Exciting day!
Quite windy in the morning, and we went hydrofoil dodging. Then did eskimo rolls:)
Choppy winds and quite a swell on the sea as we cruised across the bay at Askeli - it's about 20 minutes, so not onerous. Once we were across, we snuck over the bay and waited for the catamaran to come past - quite exciting as it is quite large. Didn't take a picture as was busy keeping the yak of the rocks. Then we cut across the channel and went down the coast into a headwind and with a nice swell on the sea - quite fun, and not windy enough to be hard work. We checked out some of the swanky houses on the south coast before stopping for lunch.
After lunch we were learning to do eskimo rolls. I think that to do eskimo rolls you have to be in the right frame of mind, and I certainly wasn't - you need to know the moves in order to do it, and I just couldn't get them right in my head. My girlfriend did though, and I was so proud of her :)
My babe kayaking on the open sea. The flag behind her is on the instructor's kayak. It has a special SONAR visible material in it so that large ships can see us, and a light at the end, and also looks kind of cool. GF has a lovely paddling technique, but she stops when I point the camera at her.
After the rolls there was a bit more rescue training - basically, one of us capsizes and the others have to get them the right way up again, ideally without them leaving the boat, although if we can't get them upright in time then of course that is what they have to do. You then empty the boat by dragging it across the deck of an upright kayak, and pull the floating kayaker back in. A squall came up as we were trying to pull get one of the boaters back into the boat, it's a lot harder with suddenly choppy seas and when you are being blown towards the rocks! Ideally, the operation should take 3 minutes, it took us 12. If we were in the cold waters of the Baltic, that would be a hypothermia case - possibly fatal. It's a sobering thought that hypothermia is the number one cause of death for sea kayakers.
But we didn't let that get us down for long :)
We watched another hydrofoil coming in during the trip back. The last 20 minutes back were the hardest - I had my wetsuit on from the resuce exercises and was feeling a little bit squished by it, as well as making it hard to move my arms. But finally we got home, and I had a swim off the coast. There were fish in the water:
I took this picture by floating on the surface, waiting until I saw a fish, zooming in and then hoping. It took a few shots to get it right, but I do like the subtlety of the fish.
