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From: Ari Saarto <asaarto_at_lpt.fi> subject: [Paddlewise] Throwing my winter-coat off Date: Thu, 18 Jun 1998 01:09:25 +0000 · This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thu Aug 21 2025 - 16:32:50 PDT

[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.

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