On Friday I went out for my long-awaited night navigation by sea kayak, which is the mysterious thing I had to practice sea kayaking for in September.
The October weather smiled down on us. The run of wind and rain and grey skies vanished literally just for the evening and we set out onto a glassy sea under a pinky-orange sky. It was so beautiful and so serene and so chilled and several times I stopped paddling and just gazed around me in amazement that this was actually happening to me.
It was a small group – just me, guide Kyle and couple Adam and Roshana. Just enough people for it not to be weird but not so many that it was noisy or overcrowded. I almost wondered out loud why they don’t do this more often, since it was so lovely, but the fact that there were three people on a trip they only run twice a year at the moment was the answer to that before I’d even asked it.
We launched straight off the slipway, I had a minor (on the large side of minor but still minor) wobble over the fact that the boat wobbled when I tried to attach the hated spraydeck but once it was on, I was all good. We “handrailed” along to Old Harry, hugging the coast closer than anyone has ever done before, challenged ourselves to slip seventeen foot of kayak between two rocks and then paused right in the corner of South Beach for some night navigation tips.
Usually the group leader just keeps an eye on his people. In the dark, that could become impossible so we all had a number and when he shouted “One!” we all had to shout our number in turn. That was mostly fine but there was one point shortly after it became properly dark when Kyle and I were chilled and then hugely amused by “One!” “Two!” “Three!…. Adam!” “What? Oh. Four!”. So that was the basics of group management by night – stay close enough to hear and shout.
Number two was “action points”, I think. It may have been a different kind of point but basically, the idea was we would head in the direction of a particular feature and regroup there before heading onto another feature. A fallen tree hanging off the cliff was our first action point, then the stark white headland in front of us and then the stark white headland hiding behind it.
Number three was “collection features”. Or maybe “collecting features”? That meant a list of features to look out for, to tick off, to collect, as we paddled. If we passed the tree and then the beach huts and then the double rocks, we were going the right way. If we didn’t collect those points, we were probably going the wrong way. Then there’s “catching features” – the things that stop you going forever in the wrong direction. On Dartmoor, we use catching features. If you get lost in the mist on a level 2 walk, you’re only supposed to be able to walk so far before running into a road or a village or some other catching feature that stops you walking across open bare moorland for the next three days, or until you drop dead. All we really had in the way of catching features here, on the edge of the Channel, was either the Isle of Wight or the French coast. I suppose if we missed Middle Beach and carried on along Studland we’d eventually spot the chain ferry and the Sandbanks peninsula. She says “eventually” as if the other end of Studland is infinitely further than the Isle of Wight or France! We’d know something had gone wrong long before we were anywhere near the Isle of Wight and I daresay a stream of cargo ships would warn us that we were getting towards France.
And of course, handrailing. Keeping the coast very close on our right hands, as if we were using it as a handrail. I’m not accustomed to being that close to the foot of fragile chalk cliffs. They feel very high from the water and you can see how fragmented they are. There are fault lines in them, vertical ones broken up by horizontal ones and pieces fall off in quite blocky geometric shapes rather than the wave of dirt and mud and general you get off other cliff collapses. I’m always nervous about cliff collapses but they are more likely in stormy weather and however damp and breezy the weather had been, it hadn’t been actually stormy and the cliffs were probably as stable as they get.
We paddled along really slowly. We weren’t wasting time on practising strokes, we weren’t wasting time rounding up a large group. We were just paddling along enjoying the views and the scenery and the serenity. I spent as much time drifting as I did actively paddling. We saw herons – a couple flying over, one paddling around the base of the cliffs. We also saw and heard oystercatchers. I’ve seen them along here before and I’m very familiar with them but I didn’t know there were herons on the sea at Studland.
When we reached the headland immediately before Old Harry, we stopped for a navigation lesson. I’d assumed we’d all have a map and the navigation would be as much a part of the evening as the paddling but the most incompetent navigator could have followed the cliffs in the twilight without a map. Kyle showed us how to orient the map – which is something I don’t do myself, it’s much easier when you’ve got a map case around your neck to hold it out and just orient your mind – and then how to take a bearing. I didn’t point out that I already know this but we did have a chuckle at Adam, the only person in the group who didn’t know how to do it, because he was 48 hours away from starting a new job with Ordnance Survey. You know, the map people. The people who make the best maps in the world, including the one Kyle was holding.
Then Kyle left us to turn ourselves around so he could see our headlights – it was dark by now and we’d switched them off for navigation – while he went to peek through Old Harry to assess conditions. I’d have been perfectly happy where we were, in nice still sheltered glassy Studland Bay but Kyle pronounced it “a bit bouncier but nothing that will test our kayaking abilities” and so off we went.
(I didn’t get many photos after that. I didn’t have enough hands once we passed Old Harry and once we were back, it was too dark and my battery was uncooperative.)
First we had to go through the gap between what I think is the very end of the peninsula and the bigger of the two stacks. It’s hard to tell in the dark from that low level. That’s where his group was falling out of their sit-on-tops one after the other when I was learning to use a sea kayak last month and so I was nervous. It was shallow here and we scraped the bottom a few times. Then a careful turn into the gap, a gentle shuffle forwards and then a little power on to get through.
Yes, it was definitely bouncier on the other side! This is where I capsized six times in almost as many minutes on my very first trip so I was inclined to be nervous anyway. The rational part of my brain knows it was smoother out here tonight than it had been in Studland Bay when I learned this last month. I had already paddled a long thin kayak in worse conditions and returning to Christchurch at the end of Explore day was far worse, although on that occasion I’d not been wearing a spraydeck and my kayak had been much shorter and stubbier.
The thing is, it was dark. Even with a headtorch, you can’t really see the waves. You can’t see exactly what they’re doing. You can just feel that you’re going up and down and sometimes the wave is catching you at an odd angle that makes one end or the other float away. Worst of all, you can hear the waves breaking against the bottom of the cliff. All in all, it seems a lot worse than it probably is.
We headed towards the bit of cliff in front of us. Kyle said to head for the arch but in the dark, my brain understood “arch” as a cave of some kind. If you think I’m wary of cliffs, multiply that by a thousand for my wariness of sea caves. A few years as a caver gives you a very healthy respect for rock that’s been bored out from underneath and a sea cave is being bored out right now. But I headed towards it, expecting to regroup there – and instead we sailed through and back into the sea. For someone expecting to bob alongside a solid cliff, it was a little like walking through a mirror or a wardrobe – something solid until suddenly you’re in a place you never imagined was there.
It was no different on the other side, of course. More chalk cliffs in front, more invisible waves, more barely-suppressed panic. We weren’t going far. Just to the first Pinnacle, round it and then back. Could we do that? “Maybe” I said through gritted teeth. Now we weren’t going as a group. We were going in pairs, which naturally meant I was paired with Kyle, since a couple will stick together right in the face of death regardless of the other option being a professional. Waves were breaking around the Pinnacle as well so we had to keep a bit of a distance from it and somehow make a big u-turn in these long boats while not being overturned and not crashing into the rock and not being caught in the breakers.
And we managed! We paddled back to Old Harry without going through the arch, pushed through the gap – St Lucas’ Leap, probably – and into the shelter of Studland Bay again. I’d survived. Worse terror was to come, though. We paused at the same headland again for everyone to take a few minutes to relax, have a drink, get settled on the calm water again. Which was the point where Roshana said she felt really sick. Too sick to have a drink. My wariness of sea caves pales into absolute insignificance against this. Who on Earth books a night kayaking trip when they know they’re very susceptible to seasickness? Gets worse each year, she said. Really embarrassing, she said. I’d been keeping to the front of the group all along. No real reason, I wasn’t racing and I wasn’t deliberately doing the “I’m more experienced in this than you”. Now I was very deliberately keeping ahead. If it happened, I didn’t want to see it, hear it or even know about it. But it’s hard to keep ahead and make enough noise with the paddles to drown it out when the group is floating together taking a break.
Not that I said anything. I’d already wobbled over getting the spraydeck on and I’d already made it quite clear that although I would survive, I didn’t enjoy the waves on the other side of Old Harry and it wasn’t time to add a “this third terror is the biggest one I have in the world” so I kept my distance and my mouth shut. If Roshana was sick, I never knew about it but I don’t think she was. Indeed, once we set off again she didn’t mention it.
Other than that fear tickling at my brain, the journey back was very pleasant. We paddled and drifted and kept close to the cliffs. I saw small birds swooping down and grabbing insects from just above the water. I have no idea what they were – they were too small and too fast and it was too dark. We’d had the lights on from the navigation until the break – they were absolutely necessary for trying to spot the waves and the cliffs and the Pinnacle and the gap but once we were back in the calm of the bay, we switched them off again and let our eyes adjust. I’ve seen swallows and swifts and martins swooping over water but are they active at night? Was I actually seeing bats?
We paused a little to look at the stars. Bournemouth and Poole were glowing to our right but Purbeck is mostly dark and we had a glorious view of a veritable carpet of stars above our heads. We found the Plough and Kyle explained how to use it to find the North Star and then how to use that to find north. I knew you follow two of the stars in the Plough but I’ve never been certain which and I’ve never known which is actually the North Star. It’s remarkable for its position, right over the North Pole, not for its brightness and so I’d never figured out exactly which it was. From that we figured we were paddling north-west. Looking at the map, the coast actually goes kind of south-east but if you’re pointing your boat away from the cliffs or away from the mini scoop of a bay we were probably in, it’s possible that the boat was pointing north-west.
Then the others spotted a shooting star! I missed it because I was gazing at something else, probably. The stars, the view across the bay, the cliffs, maybe even just marvelling at the fact that I was drifting along in the dark in a boat and I wasn’t scared at all, except at the possibility of Roshana being sick. I did spot the second shooting star though and I was the only one who did, since it was cut off from Kyle’s perspective by the cliff and the others were a little way behind where it would have been cut off from them too. I had a vague idea that the Draconids shower might be that weekend. I saw the Perseids, the best known of the meteor showers, once but I’ve never seen any other and I only know about the Draconids because I have a Google calendar containing all the moons and showers and natural things and Alexa read it out to me last week. It turns out we were a week early but then, the dates of these showers are when they’re at their strongest and this might have been the first few.
We collected all our collection features, dodged the lines of a fisherman off South Beach and returned via the two rocks. It had been a challenge on the way out but on the way back it was an optional bit of fun if we fancied it. I did. And then Middle Beach was right ahead of us. The cafe was closed but it had some lights on inside as commercial buildings often do and that gave us something to aim for. We switched on the headlights again right at the end for landing and disembarking and then we were done.
Well, not quite. We still had to haul the kayaks out of the water, get them tied onto their trolleys, haul them up the hill (Kyle pushed mine, which was a surprise when I discovered that somehow the kayak I was pulling up a steep hill was travelling faster than I was, which isn’t physically possible) and get changed.
It was all just so… wonderful. It was a beautiful night for it, all sunset and stars and clear skies and quite warm for October. The sea was still and we just chilled. Usually you fight the sea as you head back. I pull to the right all the time and I get overheated and over-sweary because I’m forced to paddle with the same arm over and over again just to keep on something like a straight line. But not tonight. As I said, I didn’t paddle at all half the time. We went slowly, enjoying the scenery and the water and the novelty and the stars and it almost had a feeling of meditation about it. I grant you, had the weather been like it was every night for a week before and every night since, it could have been a challenge and I’d have come back tired, damp, frustrated and feeling like “yeah, it was fine”. But since it was so beautiful, I’ve come back feeling like I had an evening in fairyland. Just magical. Even when we set out, I could never have imagined feeling so calm and relaxed in a seventeen foot sea kayak. At some point in the not-too-distant future, I’d like to have a go in one of those flotation tank where you just drift in the dark or under fairylights and I imagine that it’ll feel a little bit like night kayaking did on Friday. Like getting a glimpse of the other side, only with no fear of accidentally going there yourself.
I’m 100% doing it again next year and I’m making enough of a racket that I think you should too so that they’ll run these things more than twice a year. If you’re interested in trying it for yourself, it’s with Fore/Adventure and they’re running a sit-on-top trip on Friday 15th October. Night closed cockpit trips for 2022 aren’t available to book yet but if you hop over to their website, you can take a look at what daytime kayak (and foraging, and SUP, and bushcraft, and coasteering) activities they have on offer at the moment. Have fun and send me pictures!