Liquid dreams, my liquid dreams
Waterfall and streams, these liquid dreams
- boomtown rats

So Greg’s last note mentioned that he paddled late due to the lack of landing spots. Now for a slightly unbalanced kayaker type like myself, the lack of a good landing spot is the sort of thing that causes night terrors. As much as you’d like to believe it, the charts are not always correct and even what looks like a landing can turn out to be quite different when you are actually sitting 100 yards off shore looking in. Imagine you’ve been paddling all day against a bit of a wind. You’re feeling tired, hungry and a bit chilly. You’re thinking it’s about time to call it day. The down side is that the spot you planned to camp was not actually a beach but a low ledge. Not all that high, but high enough to make landing impractical. So now you find yourself just going mile by mile looking for some sort of beach or little notch to get into for the night. Looking down the shoreline you tell yourself that things will probably change once you get around that next headland.

Of course as you get around the headland what you see is nothing like you had hoped. In fact the low ledge has become a bit higher. The wind is picking up and there are little flashes of white twinkling across the surface of the sea. You realize you are again convincing yourself that that next head looks promising. Not that you’d really been paying attention, but as you take the next stroke forward you sense the world is beginning to lose some detail that tells you that up there behind the clouds the sun is on it’s downward path. You shake off a chill, swipe the water droplets off your chart and take another stroke. . .

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