Lost at sea

When I met Richard Rice at Takapuna this morning our first reaction was to head up to Mint for a coffee.
The fog had rolled in overnight and visibility was 50m tops.  As the buoys at Taka are at least 200m out and 200m apart this posed a bit of a problem. 

The sensible action was coffee.  We of course decided on a little swim to see if we could find buoy one.
Richard has an inherent tendency to swim left, (in this case Rangitoto and beyond) and with this in mind I made a concerted effort to swim right.  The technique worked perfectly, with buoy one happily looming out of the fog a couple of minutes after losing sight of the shore.

This success spurred us to continue on and see if we could find buoy two.  This was a bit more of a mission as we were relying heavily on guesswork to chose our start direction.  The vague glow of the sun in the east told us which way not to go so we headed off.  Once again the  left swim/right swim technique worked except that when I finally spotted buoy two at the limits of my vision way off to the right Richard was at the limits of my vision in the opposite direction heading like a man with a mission to Rangitoto.  Just as I was tossing up weather to chase him or head to shore and call the Coastguard he stopped to abuse a passing fisherman and realised the error of his ways.

Buoy three is a relatively short distance  and emboldened by our success we headed off.  Sure enough a couple of minutes later the buoy loomed from the fog in front of us.  We returned the same route taking a bit more notice of our direction relative to the sun and with slightly better visibility.

At this stage with about 35 minutes swum Richard decided he had had enough and headed home.  I still wanted to do the 6 hours and as the fog had rolled back in and I was swimming solo I took the sensible approach and spent the next 2 and a half hours swimming along the beach in sight of land.  The water conditions were glassy and swimming conditions perfect.

At 10 o clock Helen Adams joined me and we spent the next 2 hours using the now well established navigation techniques to do circuits of buoys 1, 2 and 3.

At 12 Hamish joined me for hour 6 and in the still marginal conditions we headed for buoy 3.  At buoy 3 the fog started to lift and we had a clear run out to cable buoy and back.  By the time we got out of the changing rooms afterwards the fog had rolled in again and viz was back to 50m .

Strait water temperatures are rising and will probably be swimmable next week but I am not as confident with the Wellington weather.

Watch this space