With sticking last week’s escapade in the blog schedule and booting this a week, it does feel a little odd, because immediately after capsizing, we come to my very first capsize on the sea! This is My Paddling Story clashing big time with Paddling In Real Time.
It’s July 2022 and I’m in a long green sea kayak, my GoPro in the hands of one of my fellow paddlers and my sunglasses hooked onto the buoyancy aid of our instructor. I paddle a little way away and then tip the kayak upside down.
After my pool session in March, when I’d learned to capsize and come up giggling, it was time to have a go at doing it on the open sea. I’d gone out for a half-day paddle on a beautiful day in March, the weekend after that pool session, and then chickened out. When you’re someone with a pathological hatred of cold water, trying your first capsize on the sea in March, even on a beautiful sunny day, just isn’t going to work. I went out determined to do it and then.. didn’t.
But fast-forward to March. It was 48 hours after I sprained my ankle spectacularly (first thought was that it was broken and it was only a year later that I realised a broken flowerpot doesn’t necessarily preclude a broken ankle) and I tried to cancel and reschedule, only to discover that it’s not allowed. So off I went to the beach, limped down the hill with the kayak on its wheels behind me and got into my boat. Once you’re on the water, you’re not really putting any pressure on a sprained ankle. Maybe I should have been – I should have my feet on the footrests and be using my legs to balance the kayak but I often don’t bother. The sea in Studland Bay is rarely rough enough that I need to and maybe I just haven’t figured out how to adjust them properly but I tend to get pins and needles in my legs if I keep them on the footrests.
It was a beautiful day, if a little windier and rougher than I’d expected. Some of my favourite paddling photos came from that trip. The sky was blue, the sea sparkled and I was feeling comfortable on the water. We paddled out to Old Harry via Kyle’s favourite two little rocks sticking out of the low tide and through the headland to the “bouncy” sea beyond. I’d done that a few times and never enjoyed that. The sea is much rougher than in the sheltered bay and although my skills had reached the point where I didn’t capsize, I was permanently afraid I would. But this time, something had happened to my confidence and I was quite happy to bounce up and down on the waves, preferably with my nose pointed straight into them. I was happy enough to pull out my camera and take selfies with the chalk cliffs behind me. Taking photos means I have to put the paddle down and the fact that I could put the paddle down in the open water means I must have been really comfortable. Skills and confidence. The two take time but they seem to come together.
We found two kids’ footballs out here, lost floating plastic waste so Kyle scooped them up and naturally, we started to throw them between ourselves. It does mean a certain amount of skill-building, to be able to get the kayak in the right place to catch it and position ourselves not just to catch it but to let go of the paddle long enough. I could chase it and get in position and stay upright but I never quite mastered catching the ball.
This was the trip where instructor Kyle recognised me from previous adventures, when I’d talked about building my skills towards becoming an instructor so Kyle decided to get me to practice my instructing – show the new paddler how to put the spraydeck on, “tell me, what advice do you have for good forward paddling?”, “Are there any weird tides around here? Great question. Julie, maybe you can answer that,” etc. I’m not sure I enjoy playing instructor when there’s someone around who knows better but it’s good to think about things – what you’re doing, how and why you’re doing it, what’s going on around you.
All of this was all very well but the purpose of the excursion, for me, was to have a go at capsizing. We went back to the shallow corner of South Beach where we usually do this bit – a nice short paddle home for cold wet kayakers and I handed all my stuff over to the others, including my camera and a request to film it. Then I used my hands to paddle a little distance away and in cold blood, leaned over and capsized.
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The film says I was underwater for less than three seconds but it felt like forever. I found my pull loop – the first thing you do on these trips when you’re still on the beach is to learn how to find and pull that loop while blind and disoriented but I’d been told that the non-stretchy nylon spraydeck would probably just pop itself under the force of gravity. It did not. I pulled the loop, fell more than climbed out of the kayak and found the surface, although I suspect I swam into the kayak before reaching fresh air. I remember clinging to the upside down kayak for quite a while as my world turned itself the right way up and my airways cleared of fishy salt water and I’d got the water out of my eyes. Then I could sort out getting back in the kayak. That took a bit of organising because Kyle and I had different plans about how that was to be achieved and which bit I needed to be holding onto but we got there eventually.
There was a little more drama, in that the other paddler wanted a go and thought he could roll on his first ever capsize but really, the paddle was finished. We were within spitting distance of the slipway, we’d had a good paddle and I’d seen a leap in my skills, abilities and confidence since my last trip out. I’d bounced around in rough seas that three paddles ago would have scared the life out of me. I’d capsized! I’d deliberately turned my kayak over and fallen into the sea and I’d survived it! Here I was, back in my kayak, wet and slightly dazed but otherwise triumphant. This was the thing I’d been avoiding since my very first attempt at paddling.
Oh. Is this aversion to capsizing related to the fact that I capsized six times in ten minutes all the way back in 2014? Probably. Ok, I’ll be giving that some thought, then.
Bumblebee Paddles 