I was very excited about this – I was going for a sauna on a beach! There are now hundreds of small semi-rustic saunas on beaches and in woodlands around the country but Studland Sauna Hut was the first one I ever noticed. Back then, you either had to book it for a largeish group for an hour or you had to turn up during one of its communal public open hours but now there are two saunas, the Large Sauna Hut (seats 10) and the Little Sauna Hut (seats 6), and you can book them for either an hour or just 30 minutes. I may have mentioned in previous spa-adjacent posts that I’m not a big fan of sauna’s intense heat but for half an hour on the beach with the sea right there, maybe I could do it.
It’s owned and run by Studland Watersports, who hire out watersports equipment and deckchairs on Studland’s Knoll Beach. If I’m hiring a kayak and going out for a solo adventure, it’ll be from them. I prefer their neighbours on Middle Beach for closed sea kayaks and organised adventures but they want photo ID and for you to stay in sight plus their hire hours seem kind of irregular so I go straight to Studland Watersports nowadays. And they have their saunas on the beach! Fore/Adventure have a seaweed spa which I’m drawn to and kind of revolted by at the same time, so they’re not the only ones doing the seaside wellness thing but this one definitely appeals more, and probably reaches a bigger audience. Knoll Beach is the big tourist beach with the National Trust cafe and shop. Middle Beach is much smaller and being eaten up by coastal erosion. Anyway – point is, I knew this sauna was there, I wanted to visit it and so I booked a 30-minute session.
I don’t generally feel that I have to earn my decadence but I kind of felt like I wanted to earn it this time, so I was going to go to the beach a couple of hours early and go out on a kayak. In hindsight, I should have booked an hour and a half, not an hour. I made it to Old Harry Rocks, paddling across a wind that was stronger than I realised at the time. I landed on the rocks, which is always a novelty, and took five minutes to take some selfies and for some strangers on a SUP to take some posed full-body photos of me which don’t have my arm blocking a third of the picture. Then I headed back. I normally have loads of time after this expedition, which I’ve done several times before, but this time, I was only just along the cliffs at the south end of the bay when I realised I had only 15 minutes to get all the way back to Knoll Beach. That’s what makes me think I normally book an hour and a half because no way am I going to have time to waste, like I normally do, after paddling to Old Harry.
And now I was going into the wind! Luckily I enjoy that and I’m reasonably strong in the arms so I grit my teeth and set my strength against the weather but I’m not normally doing it against the clock. I ploughed straight across the bay instead of “handrailing” along the cliffs and beaches like I usually do and I can see why I normally do it that way. That’s where it’s most sheltered! But I made it! I made it six minutes late, which they didn’t care about, and I really felt like I’d earned my sauna. My arms and shoulders must surely be sore after such a feat of endurance and they’d enjoy being soothed in a sauna.
I had time to get out of the wetsuit, get into a beach dress and have a snack from the cafe – well, a can of Tango and a packet of Pom Bears, and then it was time to go over to the sauna. It turns out you don’t need 20 minutes of prep, they just tick your name off the list and tell you to come back when it’s actually your time so I sat and watched schoolkids messing around on the pedalos and staff having to go out in kayaks to fetch them back, and then it was time to sauna.
Now, I’ve done this before. I went to Finland and tried out a real – if touristy – Finnish sauna! But this was somehow nothing like that. It was like being in a garden shed with a log burner in it, with too many logs and not enough open windows. What was missing? Was it not damp enough? You wash the sand off your feet and go in clean after it’s been cleaned for your session so it was pristine in there. Pristine and dry. Was it too light? It has a big glass door and a window so you can see straight out onto the beach and into the sun. Was it the lack of other people? No, I don’t think so – how chatty do you think Finns are in saunas that it feels weird to be quiet? And yet something was missing. I poured water onto the stove in case it was a big cloud of searing steam but it was plenty hot enough without that and the steam didn’t really add much. Yeah, it felt like… sitting in your garden shed with an unnecessary wood burner.
You think I didn’t enjoy it. Actually, I was quite disappointed when it came to an end. I admit, I’d had four or five dips in the sea because I can’t sit in a room that hot for half an hour straight and I enjoyed the novelty of scampering down yellow-white sand to the sea to splash water on my legs. But I’d enjoyed the sauna for five-minute stretches at a time and when my time was up, I found I wanted a few more of them. I guess one of the problems with the Finnish saunas was that the only real option for cooling down was a full-body immersion in the Baltic. No standing ankle-deep and splashing and the water is so much warmer in Dorset than in Helsinki. And perhaps I felt like I had to spend more time in the sauna in Finland and less time doing the hot-cold-hot-cold, which is really the point of it. I think next time I go to Helsinki, I’m absolutely going to the little cabin-sauna on that beach in the woods where I’ll be able to stand in the shallows like I did here.
That wasn’t even my day over. I was off to Bournemouth for a comedy show that evening and the easiest way to get from Studland to Bournemouth is via the chain ferry. I don’t often have an excuse for the chain ferry and anyway, we all know that it’s out of service more often than it’s working. But what a day! A hard satisfying paddle into the wind that really stretched my strength, a sauna on the beach that I felt like I’d earned and a trip on the ferry. I highly recommend the sauna but I think I even more highly recommend getting out on the water first so that you’re ready for the sauna.
Oh, and Studland Water Sports have cloth badges, both with their general logo on and with the Studland Sauna Hut logo on! Even better!