Sea for Cumbria 2008! (DAY 1)

Date: 10th July, Place: Walney Island (West shore, about halfway down), Time 3.30 pm. Tom is on his mobile 'phone and the conversation begins like this: "Liverpool Coast Guard, this is kayak group call-sign Team Flapjack...". 5 minutes later we're off - paddling like 6 furies into the crashing waves and 2 minutes after that we've lost 60% of our maps and other assorted deck-mounted equipment to the merciless high seas. We don't care though, the Sea for Cumbria challenge 2008 has begun.

The first day had started about lunchtime with us all gathering at Newton Rigg campus near Penrith to meet a minibus and trailer kindly provided by Unisolutions to take us to the start point. We were driven to Walney by none other than Gretna FC manager Stuart Rome who had to be in Edinburgh that very evening for a vital meeting to secure a league place for the club. Given the significance of the meeting and the distance from Barrow-in-Furness to Edinburgh, we unloaded the van and trailer at warp speed and bade Stuart a swift farewell...

Loading the gear into our boats and carrying them down to the sea, we were reminded just how heavy a fully laden sea kayak can be, with some needing 4 people to lift them. Well, you know, a gent needs his collection of soreen loaves....

The sea really was a pretty rough (no, honest it was!) and once we'd got out through the surf we were all secretly hoping the weather would improve a bit. Anyway, undeterred, we headed North with a strong-ish tail wind and our first challenge - the unpredictable estuarine waters between Roanhead and Haverigg. As it turned out, there were no dramas although things were pretty quiet as we all concentrated on the sizeable swell chasing our tails as we paddled to our first night's camp, a modest 12km away at Silecroft. On the up-side, the heavy loading in our boats made them more stable than usual and Jasper, Tom and me had the added benefit of new super-light carbon paddles that we'd bought as a collective purchase (to the universal dismay of our wives, I daresay) the week before.

As we approached the beach at Silecroft, we had another dose of surf, but now we were paddling with it. Pete Carter, our resident-experienced-paddler and Ian hit the beach first, with Pete's boat succumbing to the surf near the shore leaving him swimming and Ian leaping around in the shallows trying to grab either Pete or his stricken craft. It all turned out okay, though Ian nearly got a fully loaded composite sea kayak in the head and Pete lost his footrests and a few flakes of gelcoat.

Once landed, we began to search for a place to camp. The local campsite was quiet (despite a sign proclaiming that it was full) but there was nobody to be found to book us in. Luckily however Jasper had been chatting to a nice local girl who kindly tracked down the farmer responsible for the nearest field to our boats and secured us permission to camp there. Even more amazingly, the farmer duly turned up to take HIS cows out of HIS field so they wouldn't trash our tents and gear in the night. Lesson 1 - Western Cumbria is seemingly full of really nice and helpful people!

We set up camp, cooked dinner (the first night is always the best as you have a seemingly huge choice of vittles to gorge on) then a couple of us went for a beer in the local hostelry before we hit that hay and fell asleep to the sound of the waves (and the intermittent rain!).