The disaster that was the Great Big Paddle Parade gave my confidence a bit of a dent – or perhaps I should say that it happening right at the end of my paddling season might have. To spend the entire winter knowing that was what happened last time I went out on the water, that it would still be mo ths before conditions were suitable to try again… That’s probably more the dent. Now, this all happened on a SUP so to fix that bit of my brain, I should have gone back out on the SUP but I wanted a grown-up around and I wanted bouncy seas and that meant half-day sea kayak trip to Old Harry.
I got lucky – the weather wasn’t beautiful, the kids were back at school and I was the only person on the trip, which meant 1:1 with the instructor. Whatever it was I was hoping to get out of the trip, we could do it because there was no one else to take into account.
We launched from Middle Beach which is rapidly disappearing into the sea. When you do GCSE geography, you think coastal erosion is a long slow process and it’s startling to see it in real time in front of your eyes. I think I more or less got my spraydeck on by myself, which is progress because when I lean forward to hook the front on, the back usually pops off. Then off we went. I’ve done the trip out to Old Harry almost more times than I like to count. I’ve been with Fore/Adventure on their sea kayaking trips and I’ve done it myself more than once in a hired sit-on-top from Knoll Beach. At this point, there’s very little challenge in gliding across Studland’s smooth sheltered shallow water. Despite Torquay, I didn’t feel wobbly or nervous or out of my depth at all. Rather than play the part of a nervous inexperienced beginner, I told Dani about the boathouse and the Guides and the Paddle Parade and my slow journey to becoming a qualified instructor. We spied birds along the cliffs and tourists walking above and when we reached Old Harry, Dani told me two stories of how it got its name. As a local, I knew both but I love to be told things like this.
Old Harry Rocks might be named after the devil – the old scratch, old Hobb, old Harry; he has so many euphemistic names. There’s a vigorous tidal race off these rocks and many a ship has foundered just off this headland. Or maybe it was named after Poole-based privateer – state-sponsored pirate – who may have used lights to lure passing ships onto the rocks to save him the effort of chasing down his prey to rob them.
This is often the end point of our expedition. Land on the beach at the foot of Old Harry, enjoy the scenery and the leg-stretch, paddle home. But if conditions are OK and the group seem reasonably competent, they often go beyond and paddle through a few caves and between the pinnacles beyond. This is where I capsized so many times on my first kayaking trip and it still makes me nervous, even through I know I’m a better kayaker now and, more importantly, a more confident one. I don’t cringe away from rolling seas in terror now, so I don’t overbalance the boat now.
But under the circumstances – recently thoroughly defeated by rolling seas – I was more nervous than I’d been in a while. Never mind that I’m infinitely better and infinitely stronger and infinitely more confident in a kayak than on a flimsy paddleboard. The feeling of being lifted and dropped made me nervous and for all the water is glassy-flat in Studland Bay, it was rougher out here than I’d expected. But Dani had evidently judged me as competent to come out here – and all the way along the cliffs to the corner of Ballard Down and to peek into Swanage Bay.
I was getting used to the sea by now, to bumping gently up and down, to turning my nose into the bigger swells, to holding myself in place with small movements of the paddle, to taking my attention off what I was doing to talk to Dani or count cormorants or recognise cliff collapses. I’ve only once paddled this far beyond Old Harry and that was at the Sea Kayak Award training, when I got tired fighting my way back north and experienced my first contact tow. I’d like to add that after a short rest and being towed closer into the cliffs, I made it back under my own steam and then excelled at paddling into the wind on the way home from Brownsea Island the next day.
Taking my hands off my paddle for long enough to take photos was a bit of a challenge but I’m a firm believer in “pictures or it didn’t happen”. Dani took me into a sea cave and tried out “paddle in forwards, then reverse out” and “reverse in and paddle out forwards” and that went OK too. As a student I did a lot of caving and among the many things that still live rent-free in my mind is that active wet caves like this can be spectacularly dangerous. I don’t think I’ll ever be capable of enjoying paddling or swimming into a sea cave while mental red lights are flashing and mental sirens are screaming that it’s going to collapse on my head. The same goes for dry caves – I will never go into Read’s Cavern because I will always hear Nigel in 2003 telling me not to.
Anyway, back to the sea. We returned to Old Harry via the shorter route inside the pinnacles rather than outside them. My legs were numb and despite the Gaviscon I took before setting off, I was feeling an unpleasantly acidic sensation in my sternum. I often get it when paddling – not at the boathouse, which is pretty gentle because we’re taking beginners out nice and slowly on flat water but when I’m putting in effort and tensing my core, it comes right up. Other than that, I got on nicely. No towing required today.
We stopped on Old Harry for quite a while. I had questions about training and assessments and how to get any of these, especially when I don’t own a kayak. I began to realise that after the breeze and the hard work out on the open sea, I was far too hot in my waterproof so I took the opportunity to take that off and shove it lazily under my decklines rather than stow it in the hatch. Then we came home! Paddling back from Old Harry is always harder than paddling out there – something seems to push me and I mostly end up paddling on the one side, which is both exhausting and deeply frustrating, especially when I glanced sideways at Dani and discovered she was paddling as serenely and evenly as first thing this morning. Eventually I had to ask. What am I doing wrong? Well, for one, I’m not looking when she puts in an occasional extra stroke on the same side. Ok, fine, but I’m doing that on every stroke. The trick is mostly in edging. I am familiar with this but I don’t do it much so I’m not very good at it. It takes too much thinking – it’s like the paddling equivalent of patting my head while rubbing my stomach. Something to practice next year.
We came gliding in on small breakers. I sometimes think maybe I’d like to try kayak surfing and then I see some of the waves and I realise Studland and the boathouse are perfectly satisfying. My only goal is to get the personal skills to pass this adventure to the next generation while enjoying my local coastline on nice summer days. We don’t all have to be surfers or whitewater daredevils. And so I was back, having ceased at some point to feel overly alarmed in the bouncy waters, having got comfortable on the sea, having gone for an unexpected expedition under the eye of an expert and found competent. A good day and thank you Dani.
Bumblebee Paddles 