Sea Kayaking in South West England
… I’ll be in India.
Pesda have sent the book off for printing and it should come back next month. I’ve put expedition white-water paddling on hold in the past eighteen months, so now that the book work is all done, I’m really looking forward to this trip. I was last there in 2006, and this will be my fourth trip to India’s wonderful Himalayan rivers!
I’ll be back in a couple of weeks, in time for the Launch Weekend - I do hope that you can join me for this celebration!
I’ve just sorted out the camping arrangements for the Book Launch Weekend.
Camping will be available at Higher Farm in East Prawle, located (I’m quoting the owners here) 50 metres past the telephone box on the same side, heading towards the sea.
It’s a farmer’s field with limited facilities, so please don’t expect Butlins! The owners ask for quiet in the evening and there will be a charge for camping, which I’ll extract from people in the morning before we paddle and pass on to the farmer.
I do hope that you can join us for this weekend!
Sunday morning … we all go paddling.
Map.
If you don’t know what this is all about …
In 1997, I phoned Exeter Canoe Club to arrange leaving a boat there; I was planning to paddle around the South West for the first time. The fellow I spoke to turned out to have completed this himself just a week previously, in an amazingly fast time. His name was Sean Morley.
Sean may well be the greatest British kayaker. Whilst working as an armed response policeman in Cornwall, Sean carried out a series of spectacular expeditions in British coastal waters;
Sean won the 125 mile Devizes to Westminster Race in 2005. In 2006 he won the English Masters Surf Championships and in 2007 he won the Masters class at the 2007 Surf World Championships.
Sean now lives in California, but he hasn’t forgotten the South West. I am absolutely honoured that he has written the foreword to South West Sea Kayaking.
The sun went down, sinking into the ocean to the west of England’s most westerly point. We were there. It was wonderful.
I’ve now confidently and definitively announced that I’ve finished working on South West Sea Kayaking at least half a dozen times! Every time I dare to stick my head above the parapet and say this, another round of jobs pops up out of the blue. Recent days have seen me putting in some considerable hours reviewing and annotating the page layouts and maps put together by the Pesda team, compiling an index (yawn), scribbling the blurb for the back cover, writing bumf about emergency services, as well as a hundred other little tasks. Pesda have been incredibly busy on the book, I’m frankly amazed by the quality of the work that they’ve produced in a relatively short space of time.
Today Pesda sent it all to the printers. This time, the book really is finished.
Touch wood.
The South West has been lashed by exceptional Atlantic storms this week, breaching flood defences all along the coast and cutting off the power supply to 30 000 houses (including this one, for most of yesterday). It’s seemingly a media regulation that after major storms, pictures and film must be shown of waves breaking over either the harbour wall at Porthleven in Cornwall, or Brunel’s South Devon Railway near Teignmouth in Devon. This footage is no exception.
“Mark, I just bought a second hand Nordkapp and fancy giving sea kayaking a try this weekend.”
“This Shell garage should stock everything we need.”
“I left the map at home. No worries, I can figure out a compass bearing from the road atlas.”
“Um … the GPS is saying that the Isles of Scilly are 70 miles behind us, inland.”
“I can see the Scillies! Hang about; they’re in the wrong place.”
“Are you sure that isn’t a shark?”
I recommend the skate.
Poole Harbour in Dorset is an enormous natural harbour. Despite being used by gigantic cross-channel ferries, the harbour has an average depth of 48cm.
I have no idea who works these things out.
The above photo was taken around dawn on a chilly morning last October, during my last visit to the Isle of Wight. It was taken from Grange Chine campsite, which is right beside the water’s edge. I didn’t need to walk three steps from the tent to take it. The only other living thing in sight was the birds you see in the shot. My hands were numb by the time I’d sorted out the tripod and clicked the shutter, and I dived straight back into my sleeping bag and went back to sleep afterwards!
I am using this picture here simply because I now can. Several months ago, I submitted a whole pile of photos for inclusion with the book; about a dozen for each of 50 routes, of which just a few will be used in the final book with each route. I have since been trying not to use photos that I short-listed for the book here on the blog. I have now previewed the publisher’s ‘pdf’ layouts for various routes, including the ‘Wight Channel Coast’ one. This picture wasn’t used, so now it’s fair game!
Seeing all the work I’ve done on this project rapidly transforming into a real book is quite exciting, to put it mildly. Franco and his team at Pesda Press are doing great things with it all, and I simply can’t wait to see the end product.
Incidentally; a route excerpted from the book will appear in the next Ocean Paddler Magazine.
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