I Am A Polar Bear

Did you know you can kayak in London? Central London, that really busy bit with the thousands of Clippers and tourist boats and all the other chaos? Whether I could take my own kayak and do it myself, I don’t know, but there’s certainly a company that offers the experience with an expert guide and that’s probably the best way to do it. They’re called the London Kayak Company and I did their Greenwich to Battersea trip. They also run it in the opposite direction, do night trips and can take you out to the Thames Barrier.

We met at 11am at a small commercial unit underneath a residential tower on the banks of the Thames a little way north of central Greenwich and a little bit further south of the o2 – it’s probably only a 10-15 minute walk from the Cutty Sark but I set off very early and spent a lot of time sitting on benches in the very early March sunshine looking out across the water and wondering what it was going to be like to paddle it. In particular, I watched the Clippers which move at a relatively enormous speed and leave a powerful wash behind. I suppose as someone who primarily kayaks on the sea, I’m probably used to those kind of waves but I’m not familiar with rivers, with the hydrodynamics of that narrow waterway and in particular with the amount of traffic.

I’d dithered for a couple of weeks over what to wear. When I kayak, I wear a long-john wetsuit with a rash vest underneath but I didn’t want to carry my kayaking stuff to London for the weekend, especially when logistics happened that I needed to take it into the theatre with me on Saturday – let’s casually drop in that I went to see the Jamie Lloyd Much Ado About Nothing with Hayley Atwell and Tom Hiddleston – but ultimately, I don’t really have any clothes that I’m willing to get wet and dirty. So I folded the wetsuit nicely and put it in a drybag and pushed it into the bottom of my bag. Our guide, Harry, provided buoyancy aids and cagoules and for the people in the back of the boats, if they hadn’t brought their own with them, a pair of neoprene socks. Yes, I don’t really have a pair of suitable old trainers that can get wet because I always wear my neoprene socks, so that’s what I took.

We were to be in double kayaks, which is something I’m not used to. It’s part of the conditions for doing this paddle, given the state of the Thames in central London because they’re very big, very wide and very stable. I trust myself and my skills enough that I’d have been perfectly happy in a single but part of the point of this trip is that it’s accessible for absolute beginners and absolute beginners need to be in the safest craft possible. Second, these kayaks are steered by a rudder which is controlled by the rear paddler using their toes, hence taking off the old trainers and putting on the neoprene socks. Yes, I was the rear paddler. The practical matter is that double kayaks go better if the bigger paddler is the one at the back and I’m bigger than my partner on this occasion. I’ll say here and now that I never got used to that rudder. It never felt natural to steer with my toes instead of with my paddle, no matter how much effort Harry put in to persuade me how much better it was. I’d have felt far more comfortable using my entire upper body to fight the river than the tips of my big toes and yes, occasionally I did.

There were five of us in all – Harry in his single kayak, a couple in their double kayak and I was paired with Tay, who I think wasn’t a tourist like the others but was known to Harry and presumably drafted in to be my partner. She sat in the front and I soon learned that communicating was going to be difficult because between the splashing and the breeze and the movement, we could barely hear each other. Harry advised the other pair to not try keeping time by counting or doing anything complicated but for the rear paddler to just copy the front paddler. That was fine as long as I concentrated on it but the moment my mind wandered elsewhere – in particular when I was thinking about steering with my toes – I lost time and we clashed paddles quite a few times. That’s not entirely my fault but it’s definitely not Tay’s. I have to think about the steering sometimes because with this rudder, you press on the side that you want to go, whereas when you’re steering with a paddle, you paddle on the opposite side to the way you want to go, so it took a little thinking to remember that I was doing it the other way today.

We paddled along the south side of the river at first, where it was still fairly quiet, between Greenwich and Wapping, which gave us time to get used to the kayaks and to the tandem paddling. This was actually getting on towards our halfway point. We were paddling eleven miles with the help of the tide and Tower Bridge, not much further ahead, marked the halfway point in time, if not in distance. We wouldn’t be able to do this without the help of the tide – it’s far too far for beginners and even someone with experience would take hours to cover that kind of distance. But the tide did a lot of the heavy lifting.

It was quite something to paddle under Tower Bridge, although the delight of it was delayed a bit by a snack & drink stop tied up by HMS President. You see all these landmarks and it’s one thing to walk by them or take the bus by them or see them from the Clippers but it’s something else altogether to paddle underneath them by your own power. Harry had been very discouraging about cameras and phones but he had a pair of smart glasses and he took photos of us all the way hands-free by looking at us and asking the glasses to take a photo because if you don’t have pictures, it didn’t happen. The other pair were less receptive to his suggestion and frustrated Harry by producing their phones at any opportunity. When we tied up for our snacks, we’d barely come to a stop alongside the other boat before the rear paddler was on a video call. I know this is a very exciting thing to do and therefore you want to show it off to people but rather than show them live, I prefer to wait and then write a long rambling blog about it! It also means, since I’m depending on Harry’s photos, that I’m less distracted and therefore likely to capsize and it particularly means I’m less likely to do something stupid that results in an unscheduled swim by trying to catch the phone if it slips. My own camera was my GoPro on a floaty handle rather than my phone so at least it wouldn’t sink but it could very easily float away, so I’d listened to Harry and put it away before we even set off.

So as we paddled past major landmarks, Harry yelled out to us to turn and look at him so he could take photos of us with them. The trouble was, Tay and I were flying on ahead. We didn’t mean to but I was trying to match Tay’s strokes and her pace was faster than the other pair. I suspect our paddling was stronger, so even if we slowed the pace, we’d probably have still kept ahead.

Shall I list the landmarks? East to west, we circled the Isle of Dogs and so saw the likes to One Canada Square from many different angles, past Tower Bridge and the Tower of London, HMS Belfast, the Shard, London Bridge, Shakespeare’s Globe, St Paul’s, Millennium Bridge, National Theatre, the London Eye, the Houses of Parliament, Tate Britain, MI6, Battersea Power Station, Royal Hospital Chelsea and finished a little way past Battersea Bridge at St Mary’s Church.

I naively expected this company to have some kind of headquarters at both end, with some changing rooms at least, if not showers. But no – an industrial unit with a toilet/storeroom at Greenwich and a slipway at Battersea. That’s fine – I can change out of a wetsuit on the side of a road in London but there was no practical way to get out of the swimsuit that I had on underneath, so I went home on the train like that. Luckily, I’d stayed pretty dry – because the two steerers had neoprene socks on and couldn’t walk comfortably on the stony beach at Greenwich, Harry had pushed us into the boat from the land without even getting our feet wet, no one capsized (this was by design!) and if we’d landed correctly on the slipway at Battersea rather than the beach, I shouldn’t have got my feet wet at that end either. But I did. That’s fine, I can dry my feet and the rest of me was dry.

It was just a really fun thing to do and something I never thought would be possible – you don’t get to kayak under Tower Bridge! You don’t get to paddle a kayak through central London, past all the tourist boats and all the sights. But if you find the right company, you do! And so I did! It’s a watersports adventure, it’s a London adventure and it’s something I bet none of you have ever done!