Bumblebee Paddles

At last, at last, new blog material! Last weekend I went out on the water for the first time since September and that means I have a story to tell! There’s a company in London – most sensibly named the London Kayak Company – who do kayak trips in London and I decided to go on their “Kayak Bus” trip, which is a sightseeing tour right through the city, either from Greenwich to Battersea or the other way round. It’s eleven miles and only possible for beginners and tourists by making use of the tide to carry paddlers on their way. Obviously you still have to paddle but it makes it so much easier.

I did the Greenwich to Battersea direction, departing about 12pm and arriving about 3pm. If I’d gone the other way, it would have been about 4-7pm, which meant I wouldn’t get home until about midnight. It also gave me an excellent excuse to go up on Saturday, rather than getting up at dawn on Sunday for a frantic run across London, and go to the Theatre Royal to see Hayley Atwell and Tom Hiddleston in Much Ado About Nothing, so a good weekend all round!

You come in your own clothes that you don’t mind getting grubby, some shoes that you don’t mind getting wet and a change of clothes. Everything else is provided. I dithered over what clothes to wear and eventually decided that even though it didn’t really need it, I’d just take my wetsuit & t-shirt, the ones I’d wear kayaking in the summer. Rather than find a pair of old shoes (all my old shoes have fallen apart, which is why I don’t wear them – I don’t have anything that’s too old to wear but still wearable!), I took my neoprene socks. It turns out you really need the shoes for carrying the kayaks across the stony bit of beach outside the unit, which is probably also full of bits of glass and metal junk, so I had to wedge my shoes on over my neoprene socks and then put them in the hatch when we were ready to go.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Director and tour guide Harry, after assuring us many times that it’s his job to keep us safe and that we can sue him if he fails in that, provided waterproof salopette-things, waterproof jackets, buoyancy aids, neoprene gloves and neoprene socks for the pilots – those of us sitting in the back of the double kayaks who would need control over our toes. Our bags were wedged into the kayak’s hatches and then we were introduced to our boats. I’ve never seen anything quite like them.

I’m reasonably familiar with double kayaks. The last time I used one was 2016 and it was a sit-on-top but these were closed cockpits and we had spraydecks put on us – after we’d got in (“dive through and I’ll pull it down”). Being the larger of my pair, I was put in the back and given control of the kayak. It had a rudder and the rudder was controlled by tiny buttons above the footrests which I could just about reach with my toes. Quite possibly these are easier to use if you have bigger feet. Instead of using the paddle to steer, you just keep paddling forwards and you control the direction of the kayak using nothing but these toe-buttons. That felt every kind of unnatural to me. Harry was adamant that they’re necessary for a trip like this because if you’re steering with the paddle, you’re probably going to lose speed and if you lose speed, you’re more likely to capsize and while I disagree, I do also acknowledge that I know nothing about paddling on a river, let alone a tidal one, let alone a really busy one that goes through the very centre of London.

For the same reason, we were all going in doubles. The double kayaks are really big and really stable and if you go solo, you’re far more likely to capsize. Having been the person who persistently capsized someone else last time I was in a double kayak, I’d have been far more comfortable solo but at this, I didn’t even open my mouth. I suspect an insider was brought in to pair with me – Tay is clearly well known to Harry, casually wanders around the unit as if she belongs there, knows where everything is and how it works and doesn’t feel like someone who’s at the level of wide-eyed kayak tourist. There were two pairs – me & Tay and a couple who were a bit less experienced in a kayak and a bit less confident, plus Harry in his single kayak. We were strongly discouraged from bringing cameras. The moment tourists get phones or GoPros out, they stop concentrating on the kayak which can mean disaster and if the phone slips, they’re likely to go after it rather than saving themselves – phones are the number one cause of unplanned swims, according to Harry. I took the hint and put my GoPro in my bag. It was on its floaty handle and it had a tether but I know when to pick my battles and given that Harry was at that very moment offering free photos and videos included as part of the package, it didn’t seem worth arguing. I’m very much “pictures or it didn’t happen” but I was getting the pictures and they’d be of more of me than just shoulders-up selfies – seemed like a win-win.

So we set off from the office at Greenwich, about halfway between maritime Greenwich and the o2. Tay & I were launched first – shoved off from the shingly beach – and left to float while Harry got the others ready and on the water, which gave me time to figure out the rudder. We’d adjusted the footrests on solid land but it’s always different when you’re actually on the water so it also gave me time to figure out that I can hook them from behind and adjust them myself. Then we were off!

We started off on the south side of the river. I wish I’d paid more attention to when we switched to the north but I think it was somewhere around Wapping. Harry updated us every mile with how far we’d gone and pointed out interesting things on both banks but it was difficult to respond when he can’t really hear you and you don’t have your hands free to gesture. That first big loop around the Isle of Dogs didn’t feel at all like a loop, I have to say. From the water, the river always looks reasonably straight and it was odd to know that three quarters of an hour in, we’d have covered two and a half miles and yet be only just over a mile from where we’d started.

Harry pointed out things like “that’s Ian McKellen’s house and his pub next door”, “that’s where the pirate, paid by the Queen, Sir Francis Drake, was knighted” (I called back “Privateer!” at that point) and “there’s a foot tunnel over there, see that dome?” until we were pretty much at Tower Bridge. That marks roughly the halfway point distance-wise (the tide gets faster here, so it’s more than halfway time-wise) and we stopped, tied up to a buoy, for snacks. Harry pulled our wedged bags out of the hatch, which is something that makes me nervous, especially when my shoes are loose in there, so I’d put my snacks in my waterproof’s pocket next time. Paddling under Tower Bridge was quite a moment. When you’re on the Clippers, that’s always the moment when everyone comes rushing outside to take selfies and here I was paddling myself under it!

I’d been concerned about traffic. Being passed by the Clippers and the tourist RIBs and anything else big would make big waves and that was kind of scary. We did encounter some wash from boats, and it bounces off the embankment and creates some fairly rough conditions but honestly, I’ve had worse on my own down at Studland and the big double handled them just fine. It probably helped having an experienced paddler as partner – Tay wasn’t the kind to do as I once did and lean away in panicked terror, capsizing the pair of us. Instead, we both whooped as we bounced over them – well, whooped and “ouch!”-ed as one of them dropped us back down with an audible thump. We kept to the side by and large, so we weren’t in the way of any maritime traffic and generally we went under the bridges through the arch closest to the bank – later on, it would maybe be the second and we went right under the middle of one of the later bridges.

We passed Parliament at two o’clock on the dot, as Big Ben helpfully informed us, and paddled right up against the Palace of Westminster. For a building with so much security around the front, there seemed very little stopping us from coming alongside it from the water and just climbing up. Past MI6 at Vauxhall and by now, Harry was counting us down in bridges. Four more to go – the two we can see ahead, then two more we can’t see and then we’re there!

We lost our second pair somewhere around Chelsea Hospital. I never figured out their reason for going ashore early but I know their obsession with getting their phones out was grating on Harry – partly because of the risk of dropping them and then ending up in the water themselves but also partly because it slowed them right down. Tay & I were racing ahead the whole time. Not on purpose. Rather than the “left, right, left, right” method, Harry said it was easier for the person at the back to just follow the strokes of the person in the front but when we did that, it meant we pulled ahead by quite a bit. Honestly, Tay on her own would have kept ahead of the other two. Harry frequently yelled to both boats, but particularly to us, to slow down, take our time and so sometimes, in an attempt to show him that I was trying to, I’d let my paddle rest and just concentrate on steering while Tay kept us going. I’m not great at tandem paddling. I can do it but if I had to think too much about what my toes were doing, I’d forget what my hands were doing and then our paddles would clash. So when it wasn’t too choppy and I didn’t need to have my paddle in the water to feel like I was in control of which way up the boat was, I’d sometimes put it down. But with us naturally faster and the other pair stopping for selfies and video calls – I swear, he was on a video call before Harry had even tied us up to the buoy at snack time! – we were just getting too far apart.

We swapped back to the south side of the river just after Battersea Bridge and then it was another half a kilometre or so, give or take the fact that we had to go out to pass a barge, to the landing point. Tay knew where we were going, so she instructed and I steered and at the last minute, we put on a burst of speed so we could ram the little shingly beach and get the kayak as far up it as possible. My legs were a bit numb after three hours paddling, even with the need to use my toes to steer so I got out really awkwardly into ankle-deep water. Had Harry had a bit more control over our finale, he’d have rammed us onto the concrete ramp instead. Maybe not so good for the boat but better for clients to stay dry. I didn’t mind. I had neoprene socks on and a wetsuit and it was only my feet. And what an experience it had been!

I often like to take a boat trip. I like to see a city from the river. I’ve seen London plenty of times from the city, although the Clipper stops at Westminster so I’d never been quite so far west. But I’d paddled past all the major landmarks – Canary Wharf, Tower Bridge, the Tower of London, the Shard, St Paul’s, Waterloo, the London Eye, MI6, Battersea Power Station, Royal Hospital Chelsea, under all those iconic bridges – it was amazing. I even had pictures of me paddling past some of them, thanks to Harry. I wouldn’t have had those pictures if I’d been using my own GoPro. And although I could feel the three hours in my shoulders, I didn’t hurt nearly as much as I expected. To be honest, by the time I got back to Waterloo, I’d stopped feeling it in my shoulders too and there was nothing by the morning. I’d been a bit concerned about sunburn on the back of my hands, because it was sunny and my hands are constantly pointed at the sky and although I had the gloves, I didn’t actually wear them but I guess it was early March and the sun just isn’t quite high enough to be strong enough to scorch your hands in a mere three hours. It still felt weird steering with the rudder and not the paddle and I was still strongly disinclined to prefer it over what I’ve been used to but I’d got used to the sensation. As promised, I hadn’t been for a swim in the Thames but the Kinks were absolutely right with that line “dirty old river”. Harry assured us that there was no sewage in the Thames anymore but the fact is that it’s a very opaque golden-brown which I couldn’t help comparing with the crystal-clear blue-green water off the coast of Dubrovnik last year and I definitely didn’t want to go in there.

Last up, getting changed afterwards. I’d assumed, very naively, that there would be a building of some kind at each end, with changing space and toilets and maybe a shower but nope. You just get changed, or don’t, on the slipway at Battersea. I wouldn’t have gone home with my – admittedly perfectly dry – swimsuit on under my clothes if there had been. But the wetsuit absolutely needed to come off, I can’t sit on a train for two hours in a wetsuit, even if I attempt to hide it under my clothes and luckily, I have a caver’s attitude towards taking off a wetsuit in public so that was no problem.

So if you want to have an adventure or see London from a very different angle, I really recommend this. Harry will look after you, the boats are stable, the tide does at least half the work and you don’t even have to take your own selfies!