Winter is a really bad time for a summer paddler to try to maintain a paddling blog. I swore back in January that after missing all of December and most of November, I’d get back into it and keep it up until I got back out on the water and had new stuff to blog about but then I missed last week again. I can’t wait until the canoe hire place opens up, partly to spend a pleasant Sunday morning battling my way up the river before stopping for an ice cream but partly so I can write about it!
I looked at Paddle UK’s #ShePaddles news for inspiration – is there anything sort of female-oriented that I can write my own take on? Well, of the first few paddler spotlights, before Paddle UK apparently forgot the #ShePaddles scheme was a thing for several months, three of the first five articles are all [Someone]’s Journey into White Water Kayaking. And white water is great, and of course it’s always interesting to hear how people got into paddling and into a specific form of it but some of us are never going to be into that particular form and it’s kind of offputting that it seems to be the kind that gets the most noise and attention. I daresay the photos are the most spectacular – lots of splashing, lots of fun angles, lots of adrenaline. But just as the other day I wrote about “you don’t have to be competitive”, you don’t have to go high-octane either. So let’s talk about my journey into sea kayaking.
I’ve talked a lot about the specifics of my journey into sea kayaking. I’ve written an entire blog about it, one post for every step over the course of about eight years. But this is going to be more general, a single finished article that doesn’t take several months to wade through.
I started out as a tourist down on the Jurassic Coast, having a go at kayaking one wet April day because I’d realised, several years back, that I have this natural playground on my doorstep and I’ve never used it. Sailing turned out not to be my thing so why not try kayaking? Kayaking also wasn’t my thing – in that first attempt, a guided half-day tour in sit-on-top kayaks run by a commercial company, as soon as we left the mirror-like Studland Bay, I capsized our double kayak six times in under ten minutes, resulting in the guide rafting us all together and taking us off to the beach at the foot of Old Harry Rocks to sit in an emergency shelter and eat sweets until we’d warmed up. I actually went back after that experience and had a better second try.
What really started me off, though, was someone coming into work in the summer of 2019 and announcing that Lidl had inflatable kayaks. Why did I immediately decide that I needed to buy one? No idea. But having bought one, I realised that I needed a little more training before I took it out to sea – I live in Dorset, I see “tourist rescued after inflatable drifts away” approximately twice a week during the summer and once a fortnight during the winter. I know how dangerous they can be so I went for another session, mostly to learn about Studland Bay, which is shallow, sheltered and often as flat as glass. Having established that this was a reasonably safe place to play with my inflatable, I then bought some safety kit – my own buoyancy aid and wetsuit and tried out the blow-up boat. It sagged in the middle and although I quite enjoyed it, I admit that I haven’t taken it out since. Instead, I started getting in the habit of going out in more controlled conditions in real boats. I took my Rangers to a watersports evening, I hired a paddleboard, I hired a canoe and then, motivated partly by spite and partly by wanting to show off and partly by being a Guide who’s had it ingrained in me to “look wider”, I did my Discover and Explore Awards.
What I wanted to get out of Discover and Explore was the ability to hire a kayak down at Studland and go on my own adventures, knowing I had the skills, confidence and experience to do that safely. The next step was going on a night navigation adventure out to Old Harry which meant I had to learn to paddle a sea kayak with a spraydeck, so off I went for a half day introduction to sea kayaking. For me, it was always going to be sea kayaking. Mostly that’s because that’s where I can hire kayaks locally, really. I daresay you can kayak on the river a mile from my house but I’m wary of rivers because I don’t know a lot about them and I don’t, and probably never will, own my own kayak and there’s nowhere to hire one. Besides, I’d started kayaking specifically to make use of Poole Harbour and the Jurassic Coast.
I added paddleboarding and canoeing to my repertoire. I’m not good at either but I can take the board down to the bit of river 10 miles away where families spend entire summer weekends and evenings in the shallow water with their various inflatable crafts, and I find that a nice relaxing way to spend a rare empty evening. I also like to hire a canoe and paddle up the river to the road bridge, paddle back in literally half the time, practice my strokes just upriver from the hire place, return it on the hour and then go over the other bridge and have an ice cream in the sun. That’s as far as my skills with either craft go and I’m happy with that – I’m not aiming to be a professional or an Olympian and I’m competent to just enjoy myself on the water for an hour, which is all I ever wanted.
Meanwhile, I’d discovered my local Girlguiding boathouse. Well, I’d known about at least since I was a Young Leader – we went to one of the shore evenings and I cooked hotdogs – but I’d never boated from it. I’d run an archery session for the county Inspire group, Girlguiding’s 18-30 not-actually-a-section and one of them had brought up the subject of kayaking, which had made me start to think about getting qualified so I could use her boats and run a session for them. And then, following a failed fencing session where none of the Rangers turned up, I found myself inviting myself to the boathouse and talking to the instructor about joining them.
My original plan had never been to go down the instructing and coaching route. I just wanted to be good enough to enjoy myself, to not be a duffer (“better drowned than duffers”) – even when we’d talked about it at the Explore training, even knowing that I was a Ranger and Brownie leader, I never imagined me teaching them how to kayak. And here I was, getting in on the leader side of kayaking. It was sea kayaking because the boathouse is on the sea, albeit a very shallow and sheltered bit of sea where it feels like total overkill that you need sea kayaking qualifications. I’d have stuck with the sea kayaking anyway, because that’s what I wanted to do and that’s what I do do, but now I was looking at going down the leadership route as well and it would also be in sea kayaking.
That was the summer of 2022, that first trip to the boathouse. Two and a half years later and I’ve now done two seasons at the boathouse and the third is right here on the horizon almost close enough to touch. I’ve done my Sea Kayak Award training, although the assessment looks like it’s just gone because the instructor refuses to answer emails from him – I know he’s still around, still expanding his company and I might have to march down there one day when he’s running out of the other workshops and beg on my knees to finish it – and I’ve done my Paddlesport Safety & Rescue training, so I’ve got started on the leadership stuff. I’m booked in for more training later this year, and you’ll hear all about that in due course but again, I’m pretty sure that’s not going to include assessment but it’ll be another big step towards lightening our instructor’s load. Progress is slow and probably the best way to speed it up is to join a real club, which is something I dithered about on this blog a few weeks ago – namely that I don’t want to be up at 9am on Saturday mornings every week when I’ve got so much else going on and that my local club is river-based.
But twenty years after realising I wasn’t making the most of what I had on my doorstep, I’m finally in the position where I have the sea kayaking abilities to match what I wanted to do, which is just to enjoy being on the water on a sunny day. You never stop learning and you never know when what you want to do is going to change or evolve or take a big step to the left but if I never get qualified and help the boathouse properly, at least I’m kayaking in the way I wanted to.
Bumblebee Paddles 