Kayaking By Night

Creative Commons license by Pittpics

I guess some people are much more serious Kayakers than myself.
I tend to limit my kayaking to decent weather and daylight, and have rarely even given the possibility of kayaking alone at night across the open sea no less, any serious thought.
Mark Rainsley on the other hand, has probably rarely thought not to.
He paddled across from Swanage to Needles on the Isle of Wight 18 miles across in the dead of night

Wednesday night - I launched from Swanage at 8.30 pm to cross to the Needles. I’ve done this 18 mile open crossing by night before, but this was very different. For starters, the tide was against me for several hours (duh) so it took a full five hours. Secondly, it was dark. Really dark. So dark in the last three hours, that I couldn’t see my boat in front of me, let alone anything else. The air was dense with damp mist, so if I turned my head torch on, I could only see dancing drips of moisture before my face and immediately felt nauseous. With the light off I felt pretty weird too, often hallucinating that my boat was sliding sideways or floating on air. There was no sign of any shore lights and I couldn’t tell sea from sky; no horizon (or anything) to orientate myself by, other than a very very faint smudge of light that I (thankfully correctly) assumed to be the Needles Lighthouse and paddled towards.

When I reached the lighthouse (I heard the foghorn from a couple of miles off), it was an astounding sight; the different coloured segments lit up the fog like something out of the movie Close Encounters. I told Solent Coastguard on my VHF that I’d arrived, but they insisted that I called them again when I was ashore; easier said than done as it took me quite a while to find the beach!

How often do you acctually encounter total and absalout darkness in our modern day life. Never. really, so dark that you can’t see the horizon, or your hand in front of your face?
I can’t say that I am tempted to kayak across the open sea for 18 miles by my loansom in the dark of night, but I sure will have something to think about for a few days…
The rest of the post is just as gripping. Hope over and read.