PART 3 - Meeting Father Thames - London to Herne Bay
Nearly twenty three years have passed since my last visit to London. I had been applying to university, and Imperial College of London had extended to me a conditional offer (in the UK, universities commit to accepting you based on your final grades in various AP and IB level courses) to study engineering, and I had flown in for a visit.
To be entirely honest, so much time has passed that I don’t remember much about it. I toured a few unassuming neo-classical and modern buildings in central London, saw a couple empty classrooms and a science laboratory with long white benches, and had lunch at one of the student cafeterias where they served a little pudding cake with raisins and custard for dessert. “It’s called spotted-dick,” said the professor with a white lab coat who was leading the tour, when I asked him what it was.
What I do vividly recall about the day of the tour was that it was foggy and gray, cold and rainy, and it was sometime in early June. A few months later when my IB grades were released, I had missed the required Math score by one point and my acceptance offer from Imperial College was relegated to the waiting list Limbo. I had, however, already been accepted to the University of Miami in Florida, and classes there in the fall semester were due to start two months earlier than in England. I suppose I can go to UM and make the best of it. If by some good luck Imperial calls me with a spot, then I could pack up and go. Let's see what happens, I thought.
Stepping on the University of Miami campus was like arriving at a tropical Garden of Eden. Everywhere your eyes looked was a lush evocative greenery of palm trees, flowering magnolias and strangler figs that cast a refreshing shade over the pedestrian footpaths in between buildings. The cafeteria was lined with a forest of colorful parasols in front of an emerald lake dotted with bright fountains, where storks and cormorants waded in the shallows hunting for fish, and the campus outdoor Olympic swimming pool basked under a glorious sunshine. Most contrasting to the majority plain studious male population of Imperial College, were the parading hoards of scantily clothed and extroverted college girls. I felt like a sailor on one of Captain Cook’s sea journeys having just sailed into Tahiti, and my neck was soon sore from constantly looking over my shoulder. Fortunately, Imperial College never called me back.
Today, however, the overcast sky and damp mist sticking on to my cold cheeks felt a lot like the visit to Imperial College.
“Are you really going out on the Thames? The weather looks awful,” said the lady at the hotel frontdesk as she watched me pulling the kayak out of the garage.
“He’s going around the whole UK and Ireland.” Mom answered with pride.
I confirmed it, though feeling a little uncomfortable. It seemed like too bold of a claim to make, when I had yet to even paddle the first mile. What if I got into a crash with another boat on a tight bend in the river, or a nasty whirlpool under one of the bridges sucked me underwater and I had to shout at bypassers along the waterfront to call for help? The only thing worse than failing, is for the failure to be public and early in the endeavor. People will judge you as imprudent and obviously unqualified for what you set out to do.
“Well, we’ll see. It’s only the first day.”
I had spent a few hours before dawn, carefully going through the equipment making sure that everything had its designated dry bag and hatch. Each set of items had its assigned drybag color. Green for clothes, red for food, white for electrical equipment, black for shoes, pink for the tent, purple for the sleeping bag, gray for the medical kit, blue for the kayak/ drysuit repair kits, and yellow for documents and miscellaneous items. After packing everything I wasn’t entirely certain if I remembered what color meant what, and had to feel around the bag to confirm what was in each, but during the course of a journey, the repetition of packing and unpacking the kayak numerous times would make this task instinctive. While shoving the bags in the hatches, I uncovered an important issue. I had made a last minute purchase of three kit bags made of meshed pvc which would be robust enough to last the entire journey without ripping (a problem I ran into during the Vancouver Island journey) but I had now realized that they were not very crumblable and took an awful lot of space inside the hatches. “I should have bought Ikea bags.” I mumbled. Ikea bags normally used for dirty laundry are famous amongst expedition paddlers. They’re extremely cheap, can carry a lot of gear, and crumble to fit into any nook or recess inside the hatches. I decided to leave two of the bags behind, I could make due with one for now, and find a substitute later. I was eager to get going.
After loading the kayak with all the gear and double strapping it to the kart, I began the short walk over the King Edward Bridge to the launch point. Even though it was early in the morning, the foot traffic over the bridge was busy, with children walking to school. I was intrigued by the uniform they wore with long flowing black robes that reached down to their ankles, an embroidered coat of arms bearing the letters KEW, a tie under a sweater and a scarlet and gold scarf around their necks. My Gosh, English kids really do dress like the characters in Harry Potter. I thought.
From the equally intrigued looks I was receiving, my fluorescent green drysuit and gold and black kayak adorned with runish images of wild sea creatures, I too must have been a strange sight.
I continued walking along the street adjacent to the bridge until I reached the footpath to the river. There I unloaded the kayak, made three trips to carry the gear to the water’s edge and then carried the kayak itself. I was delighted by how light it was. The vacuum bagged, carbon kevlar lay-up of the new kayak was at least twenty pounds lighter than my three-piece fiberglass version of the same kayak at home. Not only is fiberglass a heavier material, but the three-piece kayak also had double reinforced bulkheads at each joint, held together with heavy duty stainless steel hinges which added considerable weight.
“Wow you can carry it over your shoulder?” Mom shouted from up on the bridge. “You must have gotten stronger from all that working out.”
“Oh, this one is much lighter, Mom. I’m sure you can carry it. Makes me wonder just how it is that I managed the three-piece on my own in Vancouver. I guess you kind of get used to the weight.”
“Wait up a bit, I'm going to walk down and get some photos of you.”
After repacking the gear into the hatches Mom gave me a tight hug, before I waded knee deep into the water. The temperature was numbingly cold, even through the dry suit.
“I loved the four days I got to spend with you. Take good care of yourself, eat healthy food, stay warm in the tent, and come back in one piece. I only have one son,” she said in a sulky voice.
“I will mom, I promise. There are no bears to worry about in the UK like in Vancouver Island. Maybe some football hooligans, but I don’t think they’ll be kayaking.”
“I’ll come visit you in July. By then you’ll probably be up somewhere in Scotland!”
The Thames is neither the longest nor the largest river in the UK, those titles go to the Severn that empties in the Bristol Channel on the west coast of England, but it is perhaps the waterway with the most character. At Trinity Square near the banks of the river stands an iconic baroque building that used to be the headquarters of the London Port Authority. The facade is lined with Corinthian columns supporting large windows and balconies that allow natural light to flood the interior and give wide views of the surroundings and the river. A prominent central tower rises above the Immediately above the balcony and is adorned with intricate carvings and marine images of ships, anchors and sea creatures. Chief amongst the ornaments is a statue of a muscular man with a long curled beard in the style of the god Neptune who stands gazing at the river flowing by with a trident in hand. Old Father Thames has been the guardian spirit of the river since before the Romans set foot in Britain. The fate and fortune of London has through history been tied to the whims and temperament of their local deity. When the river god feels respected it gives safe passage to sailors, an abundant catch to the fishermen, and leisure and prosperity to the local residents. But he also has no misgivings to show hostility and a propensity for collective punishment, when treated with scorn. Over the years, ships have wrecked in the treacherous tides, drinking wells have been the source of numerous typhus and cholera epidemics, and one hot summer day in 1858 called the Great Stench, the pollution from the city’s open sewers, cesspits and slaughterhouses was said have developed an odor so foul and awful that the Houses of Parliament couldn’t hold session without soaking the curtains chlorine to mask the smell.
The river today is much cleaner, I was assured, thanks to several wastewater treatment plants. Admittedly, I did not notice any bad odors emanating from the water as I paddled past Westminster and the Big Ben Tower. Nonetheless, there seemed to be a multitude of random debris floating everywhere, and the miso soup murkiness of the water splashing over the kayak deck was enough for me to toss away the bananas I had been carrying under the bungee cords for an afternoon snack.
For the first hour I cruised at 6 miles per hour with the river pulling me forwards, passing several bridges and meandering through a landscape of urban parks and modern housing developments. At Putney Park I came across two rowing boats heading up the river. They seemed to be training for a race, and I was mesmerized just how the four rowers in each boat seemed completely comfortable wearing short sleeves and tight spandex shorts in the cold drizzle. When I reached the London Eye Ferris Wheel there was a sudden change in the current; the concrete pylons of a nearby pedestrian platform had developed a turbulent eddy pointing towards me with water piling up on the opposite side like the bulbous bow on a container ship. The rising tide was making the river flow upstream.
The flow quickly picked up and forced me to hug close to the south bank of the river, only deviating outwards in short bursts of speed into deeper water to paddle past river barges moored on the numerous piers. Paddling past under the eight bridges that cross the Thames between Westminster and Tower Bridge was especially challenging, the bridge pillars narrowed the river making the water especially fast and I had to use the back eddies that formed immediately upstream of each bridge to catch my breath. These eddies turned out to be convenient rest stops to observe the scenery of central London. On one bridge with a pedestrian walkway a local couple even stopped to look down at me. My bright yellow kayak must have stood out from the otherwise beige and gray waterscape on the foggy Thames.
“Oi, where ya’ off to, on that massive yellow canoe, mate?” Shouted the man waving at me in a thick dark coat.
“Oh I’m just paddling and doing some sightseeing. What’s the big glass building up ahead that looks like the Eye of Sauron?”
“Ha! Yer American, ain't ya. Ya mean the Shard? Blimey, it does look a bit like the Mordor tower from the films. Reckon it’s chocka with wankers, bigwigs and bean counters. How far ya going today? ”
“As far as the Erith Rowing Club I saw that there’s a place for me to pull out there.”
“Mate, you best get moving or you’ll be stuck at the barrier. Y’know they roll it up when the tide’s high?”
“Only when there's a risk of flooding, right?”
“Aye, that’s pretty much every bleeding day nowadays.”
I took his advice and put in some serious elbow grease to make headway against the current. I quickly went past a few more of London’s famous landmarks which I had only previously known from photographs or TV. There was the infamous Walkie-Talkie building whose curved mirror facade can focus the sun beams into a deathray that can fry eggs on the pavement and melt cars stuck in traffic. Just beyond was the gray stone building of the Tower of London flying the Union Jack. I recalled from highschool history class that it was a notorious prison for British royals and nobles, and that a good number of them ended up beheaded, hanged, or put to death in some other creative fashion. Finally there came Canary Wharf, and the Isle of Dogs, a large meander of the river that used to be a ship building dock, but now serves as London’s financial center (and also choked full of wankers and bean counters according to the man on the bridge).
When I got to the Millenium Dome which hosted the 2012 Olympic games something strange happened. The current from the rising tide suddenly stopped and the water became slack. At first I assumed that the tide must have been about to change, and I was optimistic that I would soon be going with the flow again and cover the 30 miles I had set as the day’s goal. Then, a little further on the reason became clear. The Thames barrier was up. From a distance I thought it was just another bridge over the river, with the large metal roofed piers styled to look like helmets of the Knights Templar. Then when I got closer I noticed that each pier had a big luminous red X sign. Nothing and no one was going through. I checked the barrier times on the internet, and it wasn’t due to go back down again until 4:45pm, two hours, by which time there wouldn’t be enough time to arrive in Erith with daylight.
“Great, what do I do now?” I thought
I bobbed on the water for a while. A rumbling Thames Clipper high speed boat arrived and docked at a pier on the north bank. I recognized the name “Venus”, it was the third time I had seen it running the London stretch of the river. I paddled up close to the boat and caught the eye of the captain who also recognized me.
“I’ve clocked ya a coupla times already. Where ya off to, then?”
“Well, I was hoping to keep going to Erith, but It looks like I’m stuck, and there’s no place to pull out.”
“Ah yeah the barrier - you ain’t gettin’ through there. You might wanna try the Greenwich Yacht Club. It’s just across the other side. They might be able to sort ya out.”
I paddled across the river, left the kayak on the boat ramp and walked through the open rolling gate of the yacht club into a sailboat yard. At the clubhouse I found an elderly man and a lady sitting on a rundown couch chatting some gossip over a few beers. I was quite certain that running into a soaked and tired creature that had crawled out of the river was the last thing they were expecting to see.
“Was you out on the river in this bleedin’ awful weather, darlin’?” Asked the elderly lady.
“Yes. I paddled on a kayak down the river from the KEW Bridge. I was planning to keep going, but the barrier is up so I guess I’m stuck.”
“All the way from KEW bridge? Well I’m gobsmacked. That’s a fair trek innit?” Said the old man, “And where you from and where you off to”
“I’m from Florida. I’m planning on going around the UK and Ireland, but it’s only day one today. We’ll see…”
“Like all the way up to Scotland? Blimey, that's impressive! Y’know, I once got meself a 38 foot catamaran in Jacksonville and I sailed ‘re all the way ‘ome, right through the Azores. “Ere, come outside, I’ll show you the dinghy it came wiv. It still has the Florida Reg on it. On I’m Charlie by the way - nice to meet ya!”
“Oh I would love to see it.” I said but I might have sounded either uninterested or tired. “One small question, do you think I could maybe spend the night here at the yacht club? My kayak is on the boat ramp and I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Aye… It’s a bit of pickle. Hey Mary, can we give the young gentleman a hand?”
They couldn’t let me stay the night as the entire place is locked after dark. However, Charlie lent me his token key from his key chain to walk in through the main gate in the morning, along with a separate key for the club’s boat hangar to store the kayak for the night. “It will be safe here with your gear. In the morning when you come back in, drop the key and the token inside the dinghy.”
“Oh Wow. Thank you so much. I will keep it very safe inside my wallet. I said with immense gratitude.” Do you know if there’s a place to stay close by?”
“Yeah. There’s a hotel a few blocks up the road. Not much food round ‘ere though. Reckon the Ikea place might be open for a couple more hours. They have a food court in there.”
“An Ikea store, really?” I said surprised. “I really wanted to go to one.”
“You’re remodelin’ a kitchen?
“Haha, maybe I’ll get a few ideas for the future. Right now I need a few of their laundry bags. They are going to be very useful for me…”
Running into Charlie was a fortunate event. The first of countless more throughout the journey and it reminded me of the myths of ancient Greece. Whenever the hero of the story gets into a bind, the gods miraculously intervene to save him. Athena handed a polished bronze shield to Perseus so he could avoid looking directly at Medusa, Heracles unchained Prometheus and shot the eagle eating his liver, and Adriadne gave Theseus the ball of yarn to navigate the labyrinth. Perhaps I too am on a Hero’s Journey, I thought. And the Gods will be watching over me.
I thanked Charlie a few more times for his assistance (and the bottle of Black Sheep Ale he thrust into my hand.) and gifted to him the first of the beanies (“We call it a wooly hat,” as he later corrected me) I planned to give away throughout the journey, and explained that I would also be donating $5 to St. Mungos for his help.
“I need to rename something after you.” I said “Everybody that helps me in the journey gets something named after them. What would you like?”
“Oh I dunno… ‘ow about the Millennium Dome?”
“Perfect! The Millennium Dome is now to be known as, humm… Charles’ Rotunda!” I proclaimed.
“Ha! I like it!”
The next day brought a little improvement on the weather and the drizzly rain gave a temporary truce for the time being. I was glad to see a small boat sailing down the river; it meant the Thames barrier was open. However, I was immediately struck by the size of the tidal range. The boat ramp I had landed at the previous evening seemed more like a runway culminating on a cliff six feet above a mudflat with the river’s edge at least another hundred feet away. There were all kinds of debris in the mud that people must have been tossing in the river over the years. The most noticeable were the car tires and plastic debris, but after I had retraced my steps a few times to carry the kayak and the gear, I found a few colorful ceramic shards that must have once been part of a blue pot and several rusty nails. Whether they were recent or centuries old I couldn’t possibly know, but mud crawling, I later learned, is a popular pastime with some Londoners, and finding artifacts from Roman times is not uncommon.
I was careful not to add any of my gear to the layers of London’s geologic history, and after a dirty, messy and sweaty portage to the water I was finally ready to start paddling.
I came to a place I had marked on the GPS as an interesting spot for a wastewater treatment Engineer like me. The Crossness Pumping Station was a historical sewage pumping station built in 1865. I had seen pictures of the building that showed it was ornately decorated with colored stained glass windows and archways like an Italian church supported by purple cast iron columns. Even the engine room and pump machinery resembled the priest’s altar, and the toilet bowls were embellished to look like baptism pools. Everything had been made to be both functional and beautiful, and I would have agreed with Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the Design Engineer of the project, that the work done in his building was worthy of at least as much veneration as the Sunday mass in St Paul’s Cathedral a few miles up the river.
A few miles farther down was the sewage plant outfall where the southbank of the river became an enormous boil of rising water. I was a bit concerned that I couldn’t smell any chlorine which made me wonder what was being done for disinfection before discharging the effluent in the river. In the United States, any municipal wastewater discharge that comes in contact with the public is chlorinated so the residual chlorine keeps any lingering bacteria from multiplying as soon as the water leaves the plant. I took a look around at the industrial landscape of factories, warehouses, oil refineries and shipping terminals, and concluded that I might be the only person on Earth who thought it would be a scenic trip to paddle this section of the Thames. Soon after I ran past two enormous barges moored on a pier owned by Thames Water. This was the first time I had ever seen a bubbler boat, used for pumping large amounts of air into the water whenever oxygen levels in the water drop too low for fish to survive. It was comforting to see that at least today they weren’t in use. If it’s good enough for the fish, it must be ok for me to be here, I thought. A little further down I briefly caught sight of a porpoise poking its blowhole out through the muddy water before disappearing with a tail fluke.
For most of the day I paddled against a rising tide. As the river meandered I kept switching sides between the north and south bank to stay in the slow current, but this was a frightful affair with several large ships prodding up and down the river and I had to constantly keep my wits about me. Two times I was approached by patrol boats asking whether I was lost, and I had to let them know that everything was fine, and that I wanted to concentrate on paddling. I was moving slowly against the current, and as the hours ticked by into the afternoon I was growing concerned that I might have been too ambitious thinking that I could cover the 37 miles to the harbor at the little town of Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey. It will be easier when the tide changes and starts to ebb again, then you’ll be flying, I told myself.
Unfortunately the ebbing tide also meant that I quickly started running out of water to paddle in. At 5:00 pm with only about an hour of daylight left, the hull of the kayak started scraping the mud, and I was faced with a difficult decision; make a lengthy detour further out into deeper water or find a place to land somewhere. The container ships I had been dodging throughout the day in the river were a big concern, I could see three of them heading up river towards me. Even from on top the deck of a large boat, the kayak’s low profile means it’s barely visible above the water; on a cloudy moonless night, with or without kayak lights, I would be completely invisible.
I kept paddling with what little water was left, until I caught sight of a sandy beach nestled in between the berms on the south bank of the river. I checked the GPS and saw that I was still 3.7 miles away from Sheerness Harbor. The beach was about a thousand feet away, and the water was less than one palm deep. I pushed my paddle into the mud; it felt kind of firm. Let’s start walking while it’s still easy to pull the kayak.
Fifteen minutes into the ordeal was enough for me to wonder if I had made the right decision. The mud got knee deep in places and pulling the laden kayak behind me meant that I could hardly manage more than ten or fifteen steps before needing a break to switch arms. Sometimes I pulled facing forward, while other times I leaned backwards with my weight to pull the kayak for boat length or two. Going back was out of the question, the tide was receding faster than I could walk. All the while during my purgatory walk I noticed a man wearing a bright green jacket jogging along the top of the berm. When I was some 300 feet away he stopped and kept looking attentively at me like I was some kind of curiosity. I waved at him to say everything was ok, and he pointed me to the rocks on the base of the berm, indicating that he could help pull the boat along the edge to the beach.
“You’ve picked the worst spot to come to shore. At low tide the river drops almost a mile.”
“Thank goodness I ran into you. It’s been quite exhausting.” I said catching my breath.
Don had been a general practitioner with the National Health Service. He’d worked for many years in Manchester, and after retirement had moved to a small village called the Isle of Grain. “It’s about two miles along the berm wall. It’s a lovely walk when the weather is a bit nicer and you can see a lot of Oystercatchers and Teals in the marshes behind the berm. But it’s been absolutely miserable this winter. My wife and I are off to South Florida for a week next month.”
I mentioned that I live in Miami, to which he gave me a look of pure confoundedness. “You swapped the blue water and white sand to come spend the winter mud-skipping on the brown Thames, did you?”
He was about to continue on his way, when he told me that I should think about washing off the mud. “You look like you’ve been, well, rolling on the Thames mud. That stuff’s proper nasty. I hope you didn’t swallow any of it. You might find a spot to stay at the Kent Holiday Park, but it’s a good four mile trek along the berm.”
After paddling for thirty five miles, followed by an arduous crawl through the mud, I hardly felt able to walk and pull the kayak on the cart along an uneven dirt path for 4 miles in the dark.
“I think I’ll set up the tent while there’s still some dusk light.” I said. “Then I can get an early start tomorrow.”
His suggestion was prescient, however, as soon as I had started setting the tent I snapped one of the poles, and I immediately let out a tirade of curses. It was a foolish oversight to bring a five year old tent to save a couple of hundred dollars. It’s showing its age, but I’m sure it will last for this trip. I thought.
“You can leave the kayak on the Berm. No one’s gonna come poking about at night.” Don suggested.
“I guess you’re right.”
The broken tent pole was a big inconvenience. It sheared rather than snap along its length which couldn't be fixed with duct tape. Delivery of a new tent from Amazon would take two days and I would have to pick-up at some address along the way. This morning however, had a more pressing issue to deal with. Escaping from the berm. The bottom of the low tide had occurred at 7:30am and I now stood by the kayak contemplating the immense brown mud plain in front of me. The Thames was at least a mile away and I could barely hear the rumble of the two motor boats in the distance buzzing towards the North Sea. At least you will be walking towards the water and the water will be rising towards you. It might not be so bad. Said a voice in my head.
I noticed that some of my footprints on the mud from the previous day were clearly still there which probably meant that the last high tide likely hadn’t gotten all the way to the berm. If you wait too long you might miss the peak of the high tide. Then you’ll be chasing the receding water.
“I guess I better get going.”
The second round of mud-skipping with the kayak was even more unpleasant. I was sinking down to my knees in places, and progress was measured in boat lengths pulled between rest breaks. From a distance the mud plain seems uniform and smooth like a chocolate pudding, but this is a deception. When the tide drains away it leaves subtle ripples and grooves with small pools that make the air shimmer in the sun like a mirage and make the river seem closer than it really is. The receding water also carved a network of steep channels which sometimes were three or four feet deep. Pulling the laden kayak behind me, it was distressing to arrive at one of these channels and feel like I was staring at the Grand Canyon. Maybe I should sit and wait for the tide to come to me. I thought
Crossing these channels was pure misery. I had to scout along the rim to find a suitable crossing location where the slope was a little gentler. Then I would slowly push the kayak down the cliff without letting it slip away or the packed bow hogging in the air (which would have put a severe bending stress on the hull). Being by myself, the prudent thing to do would have been to unload the kayak as the consequence of inflicting as crack in the hull could have been fatal, but the laboriousness and muddy disorder (let alone the chance of leaving something behind) that would have ensued made me weigh in favor of the risk.
Getting to the bottom of the channel was the easy part. I still had to climb out with the kayak up the other side. For this I used the slight water depth and firm ground in the bottom of the channel for a running approach to build momentum and etch the kayak as far as possible up the channel wall. I did this at an angle to lessen the slope but at the expense of a longer run and it took two or three thrusts to get out and over the rim. The effort felt like the sprint at the end of a marathon, only in this case the next channel where the process would be repeated was sometimes less than five hundred feet away.
About two hours into the ordeal I sat on top of the kayak for a longer rest, and looked back towards the start point. I noticed a faint green figure standing like a teapot with both hands on his waist on top of the berm. I assumed it must have been Don taking a pause from his morning jog to look at me. It made me feel a little embarrassed to be out there. You dummy. You should have waited for someone to show up and help you carry the kayak to a better launch point. It would probably have taken the same, maybe not less time and a lot less effort. I didn’t wave or give any acknowledgement lest he think I was in distress. I was now much closer to the river than the berm. Some fifty more boat lengths, and I would get there.
I finally came to a stop two boat lengths from the water's edge and went to wash off some of the mud from the drysuit. It was a hurried affair, with barely enough time to hurry back, crawl into the cockpit, and clip on the spray skirt before the water became ankle deep, the kayak started floating and the mudflats that seemed to stretch on forever suddenly disappeared along with my footprints. Time to get out of this purgatory! I thought.
There was a strong westerly breeze coming down from London, and I put up the sail to make some distance with the aid of the wind and compensate for the rising tide. Soon however, I noticed a problem. The kayak deck at the base of the mast was visibly sagging from the downward force of the stays, and the mast itself seemed slanted towards the windward side by at least fifteen degrees. I had noticed a very slight tilt while paddling down the Thames in very light winds, and thought that maybe I was imagining thing, but now it was undeniable. “God damn it. Rockpool must not have added the carbon-kevlar reinforcement to stiffen the deck.”
This was disappointing. When I first purchased the three piece kayak in Miami it had experienced the same issue and required considerable effort and time to patch in the additional reinforcement. Even at that time, when I was ordering the kayak, I had requested that the reinforcement be added during construction and was assured it had been done. This time I had been adamant with Rockpool; whatever reinforcement they had done the last time had been insufficient, and they should at least triple the number of layers this time around. There are enough problems and issues that happen in the day to day of a six month expedition, and this in particular, was one I really didn’t want to have to deal with.
“Screw it, it is what it is. I’m not going to fix this here. I guess the sail is going to be dead weight for now.” I said out loud, putting the sail away. Problems always come in batches. Yesterday the tent, and now the kayak sail. Hopefully not more than those two for now.
I paddled hugging the coast along the Isle of Sheppey to mitigate the effect of the rising current. The tide turned around midday, but by then the early morning westerly breeze changed into a strong easterly wind and whatever boost I thought I would get from paddling with the falling tide was more than countered by the choppy seas. My goal was to arrive at a town called Herne Bay; aerial photographs showed that it had a sheltered harbor within easy walking distance from the town center and accommodation. Unfortunately, I discovered that at low tide, the entire harbor quickly drains out like a bathtub leaving behind the dreaded mudflats as if a nasty dirty giant had taken a bath in it. Oh hell, I’m not mudskipping again, not today. The area seemed to have a noxious smell of raw sewage, and I quickly decided to back paddle half a mile to a shingle beach I had thumbed my nose at, because it would have required a long portage into town. A walk along a paved road seemed like a much better deal, than a slog through the mud, even if that meant portaging the kayak over a few hills.
The portage turned out to be quite a bit longer than I had anticipated and I fitted the kayak with flashlights to make it visible to traffic. The evening was settling in, and the few street lights seemed unusually dim. At the top of the first hill I managed to catch the very last ray of sunlight which made the overhanging cliff cast a long shadow towards the sea and where far out in the distance were a few dim city lights on the horizon marking the north shore of the estuary some thirty miles away. For a moment I pondered if that would be the direction from where I would be arriving on the last day of the journey. I pictured myself out on the water paddling in from the horizon with the wind in my back, wondering what might be on my mind six months in the future.
How strange; I’ve barely started a three thousand mile journey, but one day it will end. All things come to an end, one day, I thought.
After much walking I arrived late at night at a family Bed and Breakfast, a house with a tiled roof that shared walls with the neighboring properties along a narrow two way street, which I was fortunate to be able to book a room for two nights to wait for the arrival of the new tent. It was also a lucky find to discover that the backyard had been converted into a parking lot where I could keep the kayak off the street.
The owners were a friendly couple in their mid thirties. They had purchased the adjacent properties to their house and had remodeled the interior spaces into separate suites, and added an internal passage to their house leading to the front desk. “Would you like a Full English Breakfast tomorrow?” said the lady in a mellow voice
“Ah, sure…” I replied, not giving a thought to ask what that it entailed. The next morning I got to find out.
Breakfast was an assortment of items arranged in small crucibles on a large plate like paints on an artist’s palette. Some things were familiar; the fried eggs, and sliced mushrooms fried in butter, I was happy to eat. Others, however, gave my taste buds a hard time, the English have bizarre tastes. They enjoy unsavory baked beans mixed with ketchup sauce which they consume with undercooked bacon and oily pork sausages. This goopy mixture was served with a side cake called Bubble Squeak, which from the name I thought was some kind of sweet pancake. It turned out to be cabbage with mashed potatoes and leftover vegetables. By far, however, the one thing on the plate that really repulsed me was something black pudding, which my tongue informed me was definitely not pudding (I later found out it’s fried pork blood with oatmeal).
How English food came to have a dearth and uninspiring reputation was a mystery to me until I related the experience to an English friend from high school who said that it had a lot to do with rationing and food shortages Britain experienced during World War II when German U-boats targeted supply ships with food and raw materials leaving people to make due with whatever was available. “If you want authentic British food, you need to go to an Indian restaurant, and order chicken tikka masala. That’s our real national dish.”
I wasn’t keen on experimenting with any other exotic local foods for the time being, and after a morning walk exploring the seafront promenade and the amusement arcades on the town pier, I had lunch at a local Italian ice-cream shop. I was feeling very upbeat, the new tent was scheduled to be delivered that afternoon, the forecast for the next few days looked favorable with no rain and light winds, and I would soon be out of the mucky estuary and paddling in proper ocean water.
Then suddenly, things got quite bad. As I walked back to the hotel, I felt a sharp pang in my bowels, followed by cold sweats, and joint pains. My legs became wobbly and I started shuffling to be able to walk. I barely made it through the hotel front door before darting straight to the toilet bowl where I unloaded one of the foulest bouts of diarrhea and vomiting I’ve ever experienced.
“Old Father Thames is giving you a hard time, mate?” A local friend said after I sent out a message that I’d be needing at least a few days to recover.
“Could it have been something I ate?”
“Aye, British grub can be a bit dodgy, but it’s not usually gonna turn you inside out like that. Nah. no chance. Definitely the Thames. It’s got a bit of a reputation for doing folks in, especially with all the rain we’ve been getting. I saw that pic of the Crossness Pumping Station you put up. Blimey, I wouldn’t fancy a paddle around there. Bet the sewage plant was by-passing half the lot - proper minging, innit?”
“Yeah. Maybe. I’m going to be in between the bed and the toilet at least until tomorrow.”
“Get some rest mate. You’ve still got another three and a half thousand miles to go. Don’t wear yourself out too soon!”
