Adventure on the not so high seas.

Yesterday arvo, I went for a ‘leisurely’ Sunday paddle in the OC out to Sydney Harbour. The plan was to go towards Shark Island and come back after a certain amount of time resulting in a long 2 hour session. So we paddled out under the Harbour Bridge, through the equivalent of peak hour traffic for the harbour – lots of ferries, jet boats, the yacht regatta which was happening in the middle, and past The Endeavour ship which was running late. Basically a washing machine of choppy water with lots of obstacles and people checking us out (lucky for them I wasn’t paddling in just a bikini top). We were paddling around Fort Denison, out of the way from all the traffic, when suddenly we flipped over in slow motion.

I was watching the ama of the boat in the air thinking “hmm this is not a good sign”, and den…I was treading water. Normally you plan to do one ‘flip’ or ‘huli’ session every season so you familiarise yourself with the routine of checking that everyone is okay etc. Well this was the ‘unplanned’ drill. After about 20 minutes when we finally righted ourselves and were on our way (after a warning from the Naval Base to get out of their territory).

Sadly, I lost one of my favourite havaiana flip flops – a brown one with pink love hearts. It’s a strange phenomena when I always seem to lose my $20 havaianas but never the $2 flip flops from Kmart! (PS. I’m an 8/9 size). So if you happen to see it floating in the harbour – it’s mine! Of course I didn’t think about the sharks until after we got back into the boat…