The sky was grey and was another thick fog hanging over the water this morning. It made it very hard to get out of bed and into cold damp paddling clothes, but the tide was calling so no sleep in for us. We had a chat to a local who was camping on the island and he gave us some inside info on the best places to camp and tricks to catching the right currents in the narrows. The narrows are areas on the east coast where two land masses are very close together, this creates strong currents, waves and whirlpools. We have to time the currents perfectly and be wary of where we paddle.

Tomorrow we are going to be paddling through the ‘false narrows’ rather than Dodds narrows, it will be our first narrows experience so watch this space.

We paddled up the Trincomali Channel, cruising under the thick fog with the seals and the herons. I yelled out to Ngaio and heard my voice echoing down the channel... after that we all were yelling and whistling and listening to our echos bounce around the islands. It felt like we were the only people in the world, paddling down a huge glassy body of water, yelling at the top of our lungs and not seeing or hearing another person.

By midday the fog had cleared and we had covered about 17kms. We didn’t have far to go to our camp site, Pirates cove. We took our time on the water for the last of the paddle, it was another beautiful sunny day and the water was calm. Ngaio and I are loving the sunny days and the calm seas, it’s a big contrast to some of our west coast days!

We paddled into pirates cove and landed on the sandy beach. The camp site was awesome looking over the cove with deciduous trees golden and yellow dropping their leaves.

We met some people from the boats moored in the bay, they were playing pétanque and drinking beer... BEER. Austin couldn’t resist, she politely asked them if they could spare some beers, they jumped in their little fizz boat and went and got us beer from their big boat moored in the cove. We had an awesome evening debating military pensions and nuclear war and drinking our one can of glorious beer.