I had to get out to finish the year but what a shit run of weather! High winds, rain, cold, huge seas…looked great. I was soooo tempted. To stay at home. But I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. I thought about going for a sail on the broad but it was too gusty. I figured I may as well try not to kill myself on the RRRapido for a while. As it turned out this was the only option, I had half an hour while I waited for the potatoes to cool before frying them so I went out for a battering.
I got to the end of the road and looked at the sea. It was mental. Large and messy. The strong south easterly wind was making things worse too, being next to impossible to paddle against. Well, there wasn’t a great deal of point going in but…I was dressed and here now. I wandered down to the inside of the groyne and watched the way the waves were coming and how…I wasn’t certain I’d get out through them to be honest, they were big and heavy and dumping badly.
And then it looks slightly less terrifying and I pull the RRRapido up to me and jump aboard; I’m half-cocked, the thigh strap is under me and throwing me off balance, not good either where I am or in these waves but I shift my body around and keep my balance as I dig in and start flinging myself up and over and down and up again and take water over me everywhere, the camera getting knocked out of position but I keep going, get out of the danger zone and past the end of the groyne and then try to put the thigh straps on – I’ve only gone and pulled the screw and it’s flapping loosely. Well done, best I sort something and quick before I go swimming…
…legs over the side, straps lengthened and I kind of clip the strap to the seat strap behind me – it’s tricky but I make something that might work; the wind has sent me fifty yards down from the groyne now though, the best shaped of the poorly-shaped waves are up there and I think about paddling back up but…if I do that, following the line I’d come in on, I’d go slap bang into the biggest and snarliest, gnarliest bitch-dump ever. Not clever. No, I’ll hold position here, if I can, and wait for something I can ride.
It’s just peaks and troughs and lumps here and there, all so close together, stacked up behind each other, nothing wide enough for a proper ride and I’m pretty sure I’m going to get bruised so I may as well wait it out, wait for a wall of shit to come pounding in. I wait a good ten minutes, burning off Christmas fat and then a larger lump comes and I paddle for it…but it comes to nothing, not curling yet and it rolls under me. Bugger. I try the following one, it disappears into itself so I wait. Another five minutes pass and I hold myself in position, closer in…and there it is, something that will do. Not a surf wave, not a great wave, just a big lump of moving water. I dig deep and paddle for it, catch it, the nose drops and I scoot down and turn along it, running what there is until it breaks into a tumbling washing machine of foam with me on the edge, sliding in sideways, rapidly, onto the stony remnants of the beach, one eye open for the position of the digger working sand and shingle onto the shoreline from further up by the pier. It’s okay, he’s seen me – been watching me maybe - and I come crashing into England just down the beach from him.
A quick wave and I haul myself and my RRRapido up the bank and over onto the promenade to get those chips in the fryer along with the yak-caught cod I’d filleted the other week when the weather had been just that bit more suitable for kayaking.
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