Kayaking -
a long gestation

Andy started to paddle in 1976, on the River Cam in Cambridge, not a well-known white water venue. Fully occupied with the Caving Club at the time, I didn't have time to do another time-consuming activity to any significant level. But it was always "one of those things I'll get into eventually". An opportunity to paddle a river in Austria arose on a CUCC caving expedition, and I bought myself a Perception Pirouette in time for the next time I went out, paddling the river again (once) and playing a great deal on the lake. I managed to coach someone else to do his first roll, without ever managing one myself :-( I hardly knew any canoeists for years, but starting a family and having family membership of the Swaledale Outdoor Club provided an incentive to get going again - paddling seems a more likely activity to appeal to children than caving or serious fellwalking.

Having demonstrated that I was well-capable of survival whilst swimming near my kayak in white water, pool-training created a bit more ability (though thirteen swims in one trip down the Keswick Greta showed there was a way to go still). At the point of finally having learned to roll, along came foot-and-mouth to close down access to all the rivers, so sea kayaking became greatly appealing. And I was told that swimming was definitely not "the done thing" here :-) Hasn't stopped me :-(

A long weekend at Loch Sween and in the sound of Jura in absolutely perfect conditions (written up in the SOC newsletter) got me really hooked. This also looked like a good way to do multi-day camping trips in uncrowded places without the children having to carry heavy backpacks - something which definitely fitted with our ideas of a good holiday. I came back from this trip so enthused that Mary decided there must be something in this kayaking game, resulting in her going off on a "Discover sea kayaking" course with Plas Menai.

I soon bought my own first sea kayak (a North Shore Mistral), and became a regular participant in both days out and longer trips during the summer. Mary vacillated for ages over her own boat, as she is very light and had found it very hard paddling high volume boats into the wind. This limited the number of trips she got, as she had to borrow boats or go on courses. If we thought it was hard to find a boat to fit Mary at 45kg, it was going to be even harder to find one for my daughter Sarah, at under 20kg, who will probably be as light as Mary in another ten years or so as a young adult. Much research led me only to web pages about building kayaks - something about which I had my doubts. However, Nick Schade's book "The Strip-built Sea kayak" made the process sound just about within what I might tackle, so summer 2001 saw the start of my first kayak-building project, now named Geyrfugl. This 4.3m sea kayak is a 5/6ths scale version of Nick's Great Auk design and was completed in mid-February 2002.

Geyrfugl is too small for me, but proved to be moderately comfortable for Mary, and is an excellent fit for smaller people, though she is obviously a bit limited in rough conditions. But a wooden boat is such a nice thing that I had to have one.

I soon got to planning my next strip-built kayak. This one was (and eventually still is) going to be a 5.5m baidarka-style kayak (inspired by Laughing Loon's NorthStar, but independently evolved from the offsets of the Atka Island baidarka in the Hearst Museum, University of California at Berkeley), but unfortunately, my biggest heatable space isn't that long, so December 2002 saw the start of work on a different boat. To get some experience of different techniques, and try a few ideas out, this second boat has a stitch and glue hull with a strip deck - a hard-chined design with a rounded deck and very different from Geyrfugl. However, this Cormorant 466 is also scaled down from a published design, and is intended as a rock-hopping dayboat for me, or as a weekend boat for smaller members of the family. Launch date was ahead of my easter schedule, on April 9th 2003. Experience shows she is a bit more straight-tracking than ideal for a rock-hopping boat, but fast. She is also a bit of a handful in rough water, except perhaps when heavily loaded. However, I have found that it is possible to carry gear for a full week's paddling in her, and she has been paddled - solo - north of the Arctic Circle.

Mary finally chose a Low Volume version of the Romany from Nigel Dennis - a stable boat which gives her an excellent ability to enjoy big seas off the Scottish West Coast. No doubt I would enjoy these too, if I managed to take the North Shore boat, but so far, I have managed to take the smaller and rather tippy Cormorant whenever the sea has been rough, and the Mistral when it has turned out flat calm. Still, I now know I can roll :-)

We managed to come by a double very cheaply, and whilst this old McNulty Seaglass boat was a bit flat-bottomed for use on the sea and didn't track well in a wind, she was great for non-technical trips with two children in the front - our first river descent with children on the Wye in 2002 was done in this, as well as day trips on the Irish West coast. She has now been replaced by a proper sea double made in, and shipped from Helsinki - an Arctic Star 630 from Welho, delivered to my door for the same number of Euros I'd expect to pay in pounds for a UK boat.

I managed to hole my Pirouette on a weir on the Tees one very cold winter's day, so I bought a Pyranha Acrobat 275, which proved rather more forgiving and soon meant I was able to present some semblance of competence on grade 3 rivers. By mid 2003 the lawn looked like this (with a 17' Mad River Revelation Open Canoe not shown, and a Perception Sparc river kayak for Mary bought a few weeks after this photo was taken). February 2004 saw a hole in my Acrobat, annoying as I really got on well in this boat and it was only two years old. A repair proved possible, but not before the next trip, so an ex-Demo Pyranha H₂ zone 245 was hastily added to the stable, and a couple of rivers were enough to convince me that I like that even better. With the sea double in April 2004 - that brought us to a total of thirteen boats - of which our record is to transport all but one (the Horizon) on/in our two cars to a Swaledale Outdoor Club come-and-try-it day. (We had friends for New Year, at which point there were twenty boats in our storage rack, which is getting pretty full !)

The H2 did well over a hundred rivers before a knee brace sheared and went floppy. That too has been repaired, but now it is very rigid and rather heavy, so has been supplemented by a new Pyranha Ammo at the end of 2009. Mary replaced her Sparc with a Dagger Mamba, Sarah supplmented her Dagger GTS with a Fluid Nemesis and Michael has a Remix, so there are currently 14 of our own boats, and often two or three club ones in our store... The Horizon went to the Scouts, the Masterlite and a Dagger Blast as hand-me-downs to other young paddlers, and two other boats went on ebay.

The Canadian is perhaps a better bet than the double kayak for river touring camping trips, and the Wye was again the venue for our first family descent in 2003. Both children did the Symonds Yat rapid solo in Michael's Masterlite kayak, too.

Meanwhile, winter is the time for paddling rivers, and Mary has taken up this aspect of kayaking too. Andy spent winter 2002/3 paddling white water most Sundays. Indeed, in December 2002, on the third attempt, the Keswick Greta went without a swim. Later, a limiting factor became Mary's "my turn this weekend", which became more frequent as she got into harder rivers, but is now less of a problem as both kids paddle too. Sarah took every opportunity to remind us that "it's not fair" that the local Canoe Club did't take people under ten, but now paddles with SOC and rolls up every time she capsizes (which isn't often) making her the only family member who has never swum! We seem to have infected the kayaking bug onto a number of the families of my old university caving club friends too. Paddling sports seem to provide much better opportunities for photography than caving, and I never really managed good photos from my climbing or mountaineering. This all changed with my first published photos in October 2003 - including the cover shot for the new BCU "English White Water" guidebook (photo left, Tony Hammock on Salmon Leap Falls on the Upper Tees). Other photos published in this guidebook are among those in my Whitewater Gallery pages, now best viewed by looking at the index pages to River Trips.