When we finally made it to the southern tip of Isla Monserrat and started our crossing, the wind turned and came straight out of the southwest, straight at us from the mainland. The wind was blowing around 12 miles an hour and had the 10-mile crossing to fetch up wind waves. When some people are worried about the weather, they slow down. I’ve seen kayakers stop paddling and set up to do a brace. A brace that is not necessary yet because the big wave they saw has not arrived yet. Usually by the time it arrives it isn’t as big as it was before and the brace isn’t necessary. But by this time they have slowed to a standstill. The longer they dither in the water and don’t paddle, the longer they will be in the conditions that make them worry and the more they will have to worry about and the slower they go. My response to worrisome conditions is to paddle harder to go faster so it will get over with sooner. In windy conditions I paddle harder, if there are lulls in the wind I paddle even harder to make up for lost time and if there are stronger gusts I paddle even harder to keep them from slowing me down. If you don’t like windy conditions why would you behave any other way? Well one reason is because you can't just leave your friends behind.
In frustration I watched our average speed on the GPS drop to 2 miles an hour (it had been 3.6 crossing to Monserrat). Me and my GPS both did the calculation and concluded that it would take us 5 hours to make it to the mainland at this rate. Some people would not want to make this much effort for that amount of time. I talked to Don Fleming about the conditions and the speed and he agreed it might be wise to turn back. I asked Andrea Wolfe about it and she thought it was insane to continue forward. So after making less than a mile of the 10-mile crossing we turned back.
I wanted to stop on Isla Monserrat someplace near the south tip to wait and see what the wind did. Doug Hamilton was the only one of us who had been around the island and he said there were some sandy beaches up the west side. Doug and I lead the way and paddled up the west side of the island. I watched in frustration as one rocky beach after another went by. We paddled an increasingly frustrating distance farther and farther north away from the crossing that we would eventually have to make anyway. Doug assured me there was a sandy beach coming up soon. Don paddled up and asked me "Why do you keep going north?" I said I was looking for a better beach. He said: "We don’t need a better beach; we don’t need one we can camp on, why don’t we just stop here?" In frustration I turned and charged onto the ugly beach he pointed at. It had a solid rocky shelf you had to get over, and loose cobble above that to sit on. Don paddled closer and asked: "Why the hell did you land here?" In frustration I lost it and screamed at him: "I didn’t want to land here! I wanted to look for a better beach but YOU said we should land here!" I didn’t want to be anywhere near here. I wanted to be traveling southwest at 3 miles an hour but I could not. Doug explained to Don that there was a sandy beach around the next point. I told the two of them to go find it and not to land where I was. I needed to change the batteries in my camera anyway. And cool down.
When we all met later at the sandy beach, we talked about the options. By then it was 11:00 AM and the day was half over. The usual pattern is for wind to get stronger in the afternoon and the usual plan is to be off the water early in the afternoon to miss it. There seemed to be no way we could do the crossing today. Don, Doug and I got back in our boats to explore a few miles north to see if there was a better beach for camping on than the one we had stopped at.
Doug actually had an ulterior motive. If we were going to stay another day here, there was an interesting geological formation that he wanted to explore. In the satellite maps of Isla Monserrat there is a large white patch. The topographic maps showed this as a large flat spot and give it a name: “Cumbre Plana”. It looks like a salt plane, but it is at a high altitude. Dough wanted to camp close to an arroyo where he could hike up to see what this feature is. I wanted to come along and see it as well. From a little farther from shore Doug and I eyeballed the arroyos and discussed which would be the right one to make the ascent. As it turned out, we never got to do this.
In two miles of exploring we never found a camping beach better than the one we had already landed on. Don suggested that before we return to camp we go a half a mile or more offshore and check the conditions again. We turned to the southwest and paddled offshore. Don had been watching the channel and as he suspected the wind was dying down. I had given up on the crossing but when we all met back on the sandy beach Don managed to convince everyone to give it another try. This time we were able to maintain at least 3 miles an hour and made the crossing in a more reasonable 3 hours. Although one compromise for the new crossing had been to head straight west instead of southwest. This would put us a day or so closer to our cars.
One of the landmarks we used to keep ourselves on course was an offshore rock that had an arch we could see from miles away. I hoped to paddle through this arch but as we paddled closer we saw that this rock was surrounded by a large rocky reef. The reef was a shelf left over from the rock being eroded away just above the water line. The shelf was high and dry and we joked about camping on it. But I’m sure at high tide the waves wash all the way across the shelf. We had to paddle another 2 miles to get to the mainland.
By this time the wind was coming from the south so I suggested we go around the north end of the point we were approaching. This turned out to be a wonderful place to camp. A double point facing north had a sandy beach trapped between them. We were not trapped there because stony shelves extended away from the cliffs at low tide and we could walk north and south to other beaches. The topographic maps named this point “C. El Aguilillo”. It wasn’t perfect: the beach was sandy and we had managed to camp on gravel almost every other night. I found a patch of gravel in the sand and set my tent up so it opened onto the gravel. Now this campsite is perfect!