“Can I do a kayak trip around Copenhagen?” I wondered as I was planning my birthday week in Denmark. Yes, of course you can. And the first company that comes up is GreenKayak, an enviromental NGO that gives you a kayak for free on condition that you collect rubbish as you go and give them a shout-out on social media. Free kayak?? Just for a little environmental volunteering and making a difference, however small, to the city you’re visiting? Sign me up!
GreenKayak, which was founded in Copenhagen in 2017, now has 38 locations across 19 cities in 5 countries – Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Germany. I don’t know how up to date their website is but they claim that 116,342 volunteers have been out and collected 179 tons of rubbish from the waterways of those cities and their Instagram says that 4,516 paddlers collected 6.8 tons of rubbish in July 2026. This looks like a great idea, right? You download the app and book your spot and on the day – I discovered later – you sign in to your session to confirm you’ve picked up the kayak, clock out and weigh your rubbish to add to their statistics.
There were a couple of things that concerned me. GreenKayak mostly just have kayaks tied up along the water, at restaurants or riverside cafes or even, at a few locations, it’s entirely self-service. Would there be anywhere to leave my stuff? No, it turned out. Not at my location, which is Green Island, a cafe/restaurant on decking sticking out into the main river five minutes from my apartment (small plasticky hotel room with a fridge and microwave). So I need to walk there and back in the clothes I was wearing on the water. My initial plan had been a rash vest and my little swimming shorts over a swimsuit but it’s just far enough that there’s no way I’m walking through Copenhagen dressed like that. Well, actually, I wouldn’t walk through the hotel lobby dressed like that. So adventure trousers instead of the shorts and zip off the legs and the rash vest maybe looks a bit odd but nowhere near as bad as tiny skintight swimming shorts. Leave absolutely everything behind that can be left behind. I needed my GoPro, my hotel keycard, I took my debit card just in case and I took my driving licence in case the keycard stopped working after being shoved in a drybag with my phone and I needed to prove who I was to get the hotel to re-run it. In hindsight, I don’t think I needed my phone, I think I’m just too attached to it. That lot went in a tiny drybag which I hoped I could clip onto something.
So that’s the “stuff” question. Then there’s the “where can I go?” question. Where am I allowed to go and where is safe to go? I’m a pro – or at least, I’m more experienced than the average tourist and I help run a kid’s club and that means I see and worry about these things more than many people might. Dunning-Kruger effect, right?
On Wednesday morning, thus attired, carrying the drybag, white and sticky from suncream, I walked across the busy six-lane road between the hotel and the river and walked along the riverfront to Green Island and discovered that the so-called GreenKayak volunteers aren’t strictly GreenKayak volunteers. They’re people – mostly young people barely out of their teens – who work for various seasonal bars sticking out onto the water who know that there’s a kayak moored around the back. The girl who showed me to the boat was shocked to find the paddles, which had been stood leaning against the back of the restaurant, had fallen over and slipped most of the way off the deck and into the water and was delighted to discover that they float. Orange flag, let’s say. If you’re hiring out kayaks, surely “paddles float” is something you learn on day one, if not necessarily during lesson one.
She handed me a buoyancy aid, and I’m not going to nitpick that she called it a lifejacket because I’ve seen professionals who call it the wrong name, and she gave me a bucket and grabber for the litter picking. I asked where I could go and she looked blank, like she’d never been asked this question. “Anywhere? I think? If you’re not allowed to go somewhere, maybe someone will tell you when you try. I don’t know, I’ve never done it.” That orange is rapidly darkening towards a tomatoey red. You’re handing out kayaks and you’ve never even been kayaking? You can’t even give me a rough route, an idea of where to go or a confident “Oh, you’re allowed to go everywhere!”?
And then she said “If you need anything else, I’ll be at the bar!”.
No making sure the buoyancy aid was on properly – or at all. I highly doubt she’d even know. No help getting into the boat. No untying it for me once I was settled. And while I can do all these things myself, if you’re giving someone a kayak, isn’t it absolute basic safety to make sure they’re in, settled, comfortable, safe and ready to go before you walk away? Isn’t a safety briefing kind of the bare minimum?
I’m not blaming the girl. It’s not her fault no one saw fit to give her even the basic training. It’s GreenKayak’s fault for apparently not thinking that even the quickest safety briefing is necessary for when you give someone a kayak and send them out on a major waterway. Is this a “well, it’s free and if no money changes hands, we don’t need to worry about rules and regulations” thing? That doesn’t feel very Danish. Scandinavians are rule-keepers and it feels really weird to just act as if they don’t exist.
As I said, I can get in but I usually jump in from a beach or similar shallow water, not into fairly deep water from a dock. But I managed! I’d clipped the drybag to the side of the buoyancy aid and arranged the bucket, GoPro and paddle so that I could reach and settle them all in once I was in and then I discovered that there’s no way of reaching the nose to untie the kayak from the dock while sitting in the driving seat so I had to climb out, untie and do it all again while hoping the boat didn’t float away.
Speaking of seats, there’s no seat. Every sit-on-top kayak I’ve ever sat on top of had a seat tied into it. Back support! Sit-on-tops are easy for beginners because there’s no cockpit to wiggle out of if you capsize, which is psychologically a lot easier and they also tend to be pretty wide and stable. Sit on tops were a great choice for this organisation. Well done. But you need to be moored to the boat to put the power into it and you can’t do that with no backrest to press against. There were grooves for my feet but if I put my feet in them in the correct position, I scratched my right knee with my nails every single time I paddled on the right and with no back support I wasn’t sitting up properly and therefore couldn’t paddle properly anyway. Sitting cross-legged gave me the back position I needed but now I didn’t have my feet pressed into the boat to put the power forward.
Not that there was much power coming because it was a really slim blade. Honestly, if it had been a proper full-sized beginner’s paddle with a blade the size of a dinner plate, I could probably have forgiven a lot but you just can’t get up any momentum with a tiny blade, especially when you’re pitting yourself against a fairly major river with fast-moving tourist traffic and a breeze. Picture the difference between swimming with bare feet and swimming with proper diving fins. Picture a scuba diver suddenly losing their fins. Oh look, suddenly we can’t dive properly! And I can’t paddle properly!
This, to be honest, is probably a me problem. I went to the National Museum which had a display of Greenlandic kayaks and canoes and a set of paddles and they had similarly slim blades. Paddelgeek.co.uk says that there’s lesss water resistance per stroke and they enter and exit the water smoothly with minimal splash and suit the majority of recreational kayakers. The words they use are “you want to enjoy the scenery, not arrive exhausted” and “sustainability matters more than outright speed”. In my case, it may simply be that I don’t know the correct technique for a low-angle blade. But I hated that thing! I want more surface area, I want more water resistance, I want to push as much water past me as possible.
On the bright side for Copenhagen (but not so bright side for the paddling litter picker), the canals are not overwhelmed with rubbish. Whether that’s because GreenKayak have been offering free kayaks for litter picking for nine years or whether Copenhagen is just good at not chucking their rubbish in the canals, I don’t know. Over the hour and a quarter I was out, I retrieved two wine bottles, an empty bag of nuts or something (very hard to get hold of because it was full of water whch makes it very heavy for the grabbers), a length of thin foam that must have been in the packaging for something lightweight from Ikea and a scrap of a plastic bag. Not much but as it’s supposed to be weighed, I was pleased with the two glass bottles.
Now comes the “where can I go?” question. I paddled up the river, past a kind of riverside open-air gym and harbour bath called TRX Hub or possibly Kalvebod and then another swimming area that might be called Kalvebod Bølge or Bølgebaderne and under Langebro bridge and I found a small narrower canal. Yes! Off the main river! This is exactly where I want to be!
Except it turned out to be a one-way canal.I have had zero briefing. As a human-powered craft, am I allowed to paddle back up here in the wrong direction? Because I have no idea where this is going to pop out and no idea how to get back to Green Island. I’ve got my phone in my drybag but it’s not practical to take it out while paddling – it’s not waterproof and it certainly doesn’t float and I don’t have any hands free to fiddle with it. Why haven’t I got a map? Why haven’t I even been shown a map up on the wall at departure to give me an idea of where I could go? It’s a lovely idea sending people off to pick litter on a kayak but I don’t know this city, let alone its labyrinth of waterways. So by now, I’ve abandoned the idea of either enjoying the paddle or picking litter, I’m concentrating on “I’ve got just under an hour and a half to figure out how to get home”.
Fortunately, I had the sense to turn right at the end and that looked out over something that resembled the main river, which it turned out to be. Having turned right, I felt like I recognised the bridge in the distance. That was probably the way back. Good. I know where I am and I’m not enjoying anything about this, so I’m going straight home.
But there’s another problem. Now I’m on a busy and fairly rough, unsheltered river on a day that’s a little breezier than it could be, paddling against the tide with a paddle the size of a cotton bud. I’ve paddled in far rougher conditions and enjoyed it but I hate this paddle and I’m hating the entire experience. I had no idea how far it was – I kept fighting the breeze and the river and the current and seeing things I recognised and it’s always beyond one more landmark than I realised. Having drawn it on Google Maps, I’ve discovered that “home stretch” was nearly a kilometre and a half or the best part of a mile, which is a long way to go when you think you’re nearly back and you can’t get any power out of the paddle.
It was exhausting and it was demoralising and having to sit up with no back support meant I had the worst burning heartburn, which I always get when I do any paddling more strenuous than taking the Guides out at the boathouse. I’m alternating between sitting with my feet braced but scratching my own legs to bits or sitting cross-legged where my knees are safer but I can’t properly put what little power I can get into the forward motion, I’m getting more tired and frustrated and then I stopped for a break and was immediately swept backwards and sideways when I let go of the wall. With a high-angle paddle and enough support from the boat, I could pull myself round fairly easily and get back on track but in this kayak, I considered for a minute that I might end up just being swept out into the Baltic. Even if I can get myself pointing the right way and overcome everything pushing against me to start moving forwards, I’m never going to be able to maintain that long enough to get back to Green Island.
Because part of the deal is that you post your experience on social media, I filmed a certain amount of the return trip from the GoPro stuck down my buoyancy aid. The last half an hour is mostly footage of me struggling down that river, raging from behind the camera about how much I hate this. My left leg is burning and neither stretching nor curling it is helping. There’s no position I can sit in which will allow me to power properly through the water. The paddle is little more help than just paddling with my bare hands. And every time I think Green Island is just behind the next thing, another thing pops up.
I was supposed to have the kayak from 11 until 12.45. I was on my way by 10.50 and scrambling back onto the dock like an extremely ungainly seal by 12.05, sweating, swearing and exhausted. I looped the painter around the cleat on the dock from my knees, dragged the bucket back onto solid land, chucked the paddle down and I can’t even remember whether I actually hung up the buoyancy aid. At this point, I’m supposed to weigh my bucket of rubbish and sort it but I can’t see any kind of scale or any rubbish bins. So I staggered around the front to the restaurant where I was told I could just leave the trash. Would have been nice to actually weigh it and add my stats to GreenKayak’s collection but maybe they did it on my behalf. Honestly, I suspect they didn’t. Wikipedia says an empty wine bottle is 300-900g and averages it at 500g, so that’s 1kg of glass and maybe 50g of plastic and thin foam. 1.05kg which remains unlogged but I guess it’s more important to pull it out of the water than to track it, just like my daily 2km walk is still good for me even if Strava malfunctions.
My shorts were soaked through and so was most of the rash vest. Sit on tops have a hole in them which water comes through, it’s just how they’re built and I knew that. I’m glad I didn’t wear the legs of the shorts. I walked home pretty wet, had a shower and washed the shorts out in the shower. I know they’ll dry pretty quickly but I’m not sure I wanted to walk around for the next few days in shorts (or trousers, once the legs are zipped back on) that are drenched in canal water. I sat on the bed and wrote most of this right there and then and once I was dry-ish and felt like my legs would actually hold me up, I went out into Copenhagen for the afternoon.
If you want to do a kayak tour of Copenhagen, I think that’s a great idea. A better idea would be to take the metro to Amager Strand, two or three stops up from the airport, and enjoy the more sheltered water just outside the city. But if you’re going to kayak Copenhagen, do it with a professional. Go with someone who knows where they’re going, who can see when you’re getting over-tired and frustrated and is qualified to look after you. Go with someone who knows when the buoyancy aid isn’t on properly and will make sure you’re settled in the kayak before the trip starts. Don’t go alone and if you must hire a kayak and self-paddle, go with a reputable hire company who will at least see you safely onto the water and have equipment that’s fit for purpose (although, fine, there was nothing technically wrong with the paddle except that I hated it). I kind of wish I’d had time to stop by Kayak Republic, which is one of those reputable hire companies, or so I assume. I passed it on my hideous adventure and noticed that they had a couple of GreenKayaks tied up outside along with the ones you have to pay for. I’d put money on them at least giving you a proper safety briefing. Maybe I just got unlucky with the hosts.
A free kayak for a bit of environmental action is a lovely idea; the reality is that I should have paid for a bit more safety and security and you definitely should.
I Am A Polar Bear 