One of the days in Barbados we were booked in to do some sea kayaking. I’d done sea kayaking when I was younger, as well as river kayaking, so I figured it would be a piece of cake in the Caribbean sun.
This was a bit more of laid back affair than I was used to, with none of the usual accessories like spraydeck or whatnot. Given where we were, that was probably to be expected.
It all started out fair enough – some of us in single kayaks, some of us in doubles. The plan was to travel round the coastline, meet at a certain point to stop/have lunch, then head back to the beach where we set off.
It didn’t quite turn out that way.
The wind was pretty high that day. At first, I didn’t think that should make much of a difference – after all, we were in kayaks, not sailboats. However, apparently that was a mistake.
Everyone was pretty spread out, and after battling against the waves for a solid 25 minutes, my arms were aching. Some of our group was quite far behind where I was, and I thought I must have been making good progress towards our meetup point.
Until I looked over to the shore, that is.
There’s nothing much more de-moralising than seeing that you are in exactly the same position as from where you’ve started.
It turned out that the waves were so strong that they were pushing us back despite our best efforts. It was clear we weren’t going to make it to the rendezvous point, and so gave up… drifting back to shore.
Myself and Miguel opted to go surfing with the time we had left. Apparently surfers engage in some sort of black magic, because it seemed completely impossible to do. By the time I had paddled out to roughly where Miguel was, he had already surfed on three or four waves and made his way back out. I’m pretty sure he was carrying a turtle under his arm at one point, but that might just have been my imagination.
Barbados, April 2014
Lomo LC-A with Lomo underwater Krab case