Gone Paddling Sea Kayak Circumnavigation of Britain 2010

So today was the day, the finish of the circumnavigation, with the short crossing from back St Mawes to Falmouth.  We had parked up in St Mawes by the harbour overnight in order to be ready for the early start in the morning – though for once it wasn’t me needing the early start!

It’s less than three miles to paddle across Carrick Roads, and 30 miles to drive up to Truro through the narrow roads of the Roseland Peninsula and then back down to Falmouth; even if taking the shortcut on the King Harry Ferry, it’s still an hour’s journey – especially in the morning traffic at the end of the summer holidays – so in a straight race the kayak would probably win!  With the van needing to get to the museum half an hour before me in the kayak in order to help set up the fundraising stuff, Emma and Ben had to set off before 8 in order to make sure they had enough time.  This meant a bit of a wait in St Mawes harbour for me, during which a call from BBC Radio Cornwall live on air took up a few minutes of waiting.

Neil, a friend from home, had motored across from Falmouth in order to accompany me back to the Museum, so we set out from the harbour together. Wind SE F3, sea state slight, tide flooding: we raced across the bay so quickly that we actually arrived at the entrance to Falmouth Docks at just after 9am!   I’d much rather have arrived early than be struggling to get across on time, but half an hour was quite a long time to be sitting and waiting, without sticking the bow of the kayak into view of the museum!  The Crown Princess, with over 3000 passengers, was moored up in the Fal, and the small ferries shuttled back and forth carrying a tiny percentage of the passengers into Falmouth for the day.

9.30 came, and the tide sped me straight into the museum where family, friends, museum staff, a few people I’d met recently on the trip as well as people who happened to be around at the time – all waiting on the pontoon and along the museum’s balcony – just like at the launch on 20th April.

The museum had a display made especially for the kayak, adding to an existing display which I remember seeing in April – and the display even included a couple of collection tins to add to the fundraising effort for the two charities over the next couple of months.  I felt extremely honoured to have had something made specifically for the trip – many thanks indeed to Ben, Michael and the other museum staff for taking such an active interest in supporting the expedition, right from the first conversation in the museum cafe just after Christmas.

A buffet lunch was followed by a walk around Pendennis headland back into Falmouth for dinner and one last fundraising stint through the pubs in the evening made for another full day.

Fundraising total is now at just about £10,000, with quite a raised offline yet to be added to the account.

Over the next few days I’ll have a chance to sort through a few things including photos and hopefully I’ll be able to back-date a load of photos from the last few weeks – I realise my damaged camera has made things difficult to add anything other than plain text to the blog.

James

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 4th, 2010 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.