Summer Breeze

Another visit to the VC that requires some paddling. Today my long time paddling buddy Nico (not to be confused with my business partner Nico) joined again. He and Jan have paddled this trip numerous times but Nico had not been paddling last year and I had feared that he was lost to paddling.

With a forecast of Southeast 4-5 winds this would not be an easy one. Headwinds and side winds most of the time. Temperatures excellent.

We ran into a group of paddling friends that escorted the "Spieren voor Spieren" fundraise swimming across the Marsdiep.

It is rather frustrating to (again) experience that from force 4 winds and up, one is not going with a 1-3 knot current, but is blown downwind. Floating breaks are not that handy. And time and location of tidal current changes are greatly affected. At the same time this knowledge opens up very interesting tidal navigations in the Waddenzee that are otherwise (seemingly) not possible.

At 19:45 we landed again at Land's End, had a good meal there.

Today I used my new Lendal KineticTouring VariPaddLok 4-piece paddle. Not that I needed a new one, but this one is made by Celtic Paddles / Lendal UK, the (new) owners of the Lendal brand. Lendal very generously sponsored my 2003 Around the Netherlands trip and I am very thankful for their continued support.

The only thing I had to get used to (and could change on-the-fly) was the now generally mainstream 60 degrees feathering. My old (Scottish) Lendal 2003 paddle still had 80 (!) degrees feather. From 80 to 60 I found a too big change for this work-out trip and I soon adjusted the SwitchLok from 60 to 70 degrees for a more gradual transition. And for the headwind part I adjusted the length from 216 cm to 214 cm.