We whitewater kayakers always joke about how we’ll take up sea kayaking when we’re old and no longer hardcore, but hey I’m thirty now so…

A fairly big group of us “oldies” decided to go for a weekend of sea kayaking. It was also originally supposed to be an experiment in multi-day expeditioning, but some of the oldies were not even hardcore enough for that, so we didn’t bother trying to cram tents and sleeping bags into our boats, and just parked up the car near our overnight camping spot.

Flamborough head is a craggy peninsular on Yorkshire’s East coast (map), with spectacular white cliffs and caves. Exploring these was good fun, and mostly not too scary, although I did have a lingering feeling that a slight misjudgement of a wave could leave you with broken bones. Mostly the waves were fun too, and quite surfable in places. In retrospect though there were hardly any waves at all on the Saturday, and blue skies.

Sunday’s waves on the other hand were really quite something. Here’s Rik’s photo of me setting off into the relatively small waves of this sheltered inlet.

Further out beyond the breakers, we were bobbing up and down with some really mountainous waves rolling beneath us (the ones you kind of see in the distance). The wind was blowing onshore, but also slightly to one side, so we could get across to the next cove, staying well away from the cliffs this time, but we had to abandon attempts at getting back. That all felt fairly hardcore, although we were off the water and into a tearoom by midday like the bunch of OAPs we are.

photos by Rik Williams, stolen from his facebook album