(HELLO FOLKS, this is the first part of my expedition report. The second one follows, and I hope that the third and final one is ready tomorrow morning - pleasant reading to you all...) Early bird catches the worm... Seems to be, that after the God had created the continent here, He found something itching and struck under His nails. After some furious scratching and picking with a toothpick He dropped the found remains to the sea and finally, the archipelago of the Finnish Gulf was born: thousands if islets, small, low islands full of rocks, birch and dry pine woods. Large islands with groves and round cliffs. The Ice Age grinded edges off the cliffs and brought the rocks, varying from the size of your head to the size of your carage. Anyhow, it is not pure wilderness and it is not very v i r g i n a l here: you can find everything noisy and irritating between jet-skis and power-boats, but it gets calmer and calmer, nicer and more quiet, more you go to the east. It is very comforting to find out that the tradition of building traditional wooden 18ft boats: slow going, heavy and solid, is not completely lost here. They are low, open, wide and heavy, possibly have a small cabin, but nevertheless they are beautiful, carefully varnished and do make me think that the speed and efficiency dont always count so much. Even if you dont use them for fishing so much anymore, they are safe and very much fun for trips, which actually makes them even more worth of their price. Just go to Summa, east from Kotka and find out by yourself... My original plan was to cover the whole southern coast of Finland t w i c e: visit the Eastern border solo, return to Helsinki and paddle together with Rita, my SO to Hanko, SW peninsula, and return again. Well, it seemed so that the SW expedition would have been too hard for her, so we finally had to give up that plan. On Monday, July 7th at 7 am, after a restless night I put my Nordkapp on water. I had woken up at 4 am and been packing the kayak furiously more than a hour: I had this travelling fever again and wanted to go around the capital and the peninsula it lies before heavier traffic would hit the boat routes. The sun had risen early, 3.30 am, and the weather was warm, smooth and safe. Somebody else was also an early bird: after paddling the very first 20 minutes a 30ft boat suddenly emerged behind a pier. Ooops! No fun. It passed very close and besides waves, it raised cold sweat to my precious neck. Gotta listen more carefully, because I do not have x-ray eyes and being like a sitting duck in front of a speed boat is just not very much fun. Ears can be sometimes more better than your eyes - I will return to that conclusion later... It was almost calm as I had hoped: the wind rises here mostly after 9 am if the weather is nice. Took the first gulps of water to avoid dehydration, passed the Sveaborg fortress and continued towards the east. The wind was behind my back, only a slight breeze. My first aim was to reach an island of Onas, where from I could easily start tomorrow morning passing the town of Porvoo using the natural route, formed by a chain of islands near the open sea. Unfortunately that meant paddling solo 25 miles: much more I had meant to start with, it takes a while to get used to the natural rhythm of early rising and doing long hours during an expedition. It was going to be monotonous paddling, though enjoying the views and discovering a new route: last summer we did it with Rita more safely nearer the coastal line. During the first lunch break at a narrow and small beach on a rocky island I noticed few people feeding some swans from a boat, actually there was a full family on water: Mr. and Mrs. S. and five tiny brownish gray youngsters. I ate few sandwiches watching them and the they started swimming nearer. Maybe they tought that I had more to offer - unfortunately I had finally started packing my kayak and was planning to leave the beach. I raised my eyes suddenly from the aft hatch, and found Mr. Swan watching me behind the stern with cool and unfriendly eyes, from a distance of about 4ft. He hissed to me. There seemed to be some obvious safety problems, concerning his offspring getting too close to me - but why hiss to me? Take care of your own kids! I started hissing back, and there we were, two guys with serious territory problems, staring and hissing to each other. As always, it was up to women to solve the problems created by the men: Mrs. S. got bored and slowly swam away, followed by her kids, and finally by the head of the family who seemed to have serious insulting thoughts in his mind. Maybe it was their beach, I do not know... I am glad he did not attack me. My purpose was to reach the border within six or seven days, mainly using the familiar routes to Kotka ("Eagle"), my home town, taking the final route to the border from there within two days. I was planning to take care of my safety "hopping" from an island to an island, enjoying the narrow crossings of few miles at the outer border of the archipelago, not too far at the open sea. This was my first time to do a such long solo expedition, 400 kilometres (250 miles). It took me three days to enter the island of Longoren (Long Island) at 6pm, some 110 kms (68 miles) east from Helsinki. Going had been fast: the weather was extraordinarily fine and I could have reached Kotka before the evening (last 22 kms), enjoying the 9 m/sec (19+ knots?) western wind. I had all this testosterone burning in my body, after dancing with my kayak twice in standing waves in narrow passages, paddling with full speed in following seas, but instead of ruining my back I decided to have a break for a day. Longoren is one of my favourite islands: the area around the island is quiet, even though there is a camping area just a mile towards the continent and a few summer cottages miles away. Islands there are forming some kind of a calm lagoon, diameter of 5 kms between the two large islands facing the open sea and the smaller islands facing the continent. Longoren is almost a mile long and less than 300ft wide, low, sandy and at that moment the flora was wild and flourishing in its greenness amidst the sand and rocks. There are remains of an unknown old building, some birch, lots of small pines and beautiful long narrow beaches at the both sides of the island, forming a funny tail of sand and large rocks facing north. The bottom of the sea drops suddenly from three ft to 45ft near the beachline. It can make you feel really dizzy to paddle there, only few meters away and seeing how suddenly the clear water, rocks and sand turn to bottomless green and black. At the southern end of the island there are rocks in the water: from a distance they seem to be small, but if you go wading there you do suddenly notice that the rocks are as high as you, standing at the 1ft deep water and sand. Most beautiful, fertile island I do know, and worth of spending a day. Walked around a little and found remains of a hawk, a scull of a loon, and tried to read a book about zen buddhism before the sunset, when three loon families passed me swimming along the shoreline, just few meters away from my Nordkapp. The hypnotizing sight of them, seen through my tent door just filled my sleepy head and I fortunately forgot everything I had read. Like a drunken beaver I passed to sleep, happy and smiling like an idiot. I slept my tiredness off, woke next day at noon, had a breakfast and dozed off again for hours. Went skinny dipping and considered practicing self rescues with my new spare paddle. At the evening it was again similar magical situation, but then it was two swans flying low, so close I could clearly hear the noise their powerful wings made amidst the silence of the coming night. Some things are just not for readind and studying. I almost did quit reading that zen stuff completely, poor Mr. Alan W. Watts: The Way of Zen (1957 Pantheon Books Inc.) was not really a huge success during that trip... Actually, there seems to be something in zen-buddhism which interests sea kayakers. I found later, when a fellow kayaker was landing the jetty of our club after a short trip, that he was carrying the very same book with him. And the guy standing beside me mentioned that he had it in his book-shelf too. Maybe it has something related to kayaking - or maybe it is that the Nordkapp owners happen to be representatives of some romantic and fatalistic species..? (Stupid? Well, maybe one has to be, if you own a narrow Nordkapp, often blamed to be tippy...) The weather turned bad and the next two days I did spend in Kotka visiting my parents. Paddling to Kotka, crossing few three mile openings against the rising 9 m/sec eastern wind was frustrating and I was finally glad to get to a hot sauna and wash my clothes. My folks had been very concerned about me and the text messages I got through the cellular phone had been quite annoying, as were the comments, when I was continuing my journey on the July 13th: "aww, it l o o k s quite t i p p y" and "does that mean, that every time, when you are landing and building a camp, you have to take ALL that STUFF out?" (Etc. etc. - Seems that they have adopted the common habit of believing that your kids are teenagers forever...I am now 37 -sigh!) Cheers, Ari Saarto "Home of the Traditional & Famous Scandinavian Skinny-dipping [TM]" Finland - Europe GSM +358 - 50 - 526 5892 fax. +358 - 3 - 828 2815 e-mail: asaarto_at_lpt.fi *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.gasp-seakayak.net/paddlewise/ ***************************************************************************
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