Last summer, I set off to Purbeck intent on a weekend of “adventure”, which I spent at Norden Farm Campsite, exploring Corfe village in the pouring rain, doing my first sea swim and getting to jump into the cab of a heritage steam locomotive. This year I found myself back there for the “My Outdoors” section of my Silver Maverick Award. The aim was to spend three days and night outdoors and do at least three outdoors activities which challenged me.
I arrived early afternoon on Friday to pitch my tent. A four-man tent pitched single-handedly is in itself a bit of a challenging activity, especially when there’s enough breeze to turn the thing into a sail. I pinned it down, corrected, re-pinned, re-corrected and was about ready to collapse from heat exhaustion by the time my little green temporary home was up. Not that I planned to sleep in it. Not tonight. Tonight I had a triple adventure on the water.
I was very hot so I started the adventure a few hours earlier than planned by driving down to Studland for a sea swim to cool off. I’ve only been sea swimming since last summer and I’m very much a fair-weather swimmer but that cool water felt amazing as I waded in. Of course, I hadn’t planned to sea swim, so I didn’t have my tow float but I did have three drybags in my kayaking bag and so I loaded my valuables into those, reasoning that if they weren’t tough enough to be physically dragged through the water, surely a drybag in a drybag in a drybag was enough to protect my keys and wallet. A year ago I’d have wanted my wetsuit and to be honest, I probably wouldn’t have said no to it if I hadn’t known that in three hours I’d want it again for kayaking and would be more comfortable putting it on dry. Studland is a magnificent place for swimming – blue sky, white cliffs, really shallow sea (you could walk most of the way out to Old Harry and still not go much above your waist) and considering it’s the open Channel, it’s incredibly sheltered.
I kept an eye on the time – with adventure looming, I didn’t want to be late and I did want to go up to the Bankes Arms for some pre-adventure fuel. This took the form of a magnificent cheese baguette, still warm, and the usual pile of salad and chutney, followed by a slab of chocolate fudge cake and ice cream. By the time I was hauling myself to my feet and walking back to Middle Beach, I was starting to regret that. It’s a lot of food to shovel in. But it takes time to gather and kit out a group and by the time we were pushing our kayaks out to sea, I was feeling merely well-fuelled and satisfied. But that’s skipping ahead.
We met at Fore/Adventure‘s clifftop HQ in the corner of the car park where our guide Elliott dressed us all in wetsuits, spraydecks, cagoules and buoyancy aids. There were four of us. Jo and Rachel were cousins from the Midlands. One of them has been living down here for quite a while but I could never quite keep track of which was which. Angus had also moved down a few years ago. We’d all done a little kayaking before and I could admit, slightly awkwardly, that I’m a kayak instructor, albeit of the unqualified kind who teaches ten-year-olds little more than how to sit in a boat and move it forwards in knee-deep water. We were bivvying in the woods so we carried our overnight stuff down to the beach where Elliott locked it in the beach hut and we were each given a long green kayak.
The sea was smooth. It was also low tide so we had to haul them quite a distance across the beach before we found water deep enough to float our boats. Then we made our way south, following the coastline down to the corner of South Beach and along to Old Harry Rocks, the famous white chalk seascape you’ll see in just about every geography textbook. Old Harry contains every single step of coastal erosion – cracks, caves, stumps and stacks. Often we’d paddle through it, between the headland and the stacks but today the tide was too low. Elliott peered around the end and judged it safe enough for a group of relative beginners. I’ve never done that before. I’ve never seen the low, broken stack that’s called Old Harry’s Wife and I’ve certainly never faced the tidal race that makes that corner somewhere beginners don’t go. Tonight it was fine, except some big bouncy waves caused by the Channel Islands catamaran coming in. A year ago, I’d have panicked but now I sat quite happily, nose pointed towards them, bobbing gently over them. They felt like rolling mountains at the time but I filmed some of it and I’m disappointed at how small and tame they look because they didn’t feel it. I felt intrepid, bouncing over those waves.
Now we could take a minute to enjoy being on the other side, to wait for the waves to pass, to celebrate our achievement and to turn our seventeen-foot boats to go back through Old Harry. The tide was coming back in and we could pass through a gap and land on the beach on the other side so we could stretch our legs at the foot of the famous feature. As usual, it doesn’t look big enough or wide enough but you don’t need to paddle, at least. The current carries you through and you can concentrate on not hitting the sides or tipping over. I landed, scrambled out and used my paddle as a crutch to limp over to the foot of the cliff where we congregated, having pins and needles in my feet from sitting in the kayak. The sun was setting and turning Studland Bay some gorgeous shades of pink and orange and here we were, on Old Harry Rocks, watching it.
The tide, meanwhile, was rushing in. Twice Elliott had to pull the kayaks further up and by the time we got back into them, there was very little need to drag them over what remained of the rocks to get back into the open water of Studland Bay. Then it was an easy paddle back to Middle Beach as the sky darkened and turned navy and purple.
That was part one. Part two was to chain up the kayaks, get out our overnight stuff and trudge along the beach to the secret location in the woods where we were going to bivvy. We draped damp wetsuits over tree branches, Angus found a safe spot to light a small campfire and Elliott distributed bivvy bags. I’ve never slept in one before and never will again. It was like a coffin. I never imagined it could feel so small and so tight. I could barely move. I certainly couldn’t turn over. An hour after going to bed, I was already looking at my watch and counting down the hours until I could get out of it.
Shortly before the alarms went off at 4am, I heard a rustling in the trees. I live in the UK and the rational part of my brain knows it’s either a fox or a badger but in the dark, when you can make out bushes but nothing more, the irrational part of your brain tells you “I’m going to die”. More rustling. More rustling. And then a shape shot out of the bushes and ran straight at Angus, who happened to be awake and shone his torch at the intruder, which stared back at him for a moment and then vanished into the bushes. It was just a badger. Of course it was just a badger, but it turns out badgers are actually pretty enormous and apparently have no fear about running up to sleeping humans.
Elliott’s alarm went off and we all crawled out of our canvas coffins. Waking up at 4am is bad enough but we had to put the damp wetsuits back on, put the wet water shoes back on, pack up our stuff and trudge back to the beach. That said, launching a paddleboard at quarter to five in the morning and catching a perfect crimson sunrise isn’t a bad start to the day. If I’d thought the water was still last night, now it was like a mirror and it reflected the red sun, the orange sky and the black silhouetted figures of paddleboarders absolutely perfectly. We were supposed to be heading for South Beach for breakfast but we took it slowly, mostly just sitting on the board staring out at the view. 4am is painful but it’s less painful than a bivvy bag and once you’re half-awake, it’s a delight to be out on the water before the grockles and the jetskis arrive.
When the sun was high enough that it didn’t require our supervision we landed on the beach where Elliott produced a gas stove, a frying pan and a packet of bacon and we sprawled in the sand to cook breakfast, watched from afar by hungry seabirds and from close-up by billions of tiny flying bugs. Studland in the summer is overrun by tourists and apart from getting to see the sunset and sunrise, it was a novelty in itself to have the beach to ourselves.
There was time for one last adventure on the way back. Elliott tried – and failed – to teach me to stand up on the paddleboard (I have old-lady knees and no strength to stand up without something to hold onto with my arms) and the others had a lesson in how spin the board around by putting their weight on the back of it and lifting its nose. This resulted in three people falling in and the sinking of the frying pan (which got rescued before the human rider!). Finally, we went back to shore, retrieved our overnight stuff again and returned to HQ to get dressed ready to reappear as normal humans in time for breakfast, just as it started to rain. That is, we attempted to reappear as normal humans. I daresay we looked damp and tired, I know my hair would have looked pretty frazzled by then, we hadn’t brushed our teeth for 24 hours and we would have been sandy around the feet. But I arrived back at the campsite having had an adventure while everyone else was just crawling out of their tents. Time for bed.
About this time last year, maybe a little earlier, I went off to Purbeck for what should have been an “overnight adventure” for my Rebel Explorer badge (which I still haven’t finished). Well, this year I’m going back to the same campsite for another Rebel badge. This one is my Silver Maverick Award. I have a post lined up about the Maverick Awards but I need to finish my Bronze Elemental Challenge before I can publish it. In short, the Mavericks are to DofE as the Rebel badges are to Brownie badges – they offer a similar longer-term challenge and journey of self-development but specifically for adults. I finished my Bronze Maverick back in March, got awarded my badges in April, ordered my Silver book and this, finally, is the first thing I’m doing for it.
Like last time, I stayed on Norden Farm Campsite. The Isle of Purbeck is the ideal place for a weekend of adventures and my requirements for the My Outdoors section of the award were three nights in the outdoors and three outdoor activities which challenged me. Where better to find three challenging outdoor activities?
Today I’m going to talk about Friday night and Saturday morning. Part two is coming on Monday, with everything I did on Saturday and Sunday but I think there’s enough to justify splitting it into two posts and thematically it works quite nicely, for Friday and Saturday were a big paddle adventure. In short, we started Friday evening with a night paddle, like I did in 2021, then we bivvied under the stars, got up in the morning for a sunrise SUP and were released before 8am. That’s quite a lot to cram into twelve hours!
Friday was very hot and by the time I’d got my four-man tent up in a breeze, I was very sweaty. Knowing I’d be on the sea in a few hours, I began to think a sea swim would be a really good, cooling idea – and it was. Another good (if horrendously expensive) idea was to go to the pub for a big cheese baguette and a slice of chocolate fudge cake with ice cream. I admit, by the time I was walking back round to the other car park for the adventure, I was wondering if I’d made a mistake in stuffing myself but by the time we were ready to get out on the water, I was feeling less like I was going to explode and more like I was well fuelled.
There were five of us – instructor Elliott of Learning to Paddle a Sea Kayak fame, me, Angus (Northern Irish accent; mentioned living locally, working in Dudley and studying in Glasgow) and cousins Jo & Rachel from the Midlands. It was a bit logistically awkward – we had to take all our overnight stuff with us but also our dry clothes and whatnot as we’d be walking down to the beach hut and not coming back to HQ until it was time to go home the next morning. We changed into wetsuits & all the other bits and pieces up top and then loaded ourselves with everything we’d need for the next twelve hours – sleeping bags, mats, the all-important snack bag – and set off down the (closed) path. Sure enough, we locked everything in the beach hut and then pulled the kayaks out. Normally you have to carry them down but today they were living on the shoreline. It was supposed to be a night kayak but in early July, it just wasn’t going to get dark. We’d have a bit of a sunset kayak instead.
The tide was very low which made conditions pretty easy. It was still broad daylight at this point but the sun was turning the white cliffs golden and by the time Elliott had made the decision to paddle around Old Harry (going through not an option with the water this low), the sun was beginning to sink. We bounced around the end of the headland, in waves that felt a lot more dramatic than they look on camera; waves that would have had me panicking less than two years ago. Now I trust my skills and my training and I trust my confidence. I bobbed happily up and down, trying when I could to keep the nose of my kayak pointing at those waves. When everyone was through and we’d waited out the worst of the waves, which we were blaming on the catamaran, Elliott directed us through the gap in Old Harry and back to the more sheltered water on the other side – or rather, into the pool that ran onto a low-tide beach, which was why we hadn’t been able to paddle through. We landed, hopped out of the boats and enjoyed the sunset and a couple of group photos from the water.