[Hello all you folks - because I have started my holidays I wont be answering my mail... until maybe somewhere around the August 15th :-)] It was something like two and half weeks ago when I got again an overdose of anxiety and restlessness. Bought food for the weekend, packed it along with my usual safety and camping gear into the Nordkapp plus a book and some good Sicilian dry white wine. The goal was the island of Skorvo, rented by the "Seapaddlers" club, 16 miles to SW along the coast. It was going to be my first longer trip after a messy spring of hard work and my unquestionable bad attitude towards all living beings on mother earth. It was cloudy Friday afternoon, and I was facing the SW wind. Tough luck: the wind was supposed to be something like 11 m/s (22 knots). The route was familiar to me and the islands along the coast would give me some comfort - the waves would be only three- or two-footers at the open crossings, the wind could not be so hard near the coast. The kayak was packed almost full and felt very well balanced and very, very comfortable. And heavy. After the first half an hour of paddling I got to a channel, where the wind was packed against the banks and a large bridge. Definitely wet and nasty business, I paddled furiously several minutes to start the first longer crossing after the channel. It was three-footers - as Tina and Ike Turner used to say: nice and rough :-) Not very much boat traffic there, but the nets are something to worry about: if your boat gets between the waves stucked to them it means capsizing. Some of the folks do not even use flags to mark them, there are only some coloured one-gallon juice cans at the ends of the nets, which really pisses me off: you see five cans and start to wonder where the end of the net (or nets?) m i g h t be... just perfect! Got three gallons of fresh water from a well in an island. Uh, it made the boat heavy: I got more water into my face during the next crossing and I started to wonder if the idea of bringing wine in an glass bottle was a good idea at all. Well, the most heaviest stuff (meaning the water tank, not the wine :-p ) was packed directly behind my seat, so I started leaning slightly backwards when the larger waves would approach me... It helped with the balancing (getting the bow compartment lighter and so rising it more easily from the waves) even if the shape of the bow of Nordkapp is just perfect to those situations, it rises well from the water. More islands and channels. More crossings, some of them two and half miles. More wind. It was funny: no other paddlers there, only few boaters. I paddled peacefully by an old village. The island and the village lie practically only few miles from the very center of the city of Espoo, there are now quite many summer cottages, but one can still see how beautiful it was at the beginning of the century. No sights of towering bright white houses on the coastal horizon then...Mostly the fishermen have now abandoned the village. When I was paddling along a narrow and long channel a funny looking hairy beast, which was somehow resembling a dachshund, was barking furiously at me from a jetty. A really funny looking dog, and angry as one can be, the hair was standing at his back. I was happy that his friend was not there: he is very large and even more impossible to be recognized to be a part of any species known in the western world. And he has a very bad attitude, like me. Last summer he tried swimming and climbing onto my kayak, and somehow [oh god, forgive me...and Jackie, who has a kayaking dog ;-)] his bony head got under my wooden paddle. What a sound! Fortunately, he turned back then. Even if I have had a dog, we definitely do not have any friendship between us, that beast and me. Reaching the island took five hours. I drank frequently water and ate salted licorice trying to get some salt into my body and to keep the water within myself. Only two stops along the route to relieve myself, and to eat cookies with honey. A real testosterone expedition. ;-) I made a nice camp to an fully deserted island and fell into sleep after some sightseeing and eating a pot full of 50 p shrimp noodles. Cheap. Silence. Nice: I was alone. The islandof Skorvo is really beautiful, maybe less than a mile across. Rocky, very rocky: cliffs, large rocks, pine woods and lot of birch. A thin neck of land leading to an smaller island, a sandy bay between them. A nice place to swim and a nature-made harbour to kayakers, but not to power-boaters (or any other boaters besides kayakers at all): the waters are too shallow in the bay. And surprisingly, among the large rocks, rough ground and pine there are really many places to raise your tent. In the middle of the island there is a rocky hill, its height must be 60 feet. A really nice and quiet place to watch the weekend traffic, the "NE-SW highway" of powerboats and sailing boats, few miles away. At the SW side of the island, near the bay there is a wooden sauna which I was planning to heat, if somebody could have told me where the keys were... I spent the morning alone, lazily staring to the horizon and sipping coffee, but nobody came. Oh well, I am not a member of that club, so I am not supposed to take any advantages... No break & enter stuff :-) Instead of that I went to swim in seawater of 8 degrees of centigrade. We are calling it here "throwing away your winter-coat", if you are doing it for the first time after the winter. Yup: believe me, it was very cold. That meant very short swimming, I might even call it fast dipping into the seawater. The sun helped me to warm myself afterwards, but I was really happy to having used my dry-suit when paddling, even if the air temperature was rising to 20 degrees. After the noon I dozed, lying on a cliff in the warm sunshine which had broken through the clouds. Nice and calm, so calm that I did not wake to the arrival of an other paddler, who fortunately did not make any hilarious comments of seeing me snoring mouth wide open :-) Later, a couple arrived, they had the keyes I had been waiting for, so finally, the sauna was heated. We made turns in using the sauna, and just to prove myself, I went skinny-dipping again with an furious war-cry. As I told you, this was an testosterone expedition... Late-night dinner: wine-leave rolls, wild rice, sun-dried tomatoes, giant capers and marinated olives. Some espresso. Not to mention the cool and dry Sicilian white. What a joy, though the weather forecast was telling me that an area of depression would be approaching the coast from S or SW during the next morning, which usually means hard winds, later some rain and maybe a thunderstorm. Well, a clever boy as I was, I decided to wake up at 4 am to get back before the rain ;-) Which I did successfully, I left the island before 6 am, but I was again facing the wind, this time coming from NE. Sh*t! They told me at the radio that it was supposed to be 12 m/s (23 knots?) so I kept near the coast when paddling back. Still, a real joy: the air was fresh, the sun was rising. Paddling near the coast, I met accidentally a girl at a beach of her summer-cottage, having her morning swim naked. Of course, we could have shaked hands and had some small talk about the weather (we were t h a t close) but somehow, she didnt seem to be very interested -sigh- well, forwards and forwards goes the expeditionairers way... And then, that unnamed hairy beast was at that time waiting for me at the jetty with that giant friend of his... at 6.30 am! How did they do it? Dont they ever sleep? Ari - wishing safe and nice summer to you all. Paddle wise, ladies and gentlemen. *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.gasp-seakayak.net/paddlewise/ ***************************************************************************Received on Thu Jun 18 1998 - 00:14:40 PDT
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