This is still up in my top three paddle experiences. This is what I had to get comfortable in a sea kayak for: a night navigation trip, paddling in the dark. This was in October 2021 so we were past the worst of the lockdowns and restrictions but Fore/Adventure still had the requirement that you didn’t share a double sit-on-top with anyone outside your bubble and wouldn’t allow single sit-on-tops, so if you wanted to do the adventure solo, it had to be in your own personal sea kayak. So I did my session with the sea kayak to get to know the basics of how to use a spraydeck, how to capsize and how to not feel terrified of these huge boats. Spoiler from the future: this is now what I’m accustomed to and anything smaller, including the Islander Jive I use at boat club, feels really weird and unstable.
Of course, first thing was to go over how to use a sea kayak and a spraydeck and how to capsize. This was done on the slipway with the sky turning interesting shades of peach and pink and purple in front of us. By the time we set off, it was undeniably getting dark. We each had a headtorch hanging round our necks – or at least, mine was, hangover from my caving days where you always carried a backup light and that was the easiest and most convenient way to do it – but it was too early to need to switch them on. It was dusk and there was still a whiteish glow coming from the west, more than enough to see out at sea by. You forget very easily that when it’s dark, it’s easiest to see when there aren’t any artificial light sources to disrupt your natural night vision.
It was a glorious night. The sea was like glass and the sky turned purple and navy and there was still a hint of orange low on the horizon when we went back a couple of hours later. We tried out our sea kayaking skills as we handrailed along the bay to Old Harry, including darting between two small rocks that only poke out of the sea at fairly low tide. As we approached, it looked impossible to get a kayak nearly twice the length of my car through the narrow gap but they weren’t quite as close as they looked and with the tiniest of turns, I found I could get through quite neatly.
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We carried on, trying out strokes, seeing how well we could turn these long kayaks and made it out to Old Harry eventually, feeling like we’d sailed out into a fairytale – or at least, I did. Then Kyle decided we were going to pop out the other side of the famous feature and see what the more open water was like on the other side. Bit bumpy, that’s what. At this point, I was definitely making strides on my confidence-in-bouncy-water journey but I wasn’t where I am now and it’s also harder to feel comfortable when it’s dark and you can’t really see the waves coming at you. White chalk cliffs shine reasonably well even at night but it’s a bit scary when you don’t know a wave is about to hit you until it does it.
So we returned to the safety of the mirror-like Studland Bay, tucked ourselves into a corner by the cliffs, turned on our headlights and Kyle produced a map. From the name of the event, a night nav, I was expecting some kind of more technical marine navigation than “this is an OS map”. We did have a chuckle at one of the group, the only one who didn’t know how to read the map because he was due to start a new job at Ordnance Survey, just down the road in Southampton, on the following Monday. But yes, the navigation portion of the evening was just about how to read an OS map, how to find a grid reference, how to compare features on the map to what we were seeing around us, like the line of cliffs.
But Kyle also included the stars. I knew, in theory, that you could use Polaris to find north and I knew that you found Polaris by looking for the Pointers in the Plough. I’d never actually succeeded – the words didn’t seem to match with what I was seeing in the sky and I couldn’t quite grasp how Polaris could be in the north when it was in the sky. Kyle made it all make sense and now I can’t fathom not being able to find the North Star, at least on clear enough nights.
We had one more treat as we paddled back. We saw a couple of shooting stars, including one really bright and visible one that Kyle requested we single out if we were going to review the evening. I think it was the Orionid meteor shower. It’s not one of the better-known ones but it turns out there are lots of meteor showers through the year and this seemed to be one of them. Beautiful seas, the quiet splash of paddles, a map and now a shooting star – a beautiful evening.
Did I still think it was beautiful when I had to haul that kayak back up the hill to HQ at the car park on top of the cliff? Nope. Did I still think it was beautiful when I had to get out of a damp wetsuit in a sandy car park in the dark at 11pm? Nope. Do I think it was beautiful now? Of course I do! Would I do it again! Of course I would! I’m a little concerned that the sea and the sky wouldn’t be so perfect and it wouldn’t be so beautiful but if conditions reproduced that evening again, I would be happy. 10/10, really wonderful evening.
Bumblebee Paddles 