I’d only really just sorted out in my head what the difference was between a kayak and a canoe. I can’t comprehend not knowing that now. They’re so different and the only similarity really is that they’re a lot longer than they are wide and they go on the water. It’s like not being able to tell the difference between a car and a train. So, one Sunday morning, I took it into my head to go to Wareham, hire a canoe and have a trip up the river.
I’d done the Wareham river trip a couple of times before. We took a rowing boat out on A Level results day back in the Dark Ages and I’d had another go at that on my own last year – and discovered that I can’t row. Can’t figure out how to keep the oars in the oarlocks and it’s hard to wiggle up and down a river when you can’t see where you’re going. I probably wouldn’t drown but I’m definitely a duffer.
Now, canoeing was yet another watersport that I absolutely did not make an instant success of but I kind of liked it. Like the SUP, I found it frustrating that I only had one blade and needed to splash it from one side to the other to not end up going round in circles and the current and breeze meant I was constantly crashing into the reeds but somehow I still enjoyed it. It still had everything about “messing around on the river” that I’d hoped to find in the rowing boat. Despite the reeds, canoes are much easier to manoeuvre than rowing boats.
I’d gone out early enough in the day that there weren’t many other people out on the river. Well, there wouldn’t be on a grey miserable October day. I do have a trick for picking a good day to try my first paddlesports. I hadn’t actually gone there with the intention of canoeing. I think I’d gone there to make a decision between kayaking and canoeing and obviously biased towards the kayak. I expected the canoes to be very thin and very unstable and I know they’re generally paddled by two or three people. In fact, at some places, they’re very reluctant to hire a canoe to a solo paddler. Wareham has no such qualms. When I got to the quay, the canoes were bigger and wider than I expected and I made a snap decision to have a go in one.
I threw a lot of water over myself swapping the paddle from one side to the other. It took some experimentation to get going in a reasonable straight line and as the river is one bend after another, my straight lines were sabotaged every fifty or hundred metres. It takes a certain amount of calculation to go into a bend and come out pointing the way you intend to. That’s how I tended to lose control, with the current taking one end of the canoe or the other and sliding it out from underneath me. The other way I lost control was putting down the paddle for ten seconds to take a photo. Luckily, it’s not too difficult to get a canoe back on track. It was just frustrating how often I had to do it.
Even when you’re splashing and spinning, there’s a certain serenity about canoeing down a river on your own. They also hire out small plastic motorboats for people who don’t want to paddle and it was really nice to not hear one of them making a racket. It’s handy to know when there’s one around the next bend but it disturbs the peace and quiet of the river.
When I got home, I googled how to paddle a canoe solo. I know plenty of people do it but I’ve never noticed them swinging the single paddle from one side to the other. No one ever looks as tired after an hour of it as I felt. Most of the videos I watched showed two or three people in the canoe, as I expected, but there it was. The magic trick was something called a j-stroke. I filed it away in my mental paddling dictionary for next time.
Bumblebee Paddles 