Anglesey, Wales Sept. '06 A week of kayaking in Holyhead/Anglesey, with Phil and Nigel  In September of 2006 we were for the "Advanced Sea Kayaking Week" at Nigel Dennis' Sea Kayaking Center in Holyhead, which is set on an island off Anglesey, which again is an island off Wales. Holyhead is located on the Eastern shore of the Irish Sea, falsely suggesting a somehow sheltered environment by the landmass of Ireland 60 miles to the West. In our 8 days on the coast of Anglesey, the Irish Sea offered us a wide and colorful array of ocean swell, winds, surf, and tidal races of various sorts I would have never imagined being possible. The landscape of Wales matched the beauty and richness of the sea with a spectacle of high cliffs, hundreds of sea caves, wide sandy beaches, sea stacks, luscious painting-alike pastures dotted by sheep and cattle, divided by little stone walls or hedges. Little Welsh villages, farms and scattered stone houses were settled in harmony within this rich landscape, and did not appear as an interruption to this most pleasant park-like landscape.  We arrived in Holyhead by ferry from Dublin, where we flew in from New York the evening before. 5 minutes, 2 English Pounds, and a beautiful cab ride after we left the Holyhead ferry terminal, we were dropped off at Nigel Dennis' and Tara's house, only a stone throw away from the water and NDK's office right on the waterfront of Holyhead harbor. Nigel and Tara were still out of town, but we were given the keys for the house. We found ourselves for nearly 2 days alone, but happy and welcomed due to the trust in us, in Nigel and Tara's empty house until our sea kayaking class started on Monday morning. Besides a lack of human beings, the house was anything but empty: The fridge was filled to capacity with food and the book shelves were packed with most interesting maritime and travel literature. Most importantly, we were encouraged to use the kayaks in the meantime to go paddling by ourselves until the class would start on Monday morning. This enormous trust felt refreshing and was also somehow new and pleasantly surprising to us, coming from a country where you have to fill out stacks of waivers and forms for all sorts of kayaking activities, stating with your signature not to sue the kayak outfitter for reasons usually beyond reason.
The week had not officially started, but we were already in our first adventure due to a little, but significant, error on our behalf. When we set out a presumibly 12 noon for a 5 hours kayak round trip to the Skerries, a group of islands 8 miles off Holyhead, we decided to forget to change our watches to Great Britain time, and as a result we - and our watches - were still on NYC time. A 6 hour time difference we somehow overlooked and overslept. Around at our halfway point of our paddle to the Skeeris at about 2 PM NYC time, we found it highly amusing to see that the sun was only 1/2 inch over the horizon, creating a beautiful sunset only minutes later. Isn't that what nature usually has in store around dawn, let's ay at 8 PM on a September evening, and not around 2 PM? We realized our little error, adjusted our watches, and were now faced with our first night navigation class on the coast of Anglesey. The light changed quickly from dawn to complete darkness, with us being in our kayaks in for us new and foreign waters. We made it back to the shore in complete darkness by hell knows what time it was by then, with the help of some green, red and white flashing lighthouses and some other green, red and white flashing buoys. My biggest fear during this night paddle was that someone on shore in Holyhead might have seen us leaving, and us not seeing coming back in before darkness, and that this he or she might have called the Coast Guard, causing an alarm which would have been a bad introdcution of ourselves to the people of Wales and to Nigel Dennis. Thankfully, our absence went unnoticed, nobody missed us and nobody called the coast guard. Nigel Dennis was most encouraging and positive about our little mishap, mentioning that mistakes like this happen, and that the only thing what really counts is that we made the right decisions, mastered to read all the flashing lights around us correctly, and that we found the way back to shore safely.
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On our first official paddling day, Monday, we paddled with the incredible talented, generous (I still owe him money for my delicious lunch of fish and chips) and nice NDK coach Phil Clegg to the North Stacks, and on Tuesday in the waters around Furlong. At both places we were thrilled to be able to play for hours in tidal races, in which we surfed seemingly endlessly. On Wednesday and Thursday, we paddled as "guinea pigs" with 2 kayak coaches who were being assessed as 5-star coaches by Nigel. This gave us a great insight about the practical meaning of the 5-star syllabus in quite tough consitions since the winds and seas picked up to Force 8 to 9 on Wednesday, providing "South Georgia conditions" according to Nigel. At various points members of our groups were not able to either make any progres paddling into the wind, and/or were unable to steer their boats back after being blown off course, which made our two 5-star paddlers and coaches "clip" (tow) these paddlers towards the direction we were going, which was most of the time right into the 40 miles/hour wind. On Thursday the winds subsided, and left us calm seas with beautiful swell to paddle in. On this day, Nigel teached us "landings in hostile environments", which was by far my favorite new thing I learned. To land on a rock, or in a cliff-like coast, the kayaker clips himself to his own kayak with his tow rope, then slips out of the kayak and swims to, and finally climbs on, the rock with his paddle in his hand. He then places his paddle and himself above the high water line and crashing waves, and pulls his kayak up to himself on the rock with the tow line. I could not have been more impressed by this technique, and was eager to try it when it came to my turn. To launch, you let the kayak slide back into the water, sending it off with a good push, then, Yours Truly jumps off the rock into the Irish (or any other) Sea, gets back into the kayak with a re-entry roll, and then clip yourself off your boat. This technique enables you to land on rocky coasts and even cliffs I would have never thought it would be possible to land. It also showed that a tow rope, just like so many other kayak gear, can serve more than just the purpose it was intened to being used for. 
On our last day of paddling, Phil was so nice to set off with me to Llanddwyn Bay where he suspected big, but gentle surf. And he was right. After carrying the kayaks over a dune which was quite on the high, steep and sandy side, we were greeted by a 2 mile wide beach with long, gentle - but high and powerful - curling surf. We surfed for several hours on picture perfect surf-waves along this beautiful beach, which involved doing numerous "endos", being swallowed by 4-8 feet waves, and other gracious and not-so gracious capsizes. The experience is maybe best described as "roller coaster kayaking", due to the numerous ups, downs and loops involved, including the adrenaline rush and the myseriously developing appetite for candy cotton (besides fish & chips). While paddling out another time through the pounding surf, we saw that a second surfline developped about 1/4 mile offshore. Phil and I paddled out to this second offshore surfline, and we were both treated which became my favorite 90-or-so seconds in my life as a kayaker: Both Phil and myself were able to surf from this second offshore surfline to the inner surfline on a single wave, resulting in a continious 1/2 mile long single surf ride. The satisfaction and excitement I got out of this was beyond what I ever experienced in a kayak. It felt like heaven. Thank you Phil, Nigel, Tara and everybody at NDK for this amazing week, inspiration and opportunity. |