Girlguiding South West does an event most year called Wet & Wild At Wimbleball, which is a weekend of watersports & adventurous activities on and around a lake on Exmoor called Wimbleball. I’ve not been. I wish I could but I can’t figure out the logistics of getting four Rangers there – it’s not worth hiring a coach, I can’t take them and our stuff in a car and public transport isn’t really an option. I’ve got a cunning plan at the moment to be there next year, though, dot-dot-dot. But for the time being, it’s the spring of 2022 and after a couple of years of being restricted in where I can go and what I can do, I’ve got into a camping habit. It turns out Wimbleball has a public campsite and you can book your own watersports activities so I did my own private Wet & Wild at Wimbleball.
The trouble was that although Friday was a nice day and Saturday a tolerable one (I had a go at windsurfing and discovered it’s very much Not For Me), by the time we got to my hour of hiring a kayak on the lake on Saturday morning, the weather had turned. It was damp and it was breezy and the staff at Wimbleball had cancelled all activities except kayak hire – presumably kayaks aren’t quite as vulnerable to wind and rough seas as windsurfers and SUPs. They’d put some quite heavy restrictions on kayaking, though. Normally you can go pretty much as far as you like. Some arms of the lake – well, it’s a reservoir – are marked off, there are sailing places to stay away from etc but within reason, you can go wherever you like and do whatever you like. But in these winds, we had to stay within about a hundred metres of the launch point.
Now, I do understand safety. Plenty of hires are first-timers or weak swimmers and the depth of a reservoir is terrifying – this thing is somewhere around 100m deep. I quail at a 5m swimming pool. But although it was breezy, it was no more breezy than an average day down at Studland. I’ve hired kayaks at Knowle Beach and paddled all the way out to Old Harry and back on my own in stronger winds than this, with the kayak audibly bumping over the waves. That’s a 5km round trip if you follow the coast in the way I’ve always been taught, shorter if you cut straight across the bay. I suppose there’s a difference between a shallow, sheltered bay with thousands of grockles on the beach and on the water, and a fathoms-deep reservoir where you can only be seen from that one point but it felt so weird that on the open sea, I’m allowed to go off for an adventure well out of sight of the hire people whereas on an enclosed lake, I have to be right under the watchful eye of staff. I’d also like to say that this trip happened nearly a year before the appalling news that came from Wimbleball in June 2022, so while I’m whining about their safety requirements… well, turns out they did know what they were doing.
So I paddled. I think I’ve said before that when I canoe I feel like I’m just messing around on the river whereas when I’m on a kayak, my brain tells me I have a mission to accomplish and my brain found it very uncomfortable just paddling out to my limits in each direction and back again. You can’t fill an hour in a space barely bigger than a large swimming pool. Kayaks are untamed, they want to adventure. Yes, that’s the difference between a kayak, a canoe and a SUP. A SUP is beauty and serenity (until you see me on it). A canoe is just a rowing boat I can actually get to move, it’s for journeys and for gentle days on the water and for happiness. But a kayak is wild, a vehicle to take you off to new places, your strength against the wind and the waves, to take you to other worlds and come back changed.
(Or in the lack of much to actually do on the water, am I overthinking it?)
In that weather, my wetsuit didn’t really dry and when I went to put it on the next day, when the weather was better and the wind had dropped and all the activities were back on, it was deeply unpleasant to slide into cold damp neoprene. But the story of what I did the next day is a story for next week.
Bumblebee Paddles 