle in 4 metre plus swells! I’m actually feeling so much better today, with 100 times more energy so hopefully I’m pretty much recovered. I still took it fairly easy today, enjoying chatting to Tim & Sarah in their lovely garden in the sunshine and generally relaxing. Barry and I cycled into town for some groceries and cooked a meal tonight ( a small return for all the delicious meals we’ve been given here). Thanks again to the Andersons for loaning us the delightful ( but safe!) helmets!

Barry also has been great looking after me. I’m trying to milk it for one more day but I think he’s on to me!

The weather isn’t looking too good for a while but at least when we’re at Port Craig we can be ready to make the most of any small break in it to inch forwards. Ahead of us lies about 300km of roadless wilderness that is Fjordland. It’s probably the most beautiful stretch of coastline that we’ll paddle and also the most committing as the nasty weather from the SW hits it first. I think we’re just about ready to have a crack at it!!

I’m feeling much better today, although I’m still low on energy. A 10min walk to an ice-cream shop was as much as I exerted myself and it was enough! Co-incidentally the weather has been mostly terrible while I’ve been sick and we wouldn’t have made much progress anyway, but tomorrow the winds are dying down ( although the swell will still be about 5 metres from the SW!), Wed and Thursday could be light winds with reducing swell so it’s a very good opportunity. However, it’s already Monday night and I’m not sure if I’m up to getting back to Port Craig tomorrow and paddling the next day. I’m off to bed now and we’ll decide in the morning. Thank you so much to Tim, Jacqui, Sarah and Ruby for looking after us so well. We also had Peter, Belinda and Dana for dinner tonight which was great. more fantastic food! Thanks everyone for all the comments on the blog.

I’ve uploaded our GPS routes from Sanoodi.com onto day 8 – day 14 if you want to see where we paddled. you can click on the image, switch from a map to a sat photo, zoom in etc. For some reason which I’m not sure yet the times were were on the water are recorded as too long on most days so our average speed etc is wrong a lot of the time. I’m not sure yet why that is. If we don’t leave tomorrow and I get time then I’ll upload the maps for the other days tomorrow.