Bumblebee Paddles

A couple of weeks ago now, it was the Great Big Paddle Parade. It was my first time so I don’t know exactly what it is but this year it was a parade that departed Torquay, picked up batches of paddlers from two beaches and finished with a photoshoot and lunch afloat in a cove before paddling back, dropping off at the two beaches on the way back to Torquay. That much I assume happens every year. But this year, they were hoping to hit 1000 paddleboarders and set a new world record.

I signed up for it, although not without a certain amount of trepidation. I’ve been paddleboarding on the sea this summer and getting on just fine. I can kayak into a decent wind – in fact, at a push I might even say I enjoy paddling into the more than paddling on a calm day. I know I’m a stronger kayaker than paddleboarder and I know that with one blade, sitting down, I can’t transfer nearly as much power into the water as I can with a double kayak blade. But I’m reasonably competent. It’s a short trip. I can do this.

I got to the beach on Saturday morning in absolutely dismal weather to find no sign of a paddle parade. I opened the ticket and it said Sunday on it. It was absolutely not Sunday when I booked it. I’m over-busy and I miss things or forget to respond to them but I’m not ditzy; I don’t book trips to Torquay for Saturday when it’s actually on Sunday. So I dug a bit and eventually found the event linked on a Facebook group where it turned out because of the aforementioned dismal weather, it had been moved back to Sunday, when the weather was supposed to be better. Ok, do I go home or do I book another night in Torquay and hang around there all day?

Yep, I booked another night in a clifftop hotel for old people and hung around Torquay. Went to Kents Cavern. It may not have ever come up on this blog but I was a caver when I was a student and I have a huge affinity for damp dark underground places.

Sunday wasn’t a whole lot better, plus it was raining. But the parade was going ahead. Looking at this not-very-brilliant weather, all those doubts came flooding back. It’s windier than I like. The sea is rougher than I like. Maybe instead of registering, I should just walk away. But I signed in, inflated my board, got dressed, hung around in the rain.

We were the last stop on the Great Big Paddle Parade. I’d had the sense to do the shortest trip. It’s only 2.5km. I can manage that! It was still windier than I like and it meant the parade was moving south far quicker than planned. They were due to reach us at 11.30am but they were at the previous beach really early. Team Broadsands started preparing us to be on the water and ready to join by 11. The parade paused at Goodrington to let the clock catch up with them and then they were going to set off at their allocated time off 11, so actually, we didn’t need to be on the water quite so early.

I was out there by about five to eleven and the doubts had become an absolute flood of terror and dread by now. I’ve never tried to paddleboard where there are waves breaking on the shore, smashing into me so hard that I can’t keep the board pointing forward, and this is before I’ve even got out far enough to get on the thing. “I can’t do this, I can’t do this, I should go back to shore and hire a kayak, I know it’s not a kayak event but I can do this on a kayak…” My brain is just whirring and yelling but I don’t have time to get a kayak or put my board away and anyway, it’s not a kayak event. I got on the board, out past the breakers. I wasn’t being smashed or carried away out here but there was a swell, three or four feet, and I was bobbing ferociously.

I tried to tell myself it was just an ordinary breezy day at Studland. At Studland, this level of breeze wouldn’t bother me. I’d started off on my knees but it makes my feet go numb very quickly, so I sat and then I sat with my feet dangling over the sides. Looking around, most people were sitting in the same position. Fine. The sea is too rough to stand up, it’s ok to kneel or sit, and everyone’s got their feet dangling.

The parade did not come by early. My watch had died the day before so I have no idea when they made it but I have a strong suspicion they were actually late. I can’t quite make sense of my GPS track but I think I was bobbing around out there for 40-55 minutes (yes, that’s a lot of “can’t make sense of it”) before the parade reached us. That was more than enough time for something in my brain to lock. The parade arrived, whooping and shrieking and yelling and generally excited and I was not excited. I could not scream. I could not even smile. I could hang on grimly to my board, trying not to scream “Go away!” to anyone who got close enough to bump me. I don’t know how many of us there were at Broadsands but it was enough to make the bay into a human soup, lifted and dropped by the swell, carried south towards the rocks on the right-hand side of the bay, almost uncontrollably.

The parade passed and we surged forward to join on the back. We? I didn’t. I dug in my paddle and… didn’t go anyway. I kept trying. I know how to paddle, I’ve done this before, I can do this, why am I not going anywhere? Why am I putting in ten times the effort of everyone else and not going anywhere?

Half-contained semi-panic escaped. The group moved on and I was left behind, except one of our pink-jacketed group leaders and a couple of people taking it easy at the back, who very quickly spotted something was wrong. They were right that I was far too hot, with my cagoule over my wetsuit, steadied the board while I took off my buoyancy aid and jacket, secured the jacket under the decklines and put the BA back on but even when the surface panic had quieted, I still wasn’t really going anywhere. I still don’t understand why. Ok, having my feet hanging over the edge really didn’t help but after bouncing up and down for so long, I couldn’t put them on the board. The whole thing would tip over and I’d end up in the water.

That might actually have been the best thing for me, for my brain to discover that it’s not the end of the world. Maybe even to swim along behind, using the paddleboard as a giant float. But I hung in obstinately. However, the parade had reached the shore opposite by now and the nice pink man was basically out of the parade for as long as he had me on his hands. If I couldn’t make the board move and I couldn’t, the only real option was for one of the boats to pick me up. We had a big RNLI Severn class and I’d love a ride on a Severn, but not under the circumstances where I became an RNLI statistic by needing to be rescued through my own stupidity. We also had a small D-class lifeboat, the little inshore RIB which could zoon around. We had a couple of small private boats keeping an eye on things and a fairly large pleasure yacht. That’s what came and picked me up, slightly bewildered, I think, that I required rescue and yet was perfectly fine and perky. No medical issue, no injury – just… can’t do it. We also rapidly picked up someone else who was exhausted from the paddle all the way from Torquay. We had some discussions about whether she was going to be returned to land, which was eventually decided when the D-class came along with their own rescuee, who was her dad. I have no idea what had happened that dad ended up on the lifeboat and daughter on the safety boat but eventually she jumped in the D-class and I think they were both taken back to shore, whereas I stayed on board.

We followed the parade up to the final cove. We were called to pick up a suspected asthma attack at almost exactly the moment we were called to a puncture, so we passed the medical emergency to the RNLI, hung around long enough to make sure they were on their way and went to get the puncture. Not sure how but we ended up not getting the puncture, not then. Instead we led the parade around in a big circle so we could get into the cove behind them because we were the photo boat as well as the safety boat. We picked up various members of the Soak team running the event, sent the photographer off to shore for some drone photos, picked up the man in charge, sent him off again and there was generally half an hour of on-and-off chaos before we started back.

We picked up that puncture first, though, and he was not a happy bunny. It was a slow puncture but one of the smaller safety boats had decided he couldn’t risk taking it all the way back to Goodrington. My understanding was that they’d gone out on the water to await the parade, like us, and a big wave had swept two women into him and knocked him into the rocks. He’d lost a flipflop and his board had begun to slowly and quietly hiss and he was furious. The whole thing was a shambles, everything was a shambles, utterly incompetent, worst thing ever. Staff on the boat tried to pacify him, tried to explain that if people were incompetent (I sat very quietly!), maybe one thing the parade could do was educate them. “Hmph! Not at my expense!”

I have three idle thoughts on this gentleman. First, if you’re as good as you clearly think you are, why were you so close to the rocks that a rogue wave could send you crashing onto them? Second, why are you wearing flipflops? I was taught at my PRS that you should always have something on your feet and flipflops will come off at the slightest provocation. And third, you may have a RED SUP but you’re wearing a Lidl rash vest and that sends mixed messages about what a pro you are.

Actually, I had some other thoughts. There were a lot of people who didn’t have anything on their feet, or had flipflops tucked under the decklines. And there were a lot of people who didn’t have a buoyancy aid or personal flotation device, even though that had been in the rules of the event. I saw one person in event hi-viz who had a buoyancy aid tucked under the decklines, exactly where it’s going to be no use at all if you unexpectedly go in. For all my incapability to paddle, I did at least have something on my feet and a good buoyancy aid packed with emergency stuff. I don’t know for certain but I’d bet the majority of people here have just at some point bought a SUP and gone out on the water by themselves and figured out how they work. I may not be able to paddle in swell, but I’ve done my Paddlesport Safety and Rescue training. I should be able to rescue you if something goes wrong. When my fate was being decided, someone asked about a towline (my board has nowhere to attach one, so that was great!) but I had a long sling and a couple of karabiners, so I could improvise a towline if we needed one. Maybe some of the hi-viz folks should have been carrying towlines.

The big boat couldn’t take me all the way back to shore because it would run aground, so they got my half-jumping and half-falling off the side and onto my board. I paddled back with the safety jetski beside me and when that got too shallow, I continued the last 50m on my own, riding in on the surf and then standing there waiting for the parade to join me. We’d crawled along with it most of the way and then put pedal to the metal to get ahead enough to drop me off and rejoin.

That was when it all got too much. I’d failed. I’d enjoyed seeing the paddle from the big boat and I hadn’t drowned and everyone had been nice but I’d failed. I could not paddle. I’d experienced the entire Great Big Paddle Parade from the rescue boat. I knew I wasn’t as strong a SUPper as I am a kayaker but to have got picked up before I’d even set off was just humiliating.

When I got home, I looked for some videos from previous paddle adventures. My last SUP trip, where I’d sailed merrily along as if I’d been born to it, wasn’t on my GoPro and I didn’t go to the effort of switching on my laptop and getting out the portable hard drive where I hope those videos are living, but I found a video from the time I went out paddling against the wind before the sauna. That had been a really hard paddle against a really strong wind – ok, I was in a kayak, which is hugely different to balancing precariously on an inflatable board a couple of inches thick, but I hadn’t been imagining it, right? I can paddle in windy conditions, can’t I?

I made a very interesting discovery. I vividly remember it being windy that day. I remember the effort, the thrill, expecting the sauna to soothe tired muscles. I even comment during the video “Love paddling against the wind” in a slightly strained voice. But if you mute it, you wouldn’t be able to tell that it’s windy. Studland doesn’t do swell. I went kayaking last weekend, proper sea kayaking on a not-brilliant day, and the instructor says Studland only gets properly choppy when there’s an easterly wind. The prevailing wind around here is south-west, which means the bay is very well protected. It must have been a westerly wind if I was paddling into it along the south side of the bay and the water is still pretty much absolutely flat. It’s a bit textured, maybe, but there were no great ups and downs like there were at Torquay.

So I’ve had my ego utterly flattened. It’s a pity it’s right at the end of the season and I’m unlikely to have either the time or the weather to go out again before next spring because it means I’m going to spend the entire autumn and winter convinced that I can’t paddle at all and that I shouldn’t even try and then I’m not going to want to get it out next year – when I’ve always quite enjoyed it. It’s a thing to do on nice evenings or nice Fridays, when you don’t want to hire a kayak or feel like you have to go out on an expedition.

Looking at the distance, Broadsands to Fishcombe Cove is pretty much the same distance as Knoll Beach to Old Harry – it’s definitely a distance I can manage quite comfortably in the wind in a kayak, it’s not like an insurmountable epic voyage. I’ve always chickened out of paddleboarding it, more out of an overabundance of caution than because I actually think it’s too hard for me. Maybe even just out of laziness. But I think it’s not the distance. I think it was the swell and the nearly-hour of bobbing up and down working up a panic. But I knew before I registered that it was a bad idea and when I stepped into the water I knew it was a bad idea and at some point before the paddle arrived, I should have returned to shore and given up before giving up was forced upon me. And that’s the bit that was the really bad idea, to keep trying.