Went for a paddle with @Sylvia Knight yesterday in the inflatable kayak. Drove out to Alvor lagoon about an hour and a half before high tide and the idea was to paddle up the Ribeira Odiáxere as far as we could get. Normally this is a dry streamed, but there have been heavy rains in the Algarve this year, and we wanted to see what sort of state it was in. First order of business, inflate the kayak! Got a 12 volt pump from Decathlon for this. Plugs into the Leaf's DC power socket and makes short work of it.

Then into the water and off we go. There was a bit of wading but we were wearing wetsuits and the sea is still quite warm, despite overnight temperatures dropping to about 5º. Alvor lagoon is wide, shallow and flat, so you're gonna get wet before you find enough water to float even a kayak.

Anyway, we started paddling upstream with the tide, and as the lagoon started to narrow, we approached the rail bridge that carries the Algarve Line across it.

Once under the bridge, the lagoon starts to resemble more the mouth of a river, and it sort of is at this point. Two rivers really: The Odiáxere, our target, and the Arão.

Now the Algarve is a wide flat plain, on which almost everyone actually lives, separated from the rest of Portugal by a range of smallish mountains. The reason we chose the Odiáxere instead of the Arão is that at the confluence, you turn left to get into the former and run parallel with the beach for some way. The latter heads straight inland and soon starts meeting contour lines, and we need the high tide for depth.

You can just see the confluence in the previous photo.

I keep dipping my finger in and tasting the water. Initially it was unambiguously sea water. Now it is starting to get brackish as more of it is flow from upstream, and also colder. As you can see, we are approaching our next bridge, which carries the N125 road over the stream.

I thought the reflection made this a cool picture!

After the bridge the stream runs into the town of Odiáxere. I think the stream is named after the town, not the other way round. The water is now losing a lot of its salinity and it's only about 3 metres wide now, and flanked by lots of thick bamboo. Much of the bamboo has broken off and fallen in the water. It keeps snagging our skeg.

You can't really tell, but we're actually in the village now. It's hidden from us by all that bamboo. Nobody can see us, but local dogs are keen to tell everyone that we are there, very loudly!

Eventually we can go no further. The water now is completely fresh and the stream is only a few centimetres deep. It's also utterly grown over with quite thick vegetation. I guess the salt water doesn't get up here at all often.

This is where we turned round. I had to get out and push!

Our timing was perfect. We arrived at the top of the navigable part pretty much exactly as the tide turned, and had it pushing us both ways. Retracing our steps, we arrived back at the car 15 minutes before sunset. Perfect! Here we are, almost back where we started, bathed in golden light from the setting sun. It was getting very cold though and, because I am prone to Raynaud's syndrome, I can't feel or move my fingers. Sylvia had to do a lot of the finer bits of packing the kayak away because I simply couldn't grip stuff until the car heater had warmed my fingers up for a while.

Other than being freezing bloody cold in the last 15 minutes or so (problem with The Algarve in winter. The days can be lovely but it gets cold fast as the sun goes down), I really enjoyed that. There's another big tide in 4 weeks time. Might try something similar with another stream.