It’s summer! The boats are back! I went canoeing!
Ok, it’s not summer. The weather sometimes remembers it’s trying to trick us into believing it’s spring but it’s not summer. But the boat hire has reopened for the summer season and to be honest, if it had been a full-on named storm, I’d probably have still gone for my first boat trip of the year. As it happened, it was a beautiful day, all blue sky and sunshine and I didn’t get up as early on Sunday as I might have liked but I was still there for 10.30.
It turned out it was actually windier than I’d realised. The nice man who runs the place recognised me from my frequent visits last season and he mentioned something about “but I know you’ve been out before” which makes me wonder if he’d hand a three-man canoe to a single person in that kind of wind if he didn’t know they’d been out before. I know the place where I’m spending a watersport camping weekend in the summer is extremely averse to hiring out canoes to single people because it takes a bit more handling.
Not only does he know I’ve been out before in a canoe on my own, on several occasions, he also knows that he’s had me booked in for a lesson. We briefly covered the j-stroke on my Explore course but I never mastered it and I mentioned it in frustration as the nice man was tying up my boat after a visit last September, to which he responded “Did you know we do lessons? Would you like to book in a lesson?”
Oh yes please!
That was last September or October and I never did a post on it because, mostly, I just didn’t have the pictures. Hard to take photos during an actual one-to-one lesson. I’m ok with kayaking because you get a double-ended paddle. With canoeing, you get a single-ended paddle. Fine. I can propel my boat down the river and back using a single-ended paddle but it’s messy and splashy and I already had an idea that it wasn’t the right way to do it. Then in July I was introduced to this j-stroke and so next time I took a canoe out, I tried it. I watched videos on YouTube and tried again the next time. I just couldn’t do it and I mentioned it and so we had the lesson. Not with the nice man, with one of his instructors. It’s actually really good value: the cost of an hour long lesson is the same as the cost of hiring a canoe for an hour. As far as I was concerned, that’s a free lesson. And you’re tying up a second boat and an instructor for that hour, so I’m making money.
The j-stroke is what it sounds like. It’s a forward paddle stroke that ends with a sharp curve, making it the shape of a j. The idea is that curve negates the turning effect of always paddling on the same side, enabling you to go in a straight line without having to flip the paddle from one side to the other every other stroke. I never quite mastered it. I sort of got the hang of “forward stroke followed by a stern rudder that acts as a brake” and that kept me in a straight line but it really felt like an endless round of “go-stop-go-stop” which doesn’t feel like paddling in a smooth straight line. At least I learned really and properly how to use and appreciate my stern rudder.
So, back to Sunday. He knows I’m reasonably experienced, at least in this bit of river, and he knows I’ve had a lesson and I also mentioned that I did a technical skills workshop in a pool a couple of weeks ago, so he knows I’m not totally helpless if I capsize. Besides, the river mostly isn’t that deep and it’s no wider than maybe ten metres. Not even that most of the time. Off I went!
It was pleasant at first. Hot and sunny enough to be warm but with enough breeze to not overheat. I considered taking my jumper off a couple of times but I didn’t feel a desperate need to and when it proved too logistically awkward to even try, I wasn’t bothered. You try getting off a buoyancy aid and then a jumper and then the BA back on without losing control of a canoe on a windy day!
I decided to have two hours today instead of one. One is just long enough to get to the road bridge, which is the marker for the furthest you can go. I wanted to take it easy. Just bob along on the river, make my way to the bridge, lazily make my way back. Two hours. Life didn’t turn out like that. Between the wind and the current, I found myself paddling fairly frantically for all of the first hour and a half and most of the last half-hour. If you don’t, you either get spun around or you get thrown into the reeds. And I use the word “thrown” with absolute accuracy. I lost count of the number of times I paddled for my life along the left-hand side, shouting “No! No! Sweep! Sweeeep! Rudder! No!” before finding myself crashing into the reeds on the right-hand side. How did I even get across the river like that? How do I get out of the reeds?
This is where the shallow river comes into play. At least at the sides, in the reeds, you can shove your short single-bladed paddle into the river bed and use it as a punt to push off. Of course, sometimes the reeds are too dense and in that event, you have to shout and swear. Oh, much unparliamentary language got used.
Perhaps the most alarming moment was at the road bridge. I foolishly let myself drift underneath, to mark that I’d definitely reached it. Got swept out to the other side, didn’t I? And then I couldn’t get back. It’s very low, low enough that I can’t easily switch sides with my paddle and in a current that strong, you can forget any hope of j-stroking your way out. If the current catches one end of the boat, the other is likely to hit the concrete wall at the side. I made it out, got my prow into sunlight and then it caught me and I sailed sideways back out to the wrong side of the bridge again. This is what he’s concerned about with inexperienced paddlers, isn’t it? Was I going to spend the next hour and a half fighting the current until I was too exhausted to go on and got washed down the weir that’s supposedly just a bit further on?
I tried using my hands. Drop the paddle into the boat, grab the concrete above my head and propel myself out. But all you’ve really got to hold onto is the friction of your palms against concrete and a current turning a boat sideways and pushing along all sixteen feet of it is not something my calms can defeat.
I felt like I was fighting that current for at least half an hour but I set up my GoPro to film my journey just before I tried to paddle under and I caught the whole thing, including the language. In less than two minutes and thirty seconds, I was on my way back up the river again. I was fighting the current under the bridge for about two minutes and that’s all.
I’m helped by one thing my instructor mentioned. Part of the reason I’m so bad at the j-stroke is that my forward stroke is “too powerful”. I like being too powerful. Of course, in this context it means “you’re doing it wrong” and I accept that. But when the current and the wind are against you, it’s not a bad thing to paddle too powerfully, to just haul against nature and pop out the other side. Again, of course, in this context, “pop out the other side” usually meant “crash into a different set of reeds to the ones you thought you were about to crash into” but hey.
There’s a moment somewhere that I caught on camera where I yell “this isn’t paddling! This is tacking!” as I zig-zag up the river, paddling one side and the other, fighting as the current and wind caught my port side and then my starboard side but even if the route you take is a bit unconventional, you’ve still survived some corners that are a bit difficult for your level of expertise. Mine is definitely “pleasant Sunday morning messing around on the river paddler”. I’m no pro canoeist but I enjoy it. And despite the fact that on Tuesday I could still feel twinges in my back from that too-powerful paddling against nature, and the amount of swearing and the number of times I got slammed into the reeds, I did enjoy it.
There was no lazy pleasant messing around on the river on Sunday, let me tell you. I tested my mettle against the weather and against a pair of idiots in a motor boat. They hire them out too. They’re really just overgrown plastic eggboxes which seat about five people with an outboard motor on the back. Ideal if you enjoy messing around on the river on a pleasant Sunday morning but also like the whine of a motor and the smell of two-stroke. Anyway, these two idiots had marginally less control over their motorised boat than I did over my canoe. I had to dodge them at one corner. My weedy muscles using one paddle to defeat the current and the wind vs a 2.3hp motor and I was the one winning. I watched people come down in canoes in pairs and in kayaks with their precious double-bladed paddles and I admit, I did chuckle at one man in a rowing boat who was struggling. Not as I badly as when I last took a rowing boat out – oh god, you would not believe how bad I am at rowing! – but he was definitely no Swallow or Amazon.
I’d had a hankering for ice cream for a couple of days so once I’d returned my canoe to its place, I went across the road for an ice cream and sat by the riverbank on the other side of the town bridge. For all it was beautiful and sunny and actually really hot when the wind dropped, it was freezing when the wind blew. A largish real motorboat had been on the slipway when I returned so rather than landing there and stepping ashore, I had to land next to the other canoes and step into the water. That’s fine, I wear my mountain sandals for a reason and it was shallow enough that although I got my feet wet, I didn’t get my trousers wet. But when you’re sitting in a strong breeze and you’re already freezing, wet feet get really cold. I’d planned to do a bit of walking but I was too cold. My feet were numb. I got back to the car which had been sitting in the sun but being a car, was unaffected by the cold wind. It was like an oven inside. It’s not often that you return half-frozen to a really hot car so it was a very weird sensation to get inside and make an obscene noise that’s half moan and half howl and you don’t know whether it’s pain from the heat or pleasure from being out of the cold. Anyway, I put the heating on all the way home.
And now it’s Thursday (well, as I write this, it’s Tuesday) and I’ve got a sea kayaking lesson booked for this Sunday, so my summer on the water is getting off to a very early start.