Tag Archives: canoeing

Sand

The seabed is so pale – wave-rippled sand – just a few feet below us. Dad directs a course across the bay, paddling far out from the beach. The waves are getting quite large, and with each, the aluminium of the canoe shunks as we land, spray spraying from the bow.

Mum shifts nervously. “Is it really safe?”

“Oh, it’s OK.” says Dad, looking serious but calm. He eyes the shore, the headland and the horizon, grips the paddle a little more tightly, and smiles. This is a moment to savour.

Shunk… Shunk… 

Yet bigger waves. From my cross-leggedness on the red cushion, I grip the gunwales and just love. Alice and Lena are there too. We’re like peas in an open pod, the five of us – and a cool box.

It’s shallowing now, and the water’s paler, losing the deeper turquoise and fading to clear. Sunlight refracts and dances on the sinuously rippled sand. We can hear and see the waves hissing onto the beach.

“When we beach, can you just jump out and start to drag us up?” says Dad.

Lena and I ready ourselves.

The metal hull slides and scrapes over the shell sand, and we jump out on either side.

Langoustine

Rafting the kayaks together – each holding their paddle tight to the gunwale – a mesh of spars. The instructor stands up in his, grasps the small orange buoy, and hauls in. Translucent green veils of weed hang from the dripping rope. The cage becomes visible a few feet below the surface – miners emerging from a coal shaft, or some skeletal sea monster. It breaks the waves, and we see it alive with click-clacking mini-lobsters, bright orange. Langoustines.

It’s alive, it’s behind me, and it’s in my kayak. I can hear the scrabbling and feel its vibration through the black plastic seat. I’m in a floating trap. Somehow, the paddle-sweeping, breaker-dodging, coastline-hugging journey home has more edge, more nervousness than the outward journey. We pick our way through the poppy brown seaweed that slops back and forth in the swell, and sludge our way to a halt below the high plywood canoe shoot. The crustaceans are gingerly retrieved, slung in a bag, and lugged over the heather and bracken paths to the lodge.

Someone’s pumping the lanterns. What’s the fuel in those? Kerosene? The smell of it hangs in the air. The one-legged cook stoops to fire up the oven into which a baking tray’s worth of langoustines will be slid.