Bank Holiday Bonkers!...29/08/2011

There was this text, see. There was some beer and wine involved too, see. There was a late night curried Smoothound delivery, see. There was some more wine, see. That’s why. That’s all the reasons needed, see.

07:30 and Si’s at the door. I finish my coffee and we drive down to the end of my road – no buggering about with trolleys today. It’s a quick in-and-out, that’s the plan. Launch at South Beach, paddle the mile and a half straight out to the Stanford Buoy and paddle straight back in again. It’s forecast for 10-15mph westerlies and we know we’re going to have to aim off because it’ll be around mid-tide and we’re approaching springs but I figure on an hour instead of the usual 20-30 minutes. So we launch into this flat sea. We could have gone fishing but the tides didn’t suit Si’s ear-bending and I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to do anyway so a paddle for the hell of it was the order of the day.

A bit of chop as we cross the first of the banks and a bit of swell running too. We’re aiming off a fair bit, heading for the South West Holm buoy in fact, and as we’re doing well we decide to hit that one first and then paddle south for the Stanford Buoy. We stop to let a trawler through, it’s a bit rough here now, almost as rough as my road was on Wednesday night with the triple machete stabbing incident on my neighbours, so we don’t want to come a cropper with this fella. Bad move, we drift south and it takes a hell of an effort to close in enough to read the nameplate clearly. I'm making maybe half a knot…



I turned and headed back towards Si:



Ah yes, he is still with us!



Bollocks to this, we’re two miles out by now, time to head back in to the Stanford, half a mile south perhaps.



Now, I looked when I got back in and the RNSYC weather station recorded 26.2mph at around 09:30. This was shortly before we landed the second time. Trouble is the tide was running full tilt now and the wind had gone south westerly. Heading straight in was leaving us almost at a standstill as we were getting pushed backwards as we weathercocked. We had to aim for Kessingland and just make the effort to get back once we were closer in.

It was hard paddling. We crawled in, any cruising speed built up being sapped by the chop and swell and when we started hitting the banks and the shallow water over them things became somewhat livelier. Then the wind shifted westerly again and we slogged our way in, landing under the cliffs at Pakefield. A quick breather and we paddled the ¾ mile back to the launch point in calm water.

Lovely stuff, a nice burn-off of the wine. I estimate a six mile loop (at least) in the two hours constant hard paddling, double it for the effort! I was so worn out that I did the washing up before cycling to Pakefield and back in top gear ;D I think I’m getting close to killing poor old Si, he’s only known me a month or so (previous 25 years discounted because it was vague, via a mutual schoolfriend!)