South West Sea Kayaking

Spring follows winter.

For Sale: Small wooden hut with no electricity or water supply. No overnight residence permitted. Enough room for a deckchair inside, nice views. Sensible offers considered.

The south Devon coast between Start Point and Prawle Point is characterised by wave-cut platforms. These are basically bedrock reefs formed when wave action (over millennia) scours the cliffs away, leaving only the base layer of rock, just above the sea level. The platforms are dissected by numerous channels which just beg to be explored by paddlers!

The fellow in the yellow kayak is my good friend Chris Wheeler, with whom I’ve paddled regularly for at least ten years. Most of this has been on foreign white water rivers, in obscure gorges all over the globe. Chris has actually been paddling for over twenty years. Despite this, somehow he hadn’t ever been in a sea kayak up until recent times, claiming that he’d save this sort of boring nonsense for old age retirement(!). A concerted long-term indoctrination campaign eventually won him over, and he is now proud owner of the pictured sea kayak. He has even taken the sport overseas. He is happy to concede that he was wrong about sea kayaking, although I think it’s a safe bet that he won’t ever be buying a Kelly Kettle or growing unkempt facial hair.

Some of the titles on my desk right now…

Another section draughted, from Kimmeridge to Lulworth. This wasn’t too onerous, as I have been basically rewriting an article I wrote about this coast last year.

The photo shows Heather paddling through Bat Hole, a natural tunnel through the monolithic buttress cliff of Bat Head. The cliffs above featured in John Schlesinger’s 1967 film of Far from the Madding Crowd. Remember the opening scene when Gabriel Oak’s dog drives his herd of sheep over the edge? That was here. The film also featured Julie Christie. She is quite nice.

Trevose Head lighthouse is perched atop 50 metre cliffs, overlooking the dubiously named ‘Stinking Cove’. Out to sea some impressive rocks point skywards above the constant swell; the Bull and the Quies. The lighthouse commands a wide view up and down the Bristol Channel, and when first built was the only light to guide ships between Land’s End and Lundy. The photos here were taken last year whilst surfing in the area.

Ten years ago, I paddled past Trevose Head. I had lived on the south coast for several years and it bothered me that I didn’t know anything at all about the part of the Britain I now lived in, let alone about the sea itself. I bought a secondhand sea kayak and launched from Southbourne Beach (in front of the flat I then lived in). Nineteen days later I finished my trip at Woolacombe Beach in North Devon, having paddled nearly 400 miles around the south west peninsula. I’m not too sure how I survived the trip, but that’s another story. I was hooked on the sea and I was hooked on the south west.

As time marches on, I can recall less and less of the coast which made that such a brilliant trip. For instance, I cannot remember a single thing at all about paddling past Trevose Head. I have no memory of it all. This bothers me. A lot.

I’d better get back there soon.

I’ve just completed the first draught of the chapter describing my most local coast and my favourite paddle, the Swanage to Kimmeridge trip. You might think that writing about coast that I already know well would be a doddle, but it somehow took me all of yesterday to jumble 1500 words together. The problem is not so much what to put in, but what to leave out. I could bore for England on the pleasures of the Purbeck stone cliffs.

Halfway between Seacombe and Winspit, a distinctive slab of rock angles up from the water against the cliffs. This is Halsewell Rock. Close to this spot in January 1786, the sinking East Indiaman Halsewell was driven whole into a huge cave during a snowstorm. Of the 240 souls on board, only 82 survived until dawn, when crew members scrambled up the rock to seek help. The dead included seven young women en route to Bombay to marry staff of the East India Company.

Further details can be found here.

At low tide, the beach of Trebarwith Strand in North Cornwall is full of tourists and surfers. At high tide, the long beach disappears completely and the sea washes up to the cliffs and rocks.

A few of us headed off from Weymouth early this morning with the notion of paddling around the Isle of Portland. It’s not quite an island in reality, as it’s connected to Dorset by the pebbles of Chesil Beach. This is a tricky trip to get right, as the tide flows all over the place and hence you need to time your arrival at the southern tip carefully. Furthermore, any kind of swell makes landing on steep Chesil Beach (to portage across) pretty hair-raising.

Launching, we hit lumpy swell right away and the wind was fairly stiff…so the full trip around Portland was off. Instead we ambled around sheltered Portland Harbour, lunching on the Isle and playing in the surf and swell outside. This was more fun than it should have been. A few folk got wet.

We were joined by Bertie Beckram, who is a local.

Along the entire English coast, there is only a single cape.

This headland is several miles south of my house. I’ve paddled around it dozens of times, bouncing through the big tide race at the bottom. Most of the time I’ve been paddling without companions, but I’ve never been alone.

‘The National Coastwatch Institution (NCI) is a voluntary organisation set up in 1994 to restore a visual watch along UK shores after many small Coastguard stations closed due to Government cutbacks. NCI is a registered charity and controlled by a board of Trustees with a Constitution agreed by the Charities Commission. In 1994 when two fishermen lost their lives off the Cornish coast below a recently closed Coastguard lookout, local people decided to open and restore the visual watch. When the first station was opened at Bass Point on the Lizard, NCI was born. During the next ten years other stations followed and at the start of 2006 we have thirty operational stations keeping visual watch around the coastline of England and Wales. NCI stations have been set up along the coast from Lands End in the South West to Hartlepool in the North East. Each station has a qualified and highly trained team to watch over its own particular area whether it is a popular seaside town, busy port or shipping area. Accidents will always happen at sea and along the coastline, wherever there is an NCI station a watchkeeper will be looking out for danger and ensuring your safety on the water.’ From the NCI website.