It has been about a month since my last paddle (and subsequent
blog) I think I will blame Christmas for that a little bit. I went home to
Shropshire for a few weeks and although I planned to take my boat to put some
miles on my old river, I’m glad that I didn’t. The Severn was huge. I don’t
know why I was surprised as it is almost always in flood during the winter but it
was quite intimidating all the same.
Anyway. This weekend we headed back to the water. It was a
change of scene and change of boat for me this week. I borrowed my paddle
partners Hobby2, while she piloted her older (but lighter) Talisman, and we put
in on the Wey and Arun canal. The reason for the change of boat is that I am getting
concerned that the DW is only a couple of months away and I am still capable of
falling out of my Lancer so I wanted to try something much more stable, and the
change of location was so we can do some portaging for once.
The Wey and Arun is a nice enough canal, if a little short. About
seven kilometres there and back but there are two (very muddy) portages which
is something we have yet to really practice and I am currently not very excellent
at.
I actually really enjoyed the paddle this weekend. While (surprisingly) heavy, the Hobby
is such a solid boat I didn’t have to dedicated a portion of my effort on
simply balancing and instead I could enjoy the feeling of zipping through the
water in a K1.
I do think I need to spend a bit of time just getting in and out of
the boat though as my portage technique is not very polished to say the least. I
grab the front of the boat, pull my feet close to the seat sort of crouch/stand
and then flop my belly on the bank, in what I suspect looks akin to a seal flopping out of the water. It sort of works most of the time, but
this week one of the get outs had some kind of barbed chicken wire mesh on (I
assume to give grip to someone standing on it) which I really didn’t want to
flop onto so I dithered and flailed for ages. Clearly not good enough.
