To say that, in August 1967, I was hopelessly ill-prepared to paddle a kayak along the upper reaches of the Thames, let alone out to sea, would be an understatement. Especially since I had no idea, when we started out, even quite how wide is the estuary of London’s great river. Nor, for that matter, how high are the swells at a spring tide. I think Barbara simply got carried away with my naive enthusiasm.But I had done some hurried research and had bought all the right gear.
When we finally got out onto the water, paddling frantically away from the publicity on shore, one of the Thames tourist boats cruised by and a guide on a loudspeaker announced: “And there you see the young couple who are heading for Africa.” We promptly headed for the shore, to be hopefully out of sight of tour boats and the newspaper-reading public.
Just how mistaken I had been in disregarding the river dawned on me when a group of Sea Scouts we met along the shore gave me a chart of the estuary . It revealed what my road map had not: that the mouth of the river, at its widest, is 29km across. And there seemed to be all sorts of low-water hazards in sticking close to shore.
We made three discoveries there: 1. There is a bore that, as the tide turns, can — and did — sweep a kayak up the River Stour, once the Medieval waterway course to Canterbury; 2. There is a nudist colony on the shores of Pegwell Bay; and 3. Knowledgeable, nude, canoeists know how to lead stranded kayakers through the sandbanks.And so we arrived in Dover, slightly better prepared, a day late for a scheduled, fine-weather canoe crossing — and just as the weather turned.
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