I’ll tell you about the camp and the overall experience next time but for now, let’s do the watersports activities at my weekend on Exmoor last weekend.
Girlguiding SWE do an annual event there, where you get to try out six watersports plus you get a range of shore activities including climbing, archery and geocaching. It looks fun! I want to go! The trouble is that it’s for Guides and Rangers and I haven’t got my Rangers back together, I wouldn’t know how to transport them to Exmoor except in my car if I did, and I would probably need a second adult. Next year I might look into finding a unit that wants that second adult. So, not being able to go to the actual event, I decided to do it myself. There was nothing stopping me booking a pitch on the campsite and booking in such activities as I wanted to do – a month before this event actually happens, might I add. I didn’t gatecrash it.
Windsurfing
On Friday I had a windsurfing lesson. I’ve looked dubiously at it before and last November I dithered for a couple of days over whether to have a windsurfing lesson or a sailing one before settling on the sailing, which is less horrifying and new.
I went down to the hire hut, all wetsuited up, and was presented with a sail and a boom and a short while was spent learning to put the two together. My sail was a 3.5, which seems to be the square metre-age of it rather than the height. My instructor had a 4.5 and the twelve-year-old had a 2.0. You measure your height to figure out where the boom goes and then you have to rig it to the opposite corner and then attach the up-haul which is a length of tough elastic you use to haul the sail upright when you step aboard. Then we walked the things down to the shore where the instructor discovered the UJs (universal joints: a ball joint that allows the sail to swivel in all directions) had been removed from the boards and so we were nearly an hour into the lesson before we actually got on the water.
I’d been nervous and now it turned out that was for good reason. Put your hands on the centre line. Put your knees on the centre line. Grab the up-haul and use it as support to stand up on the centre line. I have the knees of an eighty-year-old. I can’t stand up without support and a piece of elastic attached to a sail wasn’t providing it. Oscar – that’s not his name but it began with O and I can’t remember what it actually was – had to be a prop for me to get upright and then I had to cling to the mast, keep my body bent and straight in all the right places and push the sail back and forth to get the board to turn.
I knew immediately this wasn’t my sport. This was everything I hated about sailing plus I had to stand up – which I couldn’t do unaided – on a wobbly board at the same time. Sometimes you have to work at something, sometimes you just need an injection of confidence and sometimes it just isn’t for you. I admit, I thought sailing Wasn’t For Me and I feel marginally more comfortable after my latest lesson so maybe a bit more effort would have made a difference with the windsurfing. But on the whole, I’m happy to stick with paddling.
To come back, you drop the sail, collapse on the board, haul the sail onto the back of the board and then lie flat and paddle home. Trouble was, the sail is uncooperative and once I had it on board, I tended to knock it off again turning myself round and getting ready to paddle. After two attempts, we moved onto turning the board – basically, push the sail towards the back and take tiny tiny steps around the UJ until you’re facing the other way. This I accomplished with lots of tiny tiny whimpers but I’d like it noted on the record that I did achieve it. But that was it. I was done. I’d stood up by myself, I’d turned the board, I’d paddled back to shore and I’d decided that I hated windsurfing.
I was positive! I made smiley faces and Oscar and I made noises about “you tried! You stood up! You turned it! You didn’t do badly for only an hour of lesson!” and I stuck around. Oscar removed the sail and I paddled the board out onto the water to watch the others and just enjoy being on the water. I came back to watch the next lesson – no, I’m getting ahead of myself!
Next lesson was holding the boom. Forward hand crosses over to boom, slide back foot back to the red marker, slide front foot back behind UJ, grab boom with back hand, pull it in, slide front hand down to where blue and yellow meet. Yes, I had a go at this and that’s when I decided I’d had enough! I got to the point where I’d had my hands on the boom rather than on the mast and then I settled down on my board to watch the others. I paddled ashore when they did and watched the lessons and tried to be helpful (“It seems like you kind of have to imagine you’re about to do the limbo?”) and I helped pack everything away but I concluded that windsurfing was absolutely not for me.
By the way, there are no photos because I knew I wasn’t going to have any free hands to take any so I didn’t even bother taking my camera down to the water. Look at the pictures below and picture my legs wibbling while I stand briefly on a board clinging to a blue and yellow sail.
Kayaking
On Saturday I booked kayak hire. It’s only a sit-on-top which now feels quite unstable after all my terror over using a closed-cockpit sea kayak. The trouble was the wind. They’d cancelled everything except kayaking because of the wind and even the kayaks had to stay within a certain small boundary.
I’m used to take a kayak for an hour and going on an expedition, either out to the rocks or along the river to the road bridge. I’m not used to bimbling around within a hundred or so metres of shore – and frankly, I’ve kayaked in far higher winds and waves on the open sea. I enjoyed practice turning around a buoy – you can see exactly where that buoy was on my Strava tracker – and I took a few photos but bimbling around a lake not doing anything in particular is boring. The only upside really was that Oscar was in charge of hire today and I was able to be cheerful and explain that “I can do kayaking! I’m not going to give up on this one, I’m not scared of it and I can do it unaided!”.
Stand-up Paddleboard
On Sunday I had a SUP lesson. I’ve done it before – that is, I’ve been given a board and a paddle and sent off on my own but I thought it might be educational to have a lesson. I established before we began with my instructor that I’d done some paddle training and knew some strokes and he tried to explain something he called “the seaman’s stroke”. A quick Google is not finding this but it’s finding the j-stroke, which is something I learned in my canoeing lesson and have never mastered. In canoeing, you do a forward stroke and turn the paddle at the end. This counteracts the turning effect of always paddling on the same side. In SUP, because there’s a giant fin at the back, it turns around the back so you do the j-part of it at the beginning and then continue your straight forward stroke. I couldn’t quite comprehend the physics of this but once we were on the water, heading for the yellow buoy, I noticed he was doing it and so I copied. And it worked! I paddled only on the right side of my board but I used this stroke and it went in a straight line instead of in circles!
Now, the SUP went well. I’ve done plenty of paddling and paddle training before and it’s not a massive change to do it on an inflatable board instead of an unwieldy canoe. My classmates were sixteen, fourteen, fourteen and an unspecified but younger age and they were accustomed to surfing. Simple things like turning were a complete mystery to them. I don’t know how I turn, really. I just want to and the board does. It’s become pretty automatic. So I shot ahead.
The thing is, those knees. Knees vs teenagers. I was the only one of the group who couldn’t paddleboard standing up. I did get up once but the board wobbled and my legs wobbled and I realised I could hate that as much as I hated windsurfing so I plopped back down. I can paddle ok on my knees and I can still turn better than them – and I never fell off, either.
We played some games. We played Bulldog, which didn’t go brilliantly because none of us really understood the rules and no one could catch the instructor. We played World Domination – you each pick a country then you tag another paddler and play rock-paper-scissors to decide whether they join your country or you join theirs. The aim is to unite everyone under one country. One complication: if the person who was originally that country gets caught by someone else, everyone reverts back to their original country so you really have to keep an eye on the entire group. As Iceland (obviously!) I got five out of the six participants before the game finally went to the instructor’s Wakanda. Finally, we lined up and formed a kind of raft and then the instructor” exploded our boards one by one, forcing us to climb aboard someone else’s until all five of us were clinging to my board which floated two inches below the water. I had my GoPro with me and I’d just reached for it to grab a photo of us when someone made a slight move and the board tipped everyone off. Everyone? No. The three in the middle. At the stern, I managed to cling on and keep it upright and at the bow, whoever was there stayed on as well. Oh, and we had a half-hearted go at paddleboard yoga, which mostly meant the instructor showing off that he could do a headstand on the board.
I’d have enjoyed paddling off by myself but actually, it was more fun going as a group plus I learned a little more fine control of my board and played some games. If (and it’s still an if) I do my paddle instructor course next summer, I’ll technically be qualified to teach paddleboard as well as kayak and it’s handy to have some games in store. Which reminds me, I’m teaching archery with my Brownies on Monday and maybe it’s time to look up some games other than Rescue the Princess, which is my invariable fall-back.
If the weather had been nicer on Saturday, I might have hired a canoe – might have had to convince them that I really can handle a three-person boat by myself, yes, even in these winds. If I’d known what the weather was going to be like on Thursday or Friday, I might have hired something then as well. But you’ll hear all about the weather in my next post because that’s the one where I’m going to talk about the camping and everything else I did last weekend. See you next time!
