Wales – AC Canoe Adventures

A trip along superb coastline

Starting at Freshwater East

We had to travel to West Wales and decided to make the most of it and take the kayaks. You know how it is, we planned to be on the water by late morning, the meeting took longer and then we we discovered the absolute gridlock of holiday traffic, roadworks and goodness knows what else in Pembroke town. Note to self: AVOID in Summer! Change to plan B.

Second, be aware that parking at Stackpole Quay is very limited and was full even on a Monday in the middle of August. Plan C?

Certain that we would find somewhere to launch we continued along the minor road to Freshwater East. Here we found a car park on the left (with space! £5.00 for the day!!!) and, better still, a small track opposite which lead up past some houses to the top of a slipway. There is no parking here and not advisable to drive onto the sand, but we were able to unload the boats right on the beach and then go back to park the van.

We arrived knowing that the tide would be ebbing, and I had flash-backs to very very long carries at Oxwich, but the beach has a better gradient here, so the sea didn’t disappear too far away.

Weather and tide

We were paddling on an ebbing tide so we decided to leave Freshwater East and paddle with the tide to start with and head towards Stackpole and Castlemartin. (Check on 01646 662287 to make sure there is no firing on the ranges). We expected winds of around 7 mph (light) from the NW, so we faced a calm trip under the cliffs. As we were around 3 hours after high tide, we expected to have a faster tide on the way out than for our return, making for slightly easier paddling. (Here it runs on 4kn Springs and based on the twelfths rule, we’d expect around 3 knots as we were off Springs and heading for neap tides). If you’d like a nice quick article on tides and the twelfths rule, have a look at: http://www.ukseakayakguidebook.co.uk/short_articles/tide_simplified.pdf

Setting out

We headed round Trewent point and crossed the bay towards Stackpole point. It was a steady trip across and we stopped to watch tankers moored and doing exercises with their lifeboats. At Stackpole head there are lots of rocks beneath the surface and we found the tide running fairly well: as we looked through the rock arches, we had the bizarre illusion the the rocks behind were moving! At under 3kn it was a steady paddle against the flow, but once under the dramatic arches we found calm water.

Never in a hurry, we stopped round the corner to watch climbers traversing the superb limestone cliffs.

Limestone cliffs at Stackpole and Mowingword

Continuing across the bay we headed around Church Rock (another rock that had abandoned climbing slings as evidence that we would never be the first to its top).

Church Rock, Broad Haven dunes behind it.

Heading back

On the way back we took our time again and made the most of exploring the many caves, arches and rock gardens that we found.

It’s a great place for practicing manoeuvres and testing paddle strokes, looking for the movement of the water and, last but not least, being glad that you have a plastic, not composite boat when it doesn’t quite go to plan!

And finally heading back to the dramatic arches of Stackpole Head…

The trip back across the bay felt long, and once we’d rounded Trewent we felt the wind funneling down from the shore. I’ve felt this effect before: light winds can become much more than expected when they are channeled down a valley.

…and Finally

Definitely a trip to do again and next time maybe to get along under the cliffs by Castlemartin. Or maybe go the other way to Caldey Island.

Oh, and here is the video: https://youtu.be/M4MkgSNJ9T8

So many choices.

It was a bit late in the year when we bought our sea kayaks, so it was something of a race to get out and play before Winter set in.

I have a love-hate relationship with bodies of water – on the one hand I am very nervous of it and not a natural swimmer. On the other, I have always loved being by it; childhood memories of happy seaside holidays, rock-pooling and collecting ‘Eye-Spy’ points (anyone else remember those?). 30 years ago, in an effort to overcome this rather overwhelming fear of water, I took a Winter course with a canoe club. It was all about rolling BATS and the first thing we had to do was dive in and swim two lengths of the pool. I can swim two lengths, (not stylishly), but not dive and it was something of a ‘swim of shame’. The kindly (I think not!) instructor selected me to sit in the BAT first and told me to capsize it. Well – for all you water-babies out there you probably wonder what the fuss was about, but it was a move of terror for me. To cut a long story short, I never really got into kayaking from that point. (I wonder why?) As a coach in my current life, many years later, this makes me absolutely cringe…..

Surely this ditch-and-retrieve things isn’t that hard?

A few years on I met the love of my life who was a keen sport diver. He is a complete water-baby, and even now I’m not sure how he hides his gills. It took me a whole Winter of weekly pool training to get my basic SAA qualifications and I remember my poor husband watching in frustration and splashing his fins on the pool surface while I tried vainly to duck dive and to swim a width under water. I got there with a lot of support, confidence-building slowly – oh, so slowly – until I could successfully complete my ditch and retrieve in 5m of water. Only such a non-water-baby as me could have chosen a club that used the pool used by SBS for training.

I now believe that the struggle muscle that got me through not only sport diving, but qualifying as dive supervisor, and later to technical and mixed gas diving was powerful in making the sport enjoyable for me. It wasn’t something that was going to happen fast, but the small steps to confidence were lasting.

I loved diving – not the boat trips (sea-sick), not the agony of warming up after Winter dives in a wetsuit, not the fast drift dives in murky water over rocky ledges, not the heaving about of hefty kit. What I loved was the sea life, cute tompot blennies peering out of pipes under Swanage pier, the velvety sea slugs in the Mediterranean, shoals of manta off St Helena. But some of the best were the seals. Those wonderful, curious, elegant swimmers that I first came face to face with on the Barrel of Butter up on Orkney.

And now? Now I want to go out in a sea kayak and see seals. This is where my kayaking story really starts.

With a determination that a few waves aren’t going to deter me from getting out in a kayak, it was important to build my confidence; diminish the fear of capsizing; learn to be calm in this alien environment and go out and enjoy the coast.

First steps were a course in basic flat-water skills at Cardiff International White Water in August 2019. Next, get out there on the sea and have some fun. Now, starting out for 2020 I want to try and get confident enough to roll and avoid wet exits form the kayak….

So here we go. While waiting for our plane to go skiing in January we booked our places at Plas Y Brenin in March this year.

We set out on a blustery wet Friday afternoon for North Wales and by the time we arrived at PYB we were ready for a relaxing beer in the bar. Many moons ago, it was almost impossible to get a decent pint in Wales (lager or Brains only, and never on a Sunday) PYB’s bar has great beer and decent, filling food; so that was a good start to our weekend. It’s always handy to be drinking alongside another beer drinker, so Christopher wasn’t surprised that after he’d ordered a pint, I checked it to see if it was worth having, or whether I should choose differently.

The pool sessions were great, with excellent coaching. I suppose that some might see it as a fail that I wasn’t rolling in two days. I see it as a great and steady foundation on which to continue slowly building confidence. My big ‘aha’ was finding my orientation upside-down and under water.

Assisted rolling – finally bringing my head out of the water last

It’s a shame that I can’t get to pool sessions with the local clubs, as I am sure that this would be a superb way to build my knowledge, experience and confidence. Sadly, work either takes me away too much, or I am coaching equestrians in their spare evenings. Nonetheless, we live within easy distance of lots of water – rivers, lagoons, seaside. So, keen to get out, we took the kayaks down to Cardiff for a paddle in The Bay. It was rougher than it was on our New Year’s Day trip, and rather colder, so in spite of our best intentions to practice capsizes, wet exits, rolls…. we succumbed to the idea of hot soup and warm clothes…

Anyway, thinking back on my first trip in Two Tonne Tess (my rather weighty blue Scorpio), in September 19, when even a ripple sent me rushing back to the safety of dry land, it seems that the trips we’ve made have started, just slowly to build that -oh so precious, oh so important and ohhh so elusive – confidence.

I can’t wait for warmer weather and gentler breezes….

Tag: Wales

Freshwater East