Wednesday 5th August 2020 Day 134
5.17 I am fully awake and excited like a child about the prospect of kayaking today and by six thirty I decide I might as well get up now. I’m also nervous in case the shoulder won’t let me do it. It’s been fine miming paddling into thin air with but will it work in reality?
9.00 I am all ready, kayak and paddle by the car, picnic, ropes, life jacket, towel, change of clothes, cushion, back rest, waterproof pouch for phone, water shoes, water. So many things but all necessary for a days’ paddling.
10.15 I get back from walking Audrey and Yvonne appears, ready to go, our kayaks just fit into our cars which makes life a lot easier than trying to tie them onto roof racks. At the last second Yvonne remembers she has forgotten her paddle goes to retrieve it and we are off to Shoreham and the river Adur. We want to get onto the water by eleven thirty, two hours
before high tide so that we go up river with the tide which will be high at one thirty.
11.30 With all our kit in our kayaks we make our way towards the private car park we have to pass through in order to get to the water and find ourselves tagging on to a group of young people who are being taught paddle boarding but as we enter the car park a ‘Mr Job’s Worth’ appears like the Troll from under the bridge and sends us ‘goats’ packing. I am not sure what damage we could be doing to his tarmac by just walking through but I’m sure he felt important and powerful in sending us off.
Luckily, I remember that amongst the piles of new flats surrounding a public hard on the other side of the river, the actual public hard still remains and after parking up we are finally heading into the water.
The weather is perfect, sunny but not too hot although there is a bit of a breeze. The shoulder is doing ok, we meet nice people on the water and find a nice place for our lunch.
We decide to turn back when we get to Upper Beeding and on the way back, the breeze picks up and makes progress very slow. Not only that but it has whipped up the water and we start to get wet but it’s ok, all part of the trip.
It’s when we get back to the hard to get out that things go a bit awry. The river has dropped and we are faced with about twenty yards or so of thick deep soft mud before the concrete hard begins. There’s only one thing for it, so step by slippery step we yank the kayaks up towards the hard. Yvonne manages to step out of her shoes which are left about a foot down in the black oozy mud. One of my feet gets so stuck that I fall over, by which time the pair of us are starting to look like a pair of mud wrestlers and all in view of the posh new waterside apartments that surround us and there is nowhere to wash ourselves down. So, it’s into the cars, mud ‘n all and home to hot showers.
It was a great day and the mud experience just made us laugh. I wonder if Mr Job’s Worth was watching from across the river?