PART 4 - Winter's Long Tail - Herne Bay to Portland
Not far east from Herne Bay sits an old Roman fort built during the time of the Roman conquest of Britain. In its heyday it would have been an impressive structure, surrounded by a perimeter stone wall almost a thousand feet long with a parapet twenty feet high. The wall protected several buildings, including a barracks, several granaries, workshops and a bathhouse for the hundreds of legionaries stationed there. It was built to guard the entrance to a channel that no longer exists. The river Stour which empties near Ramsgate once had a tributary called the Wantsum Channel that branched north and created a waterway from the North Sea to the English Channel, and would have been a useful shortcut for sailing ships to avoid an unfavorable fast flowing tide and head winds around the cape ten miles to the east. The waterway has since silted up and the Wantsum Channel is little more than a ditch and fort which used to be nearly a mile from the shoreline has mostly vanished, the glacial silts beneath it having been progressively reclaimed by the North Sea.
Looking at the ruins of the fort as I paddled by I wondered what the Roman Legionaries once stationed there would have had on their minds. If any of them had come from Italy where the balmy Mediterranean climate is warm and pleasant all year, they would likely have remembered their homes, thousands of miles away, with fondness as they contemplated another day of work out in the gray damp fog and bone chilling wind. As I hugged close to the coast to avoid getting blown out to sea by the strong southerly wind and pelting rain washing over the cliffs I pondered if perhaps it would have been wiser to have waited at least a month before starting the journey. Winter paddling in the North Atlantic was starting to feel like poor judgement.
The old Roman waterway would have also been quite handy. Even with a pre-dawn start, I only had the ebbing tide with me for a couple of hours and I felt pressured to arrive at Margate quickly and paddle around eastern Kent during the slack tide. Fortunately, my pace was fast enough, the headwind eased slightly, and I even had time to admire several impressive white chalk cliffs with stone arches that buttressed the coast like walls along the moat of a medieval castle. Even more impressive, however, was an Englishman on a paddle board wearing only a pair of shorts catching the swells rolling in from the south.
“You’re putting me to shame.” I shouted. “I’m wearing a dry suit and I’m bone chilled right now.”
“It’s a bit chilly,” he laughed. “But you’ll warm up if you keep moving.”
“Are you really not cold?”
“Not at all.”
I assumed that his matter of factness attitude about the weather was something that you can only possess from being born in a harsh and hostile climate. During the journey, I was at times struck with a feeling of shameful indolence whenever I stared at rainy conditions outside my tent wondering if I should take a rest day only to see a couple elderly ladies joyfully getting ready for a morning swim. I can’t sit it out, if they’re fine with it.
After passing Ramsgate the flood tide picked up to about four knots and progress slowed to a crawl. The rain tightened, and a dense fog settled in making the shoreline almost invisible. I stopped somewhere south of the River Stour, the southern end of the old Roman waterway, at the edge of a finely manicured golf course. I assumed no one would be around given the miserable conditions but the area turned out to be a popular dog walking trail and people came and went with their pets throughout the afternoon, and stopped to make small talk about what I was doing. One gentleman who must have been in his seventies strolled along the trail path with a ball catcher toy stick, which he used to toss a tennis ball for his dogs, a brown lab called Pauley and black lab a named Bailey. Pauley was clearly the wittier of the two and gave Bailey the slip to catch the saliva laden tennis ball nearly every time.
“Bailey is almost twelve years old. He’s got arthritis on both his back legs, so he’s gotten a bit lame the past couple of years. Pauley was just a puppy last year so he’s full of energy. He wears me out.”
I asked him if I could toss a ball to which he readily handed the stick to me. I was about to introduce myself, but he cut me off. “You don’t need an introduction, mate. You’re the American paddling around Britain. Everyone along the beach is talking about you.”
John had lived in Ramsgate his entire life. His father was a World War II veteran who had been stationed in Ramsgate with the Royal Navy, and eventually settled in Southeast England. “He was part of the coastal defence system. He was a motor gun boat captain and his job was to head out and rescue pilots who’d been shot down over the English Channel. One of the stations was here in Ramsgate, and the other was over in Dover.”
“Did he rescue a lot of pilots?”
“Oh yeah, when a battle was in full swing, the planes would be swarming like locusts. They’d be rescuing more than a dozen in a single day. The tricky part though was you didn’t always know who you were picking up, until you had them on the boat. Plenty of times, they ended up rescuing German pilots.”
We chatted for a long while. John warned me that there were several firing ranges along the coast and that I should check to see when each would be conducting live fire exercises as access to the shore would be restricted, and I might have to detour several miles out to sea. “The first one you’ll come to is in Hythe, and then there’s another one past Dungeness. They’ve been pretty busy lately - I think they’re training the Ukrainians there. I know a few people I can ring up and ask to keep an eye out for you, just in case.”
I gave him one of the business cards with the website, and the link to my GPS tracker.
“Oh, spot on - this’ll be a massive help for the lads.”
The next morning I experienced something I had yet to feel since I had started the journey; sunshine, warmth, and calm seas. I jumped at the chance to make the most of the conditions, and began paddling at the crack of dawn eating a breakfast of cereal bars and ham and cheese rolls out on the water.
When I was past the little town of St. Margaret the coastline was trusted up, beginning the section of the white chalk cliffs of Dover. I couldn't, however, stop by and admire the white faced escarpments for very long. Normally a boat escort is required to paddle across the Port of Dover. Crossing a busy shipping lane can be a very frightening thing to do on a kayak. Out on the open sea, objects on the horizon look two dimensional, their size, distance, and direction can be hard to tell. A massive container ship can look small and seem farther than it really is if it’s sailing at an angle away or towards you, its speed will be difficult to estimate without a fixed reference point, and it’s easy to put yourself in a brinkmanship duel with a vessel that has no idea that you’re even there (the kayak’s low profile on the water makes it practically invisible even in calm seas). At Dover, the issues are multiplied many times over. The port has a north and south entrance separated by a mile long barrier and ferries from Calais, France, come and go every thirty minutes during busy times. They enter and leave the port through both entrances, which means there are four shipping lanes to be crossed.
In these situations, the kayaker’s best friend is speed. The faster you can paddle, the quicker you’ll get out of the danger zone, or change direction to avoid an accident. Today, the conditions were ideal. The atmosphere was clear, I could see out for several miles, and I was averaging five knots with the ebbing tide and tail breeze. However, the forecast was due to change in a couple of hours with a strong south westerly breeze. Rather than calling the Dover Vessel Traffic Service on the VHF radio and bear the risk that I’d be told to wait for an escort to see me through the Port, I decided to paddle the required two miles out to sea. I counted the number of ferries and boats stacked along the horizon; only six, it’s a big ocean, keep your wits about you! I took a few gulps of water and then paddled as vigorously as my arms would take me.
The timing worked perfectly only I needed to do a couple of zigzags to give the ferries a wide berth, however, one sneaky ferry exited through the south entrance at an oblique angle in my direction after I’d thought I had cleared all the lanes could ease up the pace. I felt uneasy and only relaxed when the seawalls of the port were comfortably behind me.
Not long after the forecasted southwesterly headwind hit me like a wall. The following swells that had been aiding my progress changed into a conveyor belt of stumpy waves banging the kayak bow like a drumstick. I adjusted the course towards Folkstone where the town’s Northeast facing harbor would offer some protection. To my dismay, I had arrived just before the bottom of the low tide, and the entire harbor had drained out leaving behind the dreaded mud.
Fortunately, the beach north of the harbor was a viable alternative. Though the portage from the water to the road was quite long and up a series of steep staircases, I learned on this occasion and countless others throughout the journey, that English are exceedingly generous when they see someone in need. Two ladies passing by walking their dogs offered to carry not only the gear, but also the kayak up the steep staircase to the road. “Just relax for now; we’ve got this covered. Honestly, paddling all the way around Britain, and Ireland in a canoe - I can’t think of anyone else who’s ever done that!”
I gave them many thanks, and one beanie each for the effort.
The next day I again took to the water early, though conditions were nowhere near as favorable. The southwesterly head wind was forecast to last another two days, and in addition, the English channel began to teach me a hard lesson on tides. If you stay put in the same place, you can be pretty certain that the timing of the high and low tides will shift forward from one day to the next by approximately fifty minutes. That is because the moon takes just over twenty seven days to orbit the Earth, and as the earth rotates in the same direction, it takes the moon about twenty four hours and fifty minutes to be back at the same position in the sky. If you are moving however, the timing of the tides changes, the interval becomes shorter as you travel westward.
Having traveled westward from the previous day, my early morning start to catch the full interval of the ebbing tide would have had to begin long before dawn. Consequently, after just a couple of hours, I found myself paddling against both wind and current. Ideally in these conditions I should have hugged as close as possible to the coast, however, just west of Folkestone was the Hythe firing range, where even from afar, the popping gunfire sounded like the soldiers were making popcorn in the microwave. If there were any markers or buoys to designate the exclusion zone, I never saw them.
Eventually the wind and the tide became overpowering, forcing me to give up on the day’s goal of rounding the Dungeness Peninsula. I darted to the nearest beach after I was reasonably certain the bullets had stopped flying, and landed at the base of an imposing concrete seawall at least twenty feet high. As I got off my kayak and carried and began unloading, I took some time to appreciate the work of the wall’s design engineer who had clearly given a lot of thought to contain the sea. The base of the wall was built like a staircase, with wide steps more suited for a giant, but intended to make the wave break to dissipate its energy. The crest, however, was topped with concave concrete panels to reflect the biggest waves back on themselves. That’s quite a smart idea, I thought, as I pondered the size of the storm needed to create a wave big enough to reach the concrete panels several feet above my head.
Immediately behind the wall was a pedestrian trail where several people came through walking their dogs, and I recruited the first gentleman passing by to help me carry the kayak. As he was helping me we noticed two low flying rescue helicopters heading out towards Dungeness.
“I hope it’s nothing serious,” I remarked.
“Oh, it's probably a migrant boat that’s in distress,” he shrugged, “it happens all the time, especially after a few days of good weather.”
“Really? You think so?”
“Definitely. We’re just twenty-six miles from France so a lot of them end up there. Sometimes you see them wandering into town soaked and barefoot, carrying a child, not sure what to do. It’s really quite sad.”
Dungeness is a land of extremes, a desolate landscape of steep beaches and featureless plains of windswept shrubs, dotted with huts and fishing boats resting at odd angles. On a bright day the sun scorches the ground with no shade for protection, and the air shimmers like a curtain, but when a fog bank rolls in from the Channel the place takes on a look of ghostly abandonment. The shingles stretch on for miles, and the bankedbeach makes it exceedingly difficult to land on a kayak at high tide in rough seas.
“The weather changes really quickly on the Channel,” he said. “Sometimes when a migrant boat reaches the tip of the peninsula, and they find the waves crashing on the shingles, it's really easy to capsize a rubber dinghy with twenty desperate people trying to make their way out, and get swept out to sea by the current.”
When I paddled out to the peninsula the next day, one structure was visible from miles away, an old decommissioned nuclear power plant made of several tall square metal buildings and towers, that poked above the horizon like man made islands. From the water in the midst of the enveloping fog, it felt rundown and abandoned. I imagined that if this was the first thing a migrant saw when he set foot on land, he’d be questioning if he had arrived at the right place. It could hardly feel more alien from the rolling gentle green hills and farms you’d picture in your mind when you think of Britain.
The current was slack and the wind was still, which allowed me to take a direct line to Hastings. After a few minutes however, I was deliberately approached by a patrol boat who motored up beside me.
“I hope I’m not in trouble.” I said with apprehension to the two officers on board.
“Nah, yer alright, mate.” said one of them chuckling, “We just popped to check on ya. Some bloke at the range gave us a link to yer GPS tracker. Saw this morning you were on yer way, an’ we fancied the fella cannonin’ round Britain.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” I said, relieved. “Am I too close to the range?”
“Ah yeah, if you go another mile further out yer’ll be fine.”
I followed their advice and paddled out to sea as they darted back to the firing range. When I reached Hastings it was mid afternoon, the main beachfront promenade by the town pier seemed busy and hurried with people and cars skittering along the shore while I drifted by with the current.
English seaside towns all have a particular feel to them. Almost all have a pier built out of wood or steel pylons that stretches out into the sea packed with shops and multicolored fast food establishments. Sometimes the piers are massive structures with large buildings (one even had a movie theater and a bowling alley) and others are rickety structures which when viewed from below make you wonder how they remain standing. Next to the pier there's usually a theme park with at least one roller coaster and the important ferris wheel, which no town would feel complete without one. If the roller coaster is also also on the pier, it makes for an exhilarating ride as the carts fly and down within inches from the edge, and the rusty pilings shake uncomfortably from the forces generated.
Within walking distance of the pier and the theme park there’s almost guaranteed to be a brightly lit casino. Unlike the grand establishments of the Las Vegas strip, casinos in British seaside towns are a lot more modest, normally with a facade of a simple shop on the ground floor of a two story building. Most have just slot machines, coin pushers, and tacky carnival games and arcades, but they are almost always disturbingly full, with the adults transfixed by the gambling games while their children play the arcade games. Gambling seems so ubiquitous in the Uk that I think the British as a society might have a gambling problem. Everywhere the opportunity is thrust in front of you. Even when you open Facebook or Youtube, you’re bombarded with ads for online slots, cardgames, and sports betting websites, so repeatedly that I sometimes found myself singing and humming their jingle songs on a long paddling day.
I continued past Hastings until I found the first empty beach. To my good fortune, I found an abandoned fishing boat to serve as protection from the wind. Shingle beaches are inconvenient to camp as it’s difficult to find good anchor points for the tent pegs, and windy conditions make setting up the tent a nightmare.
The next morning I ran into some difficulties setting off in a three foot pounding surf from the steep beach. Normally if there isn’t a calm section of water to get yourself set up, the best thing to do is to get ready on dry land just out of reach of the breaking waves. You sit inside the kayak, clip on the spray skirt, and perform a gorilla knuckle crawl into the water. That’s how I would normally have done it, but the coarse shingles made me hesitant. I don’t want to put a bunch of nasty scratches and dings on my new boat.
I opted to wait for a lull on the waves, quickly pull the kayak into waist deep water before jumping in. The approach went somewhat poorly and I was glad no one was there to watch. A sneaker wave tipped over the kayak, filled in the cockpit, and I was left scrambling to climb onto the stern deck and perform a self rescue while getting pounded by breaking waves. Ironically, having the cockpit filled in made the kayak sit lower on the water, almost like a submarine, and consequently much more stable. After a hard time clambering in and paddling out beyond the breaking zone, I pumped out the water in relatively tranquility, though feeling thoroughly exhausted from the effort in the cold water.
Once I was ready to go, I noticed a big problem with the paddle. The feathering which allows me to adjust the angle between the blade faces had become stuck at 75 degrees. “God damn it. I must have gotten some sand in the shaft,” I shouted. Desperately as I tried with all my might, I could not pull the shaft apart or rotate it into a more comfortable setting. I was stuck with it for the foreseeable future.
Later that afternoon I rounded an impressive line of eroding white chalk cliffs called the Beachy Head and the Seven Sisters. They reminded me of an enormous vanilla ice cream cake topped with a layer of frosted chocolate. The next two days had unusually favorable northeasterly winds which meant the sea was mostly flat as long as I stayed close to shore. Mid afternoon on the second day the wind died down completely; the air felt so still and quiet it was as if I had entered a vacuum pocket in the atmosphere. I recognized this as the ominous sign that I was directly in the center of a strong low pressure system. Without fail the temperature plunged suddenly as a mass of cold air rushed in to fill the vacuum with a powerful southwesterly head wind. The sea quickly turned into a foamy choppy mess as if swells had been hiding beneath the surface all along. I forged on with the help of the ebbing tide and once I was close to the Selsey Bill headland the worst of the wind was shielded away, and I arrived into the town with the last rays of fading daylight. The last six days, as I would later learn, were the best paddling I would get in the month of March; it was after all, still the tail end of the winter yet and much worse weather was still to come.
Winter is a rough season to be in the North Atlantic. The air currents of the jet stream that circle the Earth around the northern hemisphere from west to east also separate the cold polar air in the north from the more temperate air masses further south. As it flows the current meanders like a river in a flood plain, the boundary between warm and cold air masses swings wildly between north and south, and low pressure systems that form in the north Atlantic near Iceland are steered towards Europe like pies baked in a conveyor oven. In winter, the stream is stronger and swings father south, consequently directing a greater number of Atlantic lows toward the shores of the UK and Ireland, which bring cold windy and stormy weather, sometimes so frequently there’s hardly a day of calm weather to catch your breath between when one storm passes and the next one arrives.
Over the subsequent weeks, it became apparent that my paddling strategy would need to revolve around these periodic low pressure systems; sitting out the bad days, while making the most from the calm weather in between storms. For now the conditions had me land bound in Selsey; a strong westerly whipped up the sea at the headland into a formidable barrier of white foam as the wind and tide seemed to battle each other for supremacy over the shallows.
I was fortunate to have landed in Selsey at the exact location of the local headquarters of the Royal National Lifeboat Institute, an organization that provides search and rescue services. Admittedly, I knew absolutely nothing about them until this encounter, and later learned that they operate hundreds of stations throughout the coasts of the UK and Ireland and are almost entirely staffed by volunteers and funded through donations. This year would be marking their 200th anniversary since their founding in 1824.
I clambered up the steep shingle beach looking for a way into town, and ended up at doorstep of the station to ask if there was a safe place to store the kayak and, if I was lucky, also borrow a spray can of WD40 lubricant to try and unstuck my paddle shaft which by now was starting to give give me wrist pains.
“Oh, Absolutely! I can help you!” Rob the volunteer Coxswain at the lifeboat station and was an enthusiastic chap. After we lugged the kayak and the gear from the beach to the station’s boat house and had a spirited team effort to pull apart the jammed paddle shaft, he eagerly gave me a tour of the station’s search and rescue watercraft, a 44 foot vessel with the typical orange deck and blue and black hull of rescue boats called The Shannon. “She’s a brilliant boat” he said with pride, “Glides over the waves like a rubber duck in a bathtub. Even if you capsize, she’ll right herself back up.”
“How do you make sure you’re not tumbling inside like you’re in a washing machine?”
“Oh, you’re very securely strapped to the seat, like an airplane pilot. They’ve even got shock absorbers, so the ride doesn’t feel all that rough, to be honest.”
As we walked around underneath the immaculately blue painted hull, I noticed that the boat had no propellers. “Yes, that’s right,” Rob explained. “It’s jet powered, so we can go where it gets really shallow and run it up or launch from the beach. It also makes it handle and turn on itself like a jet ski.”
I asked him if they rescued a lot of people out of their station in Selsey. “In the summer months, yes, quite a few. Lots of folks go out on a paddleboard or a kayak and get blown away by the wind and can’t make it back to shore. Sometimes there’s people who run aground on the Bill, especially if they’re sailing at night. You might have noticed that there is a big shingle bank that’s exposed at low tide; the current there is quite strong - about six knots or so - and it’s easy to get swept away. That said, I’m sure you’re very experienced, judging by your impressive kayak.”
“I certainly hope so,” I said, a bit uneasy with the added weight of expectations . “If you have to come fetch me out of the water, please don’t forget to get my kayak as well.”
With the kayak safely stored for the next couple of days, I went to meet a local couple who invited me for dinner. They had been following me through the GPS tracker and noticed that the little blue arrow on the map that represents me hadn’t been moving. Brian and Sue were avid sailors, always out on their forty foot sailboat in the North Sea, and were keen to tell me about their adventures.
“There’s a massive regatta that happens here every year around late June called the Round The Island Race that circumnavigates the Isle of Wight,” Brian started, “it’s got thousands of boats that participate. The sea looks like a woodland of colorful sails and boat masts. People come from all over the world to take part in it.”
“Wow, and you’ve been on it?”
“Yes, it’s a very tricky race, with some very strong tidal currents too. In fact, the whole race is about planning your strategy based on the currents. The general direction of the tide is that it floods to the East, and then ebbs to the West. When you’re in the Solent, the channel between the Island and the mainland, however, the tide direction and times get all messed up. In some places they’re in the direction you think they should be, and other times they’re the opposite. It's because the currents wrap around the island, and the estuaries like Southampton and Portsmouth pile up water. Sometimes the tide is flooding in there, but ebbing everywhere else, and the slack times get offset by a few hours, and you can have a falling or a rising tide in two different directions as you sail through the channel.
“Is there a good strategy for a kayak to paddle through there?”
“Hmmm. What I would do is hug the north shoreline, until you’re in the solent. Then, if you want to cross to the Isle of Wight, you do it when it’s close to slack tide or at the start of the ebb, that way the current will carry you westward. The current is stronger on the west side of the channel.”
Two days later the forecast indicated a break in the winds for half a day, which would be just long enough to reach Yarmouth on the western side of the Isle of Wight. It was a tight window and things were looking much grimmer after that. A powerful winter storm brewing up in the North Atlantic would make landfall and the forecast map was bathed in shades of red and purple, indicating sustained gale force winds. I set off at the crack of dawn from the RNLI station beach, and followed Brian’s advice to hug northshore. At first the flooding tide was against me, but just as Brian predicted, after reaching the first of the estuary inlets the flood current suddenly changed direction and I was pulled along almost without effort.
At Portsmouth I veered south for the five mile crossing of the Solent the Isle of Wight aiming at two rounded island mounts in the middle of the channel as stepping stones. Those mounts turned out to be two imposing castle-like fortifications built in the middle of the sea with vertical walls made of granite blocks. These and several others dotting the channel I later learned had been built as artillery stations in the 19th century to guard the entrance to the Solent from French invasions by Napoleon, though today a few of them had been refurbished into luxury hotels and wedding venues. I noticed the tide was creating a strong eddy current around one of the forts and used it as a temporary rest stop while I waited for a container ship to make its way across the channel. I saw that a man was casting a fishing line from the edge of the fort, and asked him if he'd caught anything, to which he joyfully gestured with his hands that he’d caught dubiously seized four foot sea bass.
I continued on, but with a feeling of anxiety about the weather. After nearly crossing the channel the dreaded westerly wind suddenly picked up and I hurried to get as close as possible to the north shore of the Isle of Wight before it strengthened even more. The timing could not have been better. After passing a small harbor town called Cowes on the north of the island, the ebbing tide gained incredible strength, and even though I was now paddling dead headed into a strong breeze, the current was still able to carry the kayak along with almost no effort from me.
Once I was past Newtown Haven I met up with a fellow paddler with whom I had been in contact a few days prior, and paddled the rest of the way to Yarmouth together. Dave had worked in computer science in London before retiring, and now spent some of his time working as a kayak guide taking people on day trips in the Isle of Wight. “There’s some fantastic places to paddle here. The limestone cliffs on the channel side of the island are filled with caves you can explore on a kayak. Some of them along the stretch to Freshwater bay are huge. I sometimes give them names like the living room, the bedroom, and the kitchen because all together, they’d be bigger than a mansion.”
“If the weather isn’t too bad, maybe I can paddle there tomorrow.”
That was incredible wishful thinking on my part. Dave had offered to host me for a night, but I, a bit embarrassed, had to ask to stay for four days as one of the strongest storms of the season barreled through the English Channel with gales exceeding 50 knots. “I’m happy to have you stay for as long as you need.” Dave responded joyfully, and for which I was infinitely grateful for his generous hospitality. “Maybe you’ll get a chance to see a few of the red squirrels that come hang around in my backyard. They love the seeds in the bird feeder I put out for them.”
We made a drive to the Channel side of the island to see what kind of havoc the storm was brewing. It didn’t disappoint. Near St Catherine’s Lookout on the island’s southernmost point, twenty foot tall waves were exploding onto the shingles and rolled in so quickly one after the other they reminded me of an artillery crew firing shells at the enemy. When we stopped at the little town of Freshwater Bay the grass beyond the beach had been completely covered in salty foam piles as if there had been a snow storm, and the gales blew with a ferocity, that it was possible to let you body lean at forty five degrees and have your body weight be supported by the wind.
The sea had taken on a very milky brown color for some two hundred yards beyond the coast where there was a sharp boundary with the deeper blue back hues covered in white caps. “Ah yes, that’s because everytime a big storm hits us, it erodes the shoreline.” Dave said when I pointed this out to him. “If you look at pictures from eighty years ago or so, you’ll see that the coastline has been retreating, and in some of the lookouts, the parking lots are losing a couple of slots a year. Even when you buy a property here on the Isle of Wight, that’s one of the things you want to take into account. You have to consider the coastline erosion rate; and it’s almost always underestimated.”
I looked at an aerial photograph of the western part of Isle of Wight, and it surprised me how easy it was to distinguish in the landscape the sediment layers made of chalk and limestone from those made of clay and silt. From the western extremity of the island, up until a little past Freshwater Bay, the sea cliffs are bright white before suddenly turning beige and brown, and the point where the color change happens is also the exact location where the coastline veers south, enlarging the width of the island by several miles. I concluded from that observation, that the western end of the island must have once been much wider but the sea has eroded away the clay soils until it reached the tougher and harder limestone now exposed. This means that in the future, much of the southern part of the island along with the towns and farms, will eventually wash away into the English Channel.
Later we stopped at a place called The Needles on the westernmost point of the island where the sea has completely eroded away the clay sediments and carved three elongated stacks a hundred feet in height out of the chalk formations. Impressive as the milky white stacks were, it seemed a little far-fetched to refer to their blocky shapes as Needles. A more appropriate name would have been The Lumps as they were much longer than they were tall. The name originated from a fourth stack called Lot’s Wife which stood tall and slender several feet above the others, but collapsed in a storm in 1764. From the white foamy soup of waves battering the cliffs I could clearly understand why.
With the storm raging, and having time to spare, Dave offered to have a look at my sail mast to see how we might address the issue of sagging kayak deck when the sail was deployed. We set up the kayak in his garage shop, and immediately when I tried to stand the mast with tension on the mast, the kayak deck bulged outwards by about a quarter of an inch. “Yeah, clearly, it doesn’t have enough rigidity to handle the downward forces,” Dave observed.
I phoned Patrick Forrester, the owner of Falcon Sails, and put him on a conference video call. He recommended that we add a rigid plastic plate to the kayak underdeck which would help distribute the mast downward force more evenly. “If that doesn’t work, let me know, and I’ll mail you a custom made base plate. You let me know where to send it and I got you covered, man.”
Adding a rigid plastic plate to the kayak underdeck for additional support was a much more complicated task than I initially imagined. By sheer luck, Dave just so happened to have a plank of thermosetting plastic in his garage which he suggested we cut to size and mold into the shape of the underdeck with a heat gun. That, it turned out, was the easy part. When we had the plate in place and it seemed that the issue would soon be resolved, we were disheartened to discover that the original screws from the sail kit used to hold the above and below deck mast sections were too short to account for the extra thickness of the plate. We scrambled to find an open hardware store on the island in the middle of the storm. When we found one in downtown Yarmouth, we made another discouraging discovery. “I never knew that the thread spacing on american screws is different from metric screws. Fucking freedom units.” I sighed out loud. The different thread spacing meant that the screws would not mate with the mast attachment plate that held everything together.
“You might find American screws for sale at the hardware store in Cowes,” said the female store clerk, who was a bit irked at my language. “They're still open for another hour or so.” We drove there in a rush but to no avail; they didn’t have the screw size we needed.
“Hey, cheer up, maybe we can fashion a new attachment plate from the thermal plastic. When we drill the screws through the plate they will be the right thread by default” Dave suggested. At first glance, that seemed to work. We replaced the mast attachment metal plate with a customized plastic plate, and the sail once deployed seemed reasonably rigid with no deformation of the deck, it was about as good as we could get it. Unfortunately, as I would later discover, repeated deployments of the sail had a tendency to stress the plate threads, which eventually loosened the screws, which required constant tightening. A permanent solution would require reinforcing the underdeck with additional layers of carbon kevlar and epoxy as I had originally envisioned.
All was not lost. My struggles caught the attention of a kayak shop owner in Wales. “When you come by Swansea give me a call. I’ll have you fixed up in a day or so.” I checked the map, Swansea, was at least one month’s worth of distance away.
On the fourth day the storm finally relinquished its grip, and the early morning twilight was filled with the sound of tweaking birds and the shy red squirrels finally felt confident enough to come out of their tree nests to check on the nut feeders in Dave's backyard. “You don’t see them on the Mainland very often. Only here on the Isle of Wight.”
“Really? How come?” I asked.
“They’ve been outcompeted by the American Grey Squirrel. They aren’t as fussy when it comes to food so they get bigger and outbreed the red squirrel. A few years back, someone claimed they spotted a grey squirrel in the ferry coming over from Southampton. The captain immediately turned around midway, and the ferry was fine-combed until the little blighter was found and removed.”
After seeing one of the red squirrels precariously hanging off the nut feeder and only after great difficulty managing to get one of the prized pine nuts, I concluded that the chubby American grey squirrels are more witty, and quick on their feet. In Miami I’ve even seen them steal a french fry from an unattended plate, and they have no qualms scavenging through a trash dumpster. They are rats with puffy tails.
I was on water in the first half hour of the flooding tide, with just enough time to paddle out through the western entrance of the Solent without much difficulty. My goal was to stay close to the island until reaching the Needles where I had hoped to thread my way in between the stacks for some memorable photographs, but unfortunately even though the wind was calm the sea hadn’t yet settled, and the swells were roaring through gaps. I turned north toward the mainland, and after paddling through some bumpy swells breaking over a shallow underwater shelf, I continued the rest of the day along a series of white sandy beaches until the entrance to Poole Harbor, where Ian, a member of the Poole Canoe Club offered to let me spend the night at their club house and took me out for a drink with some of his friends.
“We’re getting some Chippies. Are you interested?”
“What’s that?” I asked
“Fish and Chips.”
“Ah, I’m up for it, sure.” I answered. After eight hours of paddling and eating nothing but cereal bars I felt eager for a hot meal.
“Great, we’ll go to the best one in Britain!” one of the chaps answered as we got into his car and drove off. In several towns I had paddled past I noticed the ubiquity of the local Fish and Chip shop. Every village, no matter how small, has at least one shop which is usually a humble establishment consisting of a counter or window to the street with few benches and tables next to a plastic board with a picture menu showing the options, portion sizes, and notes about common allergens like gluten and nuts. Almost always, you can smell the distinct aroma of deep fried fish in the air from a block away even before you see the shop, and if the place has a good reputation, there’s almost always a line of customers waiting outside during the lunch hour or in the evening as people make a stop over to buy a take away dinner. There was merit to the claim that the shop we were going to was a good one. The evening line was wrapping around the street corner, and the fried scent was wafting in the wind opening appetites.
Fish and chips is deeply ingrained into British culture. The first Friday in June is known as National Fish and Chips Day, and it has been a staple of the working class since the industrial revolution. During the War years Churchill referred to them as The Good Companions, as they were a morale booster during the German bombings and were one of the few foods exempt from rationing.
“Chippies are our national dish.”
“Isn’t it Chicken Tikka Masala? That’s what I heard,” I said with a smirk.
“Oh. Yeah, you’re right. Ha! We have two national dishes.”
When it was our turn to order, the cook was told that I was paddling around Britain and Ireland, and to which he said he’d throw an extra large piece of haddock in the fryer for me. That turned out to be a mixed gift. Either my stomach was not yet fully healed from the scuffle with Old Father Thames, or the British have evolved a unique gut flora capable of digesting exceptionally concentrated bouts of grease.
At the club house Ian was keen to go over the tidal charts for St Alban’s Head with me which I would be paddling through the next day. “Lots of people know about the tidal races around the Portland Bill, but I think that St Alban’s Head can be just as gnarly,” he said, flipping through the tidal chart. “Here’s the thing you need to know about St. Alban’s. There's a very shallow ledge just off the headland. In some places it’s barely ten feet deep, but it extends three miles offshore; when the tide is racing fast over, it makes some huge overfalls. However, there’s an inshore passage very close to the cliff base where the water is a little deeper, and the swells don’t break. If you stay very close to the cliff, you’ll avoid the worst of the overfalls.”
“How wide is the passage?”
“Maybe twenty-five meters wide, thereabouts. Motor boats do go through there, but it is kind of narrow.”
We looked at the tide and weather forecast. Low tide would be around 7:00 am, after which I would have the tide against me, but there would be a strong easterly gusting close to 30 mph.
“Oh, strong winds against the tide, it will get very hairy around the headland.”
“Have you ever paddled there in those conditions?” I asked.
“You mean on a day with a sustained Force 6 wind? Oh no. I definitely wouldn’t be out there on St Alban’s. But you certainly have far more experience than me.”
His caution sent very uncomfortable chills down my back. If the locals who paddle this stretch coast throughout the year had second thoughts, what business did I have to be out there? I did not want find myself having to call for a rescue after making an irresponsible decision, and I felt a pang in my stomach churned imagining the embarrassing the headlines on the local news, “American paddler attempting to circumnavigate Britain and Ireland nearly drowns after being warned not to paddle in obviously poor conditions.”
Nonetheless, I was also growing concerned at the overall pace of the journey. I had spent three days in Selsey waiting on the weather, and four days in the Isle of Wight. At the rate of one day paddling for every three or four landbound days, I would clearly never finish in time. I hope things improve in the spring and summer. In addition, the weather forecast and the tide for the morning on the following day would be ideal to paddle around the much tougher Portland Bill. If I didn’t go, I would miss my chance and be landbound there as well for who knows how long.
“What if I leave really early tomorrow? I mean super early, like before dawn? With a few hours of ebbing tide, and the wind on my back, I should pass the headland before the tide changes. After that there’s no more tidal races until the Portland Bill, right?
“Right. After St Alban’s the currents are weak, but it’s almost sixteen miles from here to the headland. Hmmm... It’s a bit of a stretch if you leave really, really early, you can get there close to low tide. You might have an hour or two before the flood tide really picks up speed. You better get some sleep.”
As far as I can remember, I’ve always been a light sleeper. Even when I am asleep, my eyes and ears stay attuned to the surroundings, and the slightest noise or flash of light is enough to jolt me. Any bothersome thoughts in my head, such as upcoming deadlines, an issue with a work project, or even something I might have heard or read on the news, will keep me awake at night tussling in bed from one uncomfortable position to another. Sometimes I will get up and walk to the kitchen to eat a biscuit or make a sandwich, not because I’m hungry, but because I need to try and distract my mind.
Usually, one thing that works is to get myself as physically exhausted as possible; if the body is craving for rest, the mind eventually has to loosen its grip. Tonight, however, that grip was especially tight, and the exhaustion of the thirty five miles I had paddled the day before hardly seemed to matter when I contemplated what the challenge ahead would be like. I imagined the twenty foot waves I had seen crashing in St Catherine’s Lookout in the Isle of Wight, and was reminded of the anguish I felt the day I was due to sit for my Professional Engineering license exam.
It will be just like the exam, a voice in my head said. The anticipation is the worst part. Once you sit at the desk, read the first question, and realize you can solve it, you start to breathe easier.
“I don’t think it’s like the exam at all.” I said. “You don’t get to skip over a wave about to break on top of you like you can skip a question in the exam, try the next one, and go back to it later.”
Then you better be ready.
Somehow I must have fallen asleep, because as I heard the voice in my head say those words I was jolted by the alarm clock on my phone. Time to get ready, I thought. Two hours later I had the kayak packed and on the water ready to go.
Before taking off, I took a few added precautions, most important of which were switching to the wider and longer Euro blade paddle for greater balance and stability, and secondly, avoiding drinking any liquids whatsoever. Peeing from a kayak is a stressful affair; you have to sit still and hold the paddle with one hand against your chest while you fiddle with the other to pull out your willy through the drysuit front zipper, and then somehow relax to let it flow. This is all the more difficult when the sea is choppy like a washing machine, and any one wave can splash a gallon of icy water into your pants, or worse, capsize you when you’re completely unprepared. The fear that something unforeseen could happen makes it more difficult to relax and let it flow, so the whole procedure lasts longer, which increases the risk that something bad could happen.
After I got the first few paddle strokes in I felt a bit more confident. Dusk was breaking, the winds seemed light, and the ferry running across the harbor didn't look like it was having a hard time in the chop. I covered the first four miles in record time as the ebbing tide pulled me along and spit me out through the harbor mouth like melon seed. From there on, things quickly roughened up.
The first headland out of the harbor was a set of chalk cliffs and sea arches called Old Harry’s Head. In calmer weather it’s a lovely place to paddle slowly in between the narrow arch passageways and shinny white sea stacks with crystal clear water, but today, the low clouds and faint drizzle gave the famous cliffs a sad and dirty gray hue bathed in a muddy soup of brown foam. I kept my distance from the headland beyond the reach of the breakers, but it was a constant struggle against a progressively strengthening crosswind from the East that kept pushing me towards the rocks.
After clearing past the Old Harry’s Head the contour of the land turned slightly towards the Southwest which allowed me to ease a bit on the ferry angle and take a direct line towards the next series of headlands that included one menacing piece of bare rock called Anvil Point. In today’s conditions, the name could hardly have been more prescient. The swells battered the cliff face like hammer blows shaping a scorching slab of metal, while reflected waves coming back at me sometimes made the sea drop away from underneath the kayak as if I had fallen into a pothole on the road large enough to swallow a small car.
In the midst of the confusion, I lost the feel for how fast I was actually going. I had started paddling just after 5:00 am, and it had taken a little over a half hour to cover the four miles out of Poole Harbor, which led me to assume that I would cover the sixteen miles to St Alban's Head in just over three hours and be there a little after 8:30 am, one and a half hours after the start of the flood tide, before the onset of the worst conditions a 30 mile per hour wind pushing against a strong tide could create. I looked at my watch and saw that the time was 8:45 am.
“Oh, did I already pass St. Alban’s head without even noticing?” I said out loud. “That last bit was rough as hell. Maybe that was the ledge Ian had talked about, and I’m now in the clear.”
I felt a momentary sense of relief, but it soon gave way to doubt. I stared at an enormous headland still at least five miles farther. Is that St. Alban’s Head? But the time says I already should be past it. I pulled out the GPS during a lull in the swell and confirmed my worst fears. I was behind schedule, most likely because the current was already flowing fast against me. I felt a sense of panic as if I was trapped in a room where the walls and roof were caving in. How will conditions be when I get there in another hour? If I turn back I’ll have to go through the dreaded Anvil Point again, and this time with the galing wind against me. The longer I took to decide, the worse both options would get. In the end, it required less mental exertion to double the effort and keep moving forward. The faster I paddled the less the wind would be biting my back, and the more control I could exert over the kayak.
It was the right decision. Although it took another hour to arrive at St Alban’s, and six foot standing waves were exploding over the shallow ledge that stretched out to the hazy horizon, a narrow corridor of dark water skirted the base of the cliff as if Moses had parted a small sliver of the ocean for me to squeak through; it was the inside passageway Ian had mentioned. I gave a loud shout of thanks hoping that he could hear me somehow. Once I was behind the headland, I found a comfortable pocket of still wind and glass smooth water, a small oasis of quiet stillness wrapped in a cracking whip of furious sea. Time for a water break and wizz, I said relieved.
There were still another five hours of paddling, most of it against the current, to Portland, but the toughest part was now behind me. The six foot swells were rolling with the wind, and I could surf the kayak down the face of one wave before catching up with the one in front and slide down the face of the subsequent wave. It was a kind of game to see how many waves could be strung together. When it worked, paddling was almost effortless and only a matter of adjusting the course, but if I failed to climb over the wave in front of me it felt like the kayak was moving backwards, and the wave in the rear would crash into my back like someone had just poured a bucket of ice cold water. This constant change between accelerating and sudden slowdown or bracing required constant awareness which after a few hours became both mentally and physically taxing especially when low clouds settled in and it became difficult to gauge whether I was even progressing as it was difficult to discern the changing features in the landscape. Only when I finally caught sight of the stone walls of the Portland Harbor did I know that I was close to the end.
Only those who have spent any length of time out in the open sea during a storm can appreciate what a magical experience of suddenly entering a safe harbor. It’s like arriving at an oasis shaded by a canopy of leafy trees after a long journey through the harsh and inhospitable desert. One is a place of struggle, and the other a place of peace, so different from one another, and yet they coexist next to each other. The moment I crossed through the breakwater into the wide open calm pool of the Portland Harbor, I breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, I can let my guard down.
The moment I finally landed at the boat ramp of the Portland marina and stood up to stretch my legs for the first time in twelve hours felt like a momentous occasion. Normally I would have passed on the chance to have paddled in these conditions, feeling that they would have been beyond my abilities, and having made the decision to take off that morning and to have succeeded without issue was a big boost of confidence. Perhaps I do have the chops and I am worthy to be on this journey. I thought.
These feelings would soon be tested to a much higher degree.
