Bumblebee Paddles

This one has sat in the blog schedule since March but it was only two weeks ago that I got confirmation it was even going to happen. I’d finally decided to just go to Croatia, found myself heading for Dubrovnik and discovered it’s a bit of a haven for sea kayaking. There was a company which would hire a sea kayak to me for an hour or a day, in exchange for promises that I had the qualifications and/or experience to paddle it – which I do, but those same qualities meant I felt like it would be madness to go off into a bit of sea I know nothing about, all on my own. So I found a tour- three of the Elafiti Islands in a day, the catch being that it’s a minimum group of four to run it. I left them the dates I’d be in Croatia and then sat and waited for two months for an email.

They found a tour! I’d have preferred it not be my first morning, after arriving at 11pm the night before, having not yet found a supermarket for breakfast (an apartment of your own is a wonderful thing but it doesn’t come with an all-inclusive buffet breakfast) nor where the port meeting point was. I’d had the sense to look up the details of the ferry we’d be taking to the start point so I had to resort to standing next to it, WhatsApp open, and hope the guide would board so we could spot each other. Which we did.

The ferry out from Gruž, Dubrovnik’s new port, to Lopud, the second of the three inhabited Elafitit Islands, was worth the price of admission on its own. It’s a spectacular journey, especially if it’s your first glimpse of the Adriatic. Turquoise water in the shallows, teal a but deeper and navy further out. Limestone or dolomite mountains (the guide had evidently never been asked what kind of rock his bit of coast is made of) plunging straight into the water and the Elafiti themselves were steep tree-covered rock with life and tourism clinging only to the edges.

At base, next to a church, we changed, packed our essentials into drybags, put on spraydecks and buoyancy aids, matched with paddles and carried our kayaks out to the beach. There were six of us – a family of four in two tandems and me and the instructor in our singles. We had some difficulty adjusting the rear footpegs for the dad, as there just wasn’t room for them without putting his feet through his son in the front seat. For a moment, there was discussion of just taking them out. I used a Jive at boat club without footpegs just last week – one of them doesn’t have them and its on an easily accessible middle rack rather than the more awkward top. I thought it was fine because I hardly use them. Well, you don’t know what you’re going to miss until it’s not there, it turns out.

Anyway, we got set up eventually and launched into that beautiful water. Our first destination was an arch over on Šipan, about a mile and a half away. I’d been dubious about my kayak – it looked short and I’m used to 17″ Perception Essences when I go out on the sea. This was a Venture Skye, which turned out to be 16″ 7′ and I warmed to it. It goes pretty well. The mum of the family said later that the singles must be zippier than the tandems, since guide and I were generally ahead. Actually, they’re not, but they were paddled by people with two advantages. We were the more experienced kayakers by a long way and we didn’t have to learn to paddle in sync with someone else – it’s been a long time since I’ve shared a kayak and I can well imagine spending most of the day smacking each other’s paddles and never quite figuring out how to paddle in time together.

The crossing had its challenges. I got “stars in my legs”, the delightful Icelandic expression for pins and needles, as I often do when kayaking but because I was wearing my adventure sandals rather than my neoprene socks, I couldn’t really feel where the footpegs were and it’s hard to wiggle your feet around when sandals make them double their usual thickness. We also had to dodge pleasure craft and ferries, often by coming to a stop until we can figure out where they’re actually going. Oh, and then there was the chop from that channel being wide open to the Mediterranean. But it was fine, it was just a little bouncy. The me of ten years ago would absolutely have capsized. The me that did Discover and Explore less than three years ago was quite happy with it. Nowadays, I quite like a bit of bounce.

We made it to Šipan, paddled up the side of it a little way and came to the famous arch. Yes, it’s a good arch. The sea is an amazing colour underneath it, there’s more sea behind it and it’s a good bit of shade after paddling for… well, I don’t know how long, I wasn’t timing it… in the open sunshine across from Lopud. But it was only a flying visit because our next stop was a sea cave on the south coast of Šipan, maybe fifteen minutes round the corner.

I knew it was a sea cave. I saw people swimming and jumping off the low cliffs when we got there. I had no idea that we were going to tie the kayaks to a rock and swim into it. Well, I knew there was swimming and snorkelling on the itinerary but I’d somehow assumed we’d land on the island and have an hour or two to do what we wanted, including maybe some swimming. But no, we were going to climb out of the boats, get out of our spraydecks on slippery angled rocks in shin-deep water, and then jump into the Adriatic. I’m definitely more an on-the-water than in-the-water kind of girl and to get in by half-jumping and half-slipping off the submerged rocks was… well, at that point, I hadn’t bothered to take off my buoyancy aid and that was probably for the best. But if you’re swimming, it is easier to do it without it and once I’d got used to the water, I took it off.

I’m a naturally dubious and suspicious person. That comes partly from having lived within the reach of sea-related local news headlines all my life and partly from three student years as an extremely keen caver. The result is that I seriously don’t like sea caves. They collapse unexpectedly, waves slam you against their sides and roofs and as for diving through a semi-submerged opening and inside them, no way. I once heard someone make a comment about cave diving being the most dangerous sport in existence and how every cave diver knows a few people who died doing it. No, the guide and the kids could die through that slot and into the cave beyond but I was staying outside, thank you. I’m sure it’s fine. But it’s not for me.

I did quite enjoy swimming in that pristine water outside, though. An occasional speedboat would go past somewhere between Šipan and Lopud and the waves they sent through to our little bay were incredible. You did need someone on the outside to warn cave explorers of waves so they knew not to dive through while one was coming in. They didn’t at that time but they did while we were tying up the kayaks and getting in the water, which really only added to my “not sure this is a good idea”. But once the boat was past, it all calmed down.

We got back in the boats somehow, not bothering about the spraydecks because they were awkward to put back on under the circumstances and it was only ten or fifteen minutes to the little sheltered port of Suđurađ where we were stopping for lunch. Lunch was at a tiny fish restaurant right on the jetty – well, the whole village is pretty tiny. There are only two settlements on Šipan – Suđurađ on the south coast and Šipanska Luka two-thirds of the way up the south-west coast. More than food, I wanted a drink. I had a bottle of pineapple juice tucked under my decklines but while coastal breeze and trailing my hands in the water had kept me pleasantly cool, my juice had slowly boiled in the sun until it was like drinking pineapple tea. A glass bottle of Fanta on the shore was very happily received.

By now it was 3.30pm. We had to be back on Lopud in time for the 18:10 ferry, the last one of the day back to the mainland. Not only that, we had to put the kit away, get changed and walk three-quarters of a kilometre back to the jetty. And we still had another stop scheduled on our kayak adventure – just across from the mouth of the little port to uninhabited islet Ruda.

This was another sea cave but a bigger one – big enough for us to paddle in, gape at the big hole in the roof, take half a second to realise the wall is more like a steep slope (and so can you climb out of the cave and onto the island?) but not big enough for three kayaks to turn round. That was ok, I could reverse out. I’ve done it before but I’ve never done it as well as I did that day. I motored out! I went backwards in a perfect straight line, looking over my shoulder far more than in front, swung the kayak in a perfect arc around the little headland and turned to wait for the two tandems. Yes, I’m very proud of that reverse. I knew I could do it because reversing is an important skill and I’ve been taught a few times but it just felt so good!

Now we had to go back to Lopud. The weather had deteriorated a little and the sea was choppier than it had been, with clouds on the horizon. Back home at about 11pm, those clouds would turn into a really terrifyingly loud thunderstorm but at 4pm, our main concern was getting back to Lopud in time for the ferry. We were all getting tired by now. I’d taken my sandals off and I was getting used to the kayak so I no longer had stars in my feet but I was beginning to feel several hours of paddling in my shoulders and I knew we were paddling across the wind. I quite like paddling straight into a good wind – we’ll cover that on this blog when I get to my sea kayak award training which was over a year ago now but currently scheduled for posting in August – but I’m not a fan of paddling across the wind. Nothing in a kayak infuriates me like having to basically paddle one-sided for any more than about three strokes. This was the best part of a mile, maybe a mile and a half. Luckily I remembered being shown adjusting your paddle, so you move your hands sideways along it so it’s really long on one side and really short on the other. Then you get lots of turning power on one side and just enough on the other side to feel like you’re paddling properly instead of incessantly one-sided and you stay in a straight line. I heard when we were back on shore that the instructor had towed one of the tandems the last little bit. I knew they’d fallen behind but every time I’d glanced behind, they were very much not being towed – it was an option we’d talked about at the restaurant so we all knew it was a possibility but I’d thought the whole way that it was a possibility that hadn’t been used. It’s not so long since I’d have expected it to be me who got tired and needed the help and now here I am thinking “if you had a second towline, I could have helped tow the other boat”.

We got back to Lopud in plenty of time. Even after dragging the boats back into the garden and gathering up the kit and getting changed, we still had an hour to kill. I used it to buy another fresh cold drink and sit on a bench looking out at the sea. For one thing, I was tired – remember, I’d arrived in Dubrovnik at 11pm the night before and been up at the crack of dawn for a full day of sea kayaking. For another, I knew I had a steep uphill walk back to the apartment later on. For a third, it was getting chilly. That breeze was picking up. I wished I’d brought a jumper for the ferry back but it had seemed unimaginable at 9am that it could ever get chilly here. I could always go inside on the lower deck but I’m an upstairs outside kind of person, even if I froze to death. Which I didn’t. It turned out the wind, which buffetted us as we left Lopud, was angled so that it didn’t even touch us as we sailed back to Dubrovnik.

And there we were! It had been a long day, a beautiful day, a day worth going all the way to Croatia for, and a total contrast to the last holiday kayaking adventure I’d had, which was my trip around Jökulsárlón in Iceland last summer. That post is also out in August this year but the picture at the header of my blog is from that trip so you can contrast deep teal water and ice with turquoise water and sunshine. Beautiful. Well worth doing.