The forecast till friday. Plans aren't changing!

Theres nothing like a good breeze to put you on edge the week before launch.....looking like I should get away with it though.....the plan remains the same.  Clear Lands end and paddle!

Niton (Extended Forecast) From: 1900 BST Tue Aug 12 2014 To: 1900 BST Fri Aug 15 2014 On Tuesday evening a deep and unseasonable low centred near the Shetland Isles 983 will move to northern Forties 990 by midday Wednesday. During this time a deepening low is expected to move eastwards from Biscay 1012 to eastern France 1006 by midday Wednesday. The more northern, and deeper, low will continue to fill and move southeastwards overnight and through Thursday to be centred near Oslo 997 by evening. Pressure will continue to build from the west and by midday Friday an anticyclone will be centred Fitzroy 1026. Strong westerly or nortthwesterly winds will cover all waters and may increase to gale strength across southern Biscay for a time on Tuesday night. On Wednesday and Thursday winds will decrease from the west, with strong northerly winds expected to become confined to southern Fitzroy by the early hours of Friday morning. Thereafter little change is expected

Training.

Organising chaos

With 12 days to go and only one full day off work before the off, preparations are feeling incredibly snug. I moved house this weekend unpacked and then started planning to pack....a weird position to be in for sure.  I had a good sail on the estuary this morning actually keeping pace with a laser pico, and beating it upwind (he had no paddles). 
Having never undertaken anything so big I dont know how I should be feeling right now but im gaining a mantra  that pings in my head a lot at the moment. ....
Sky above, Sea below,  Paddle, Paddle, Paddle!
Simple rules that shouldn't see me far wrong.

Canals eh???

If you'd told me 10 years....even 3 years ago that I'd be excited over a book about canals I would have pointed out my lifes path which mainly revolved around skateboards and surfboards but, that was then......this is now!  A genuinely good guide book full of interesting and more importantly, useful information. Myself and my new book will be getting very well aquainted between bristol and london....not long now!

Mmmmm food

Cheers Canada!!!   Its really flattering that people as far away as Canada are sending me care packages.
Much love!!

Now on facebook too

Hey there..... theres now a Kayak south facebook page.....feel free to leave comments throughout the trip.
Simon.

A poem, a siren song or a calling.

There are many words that capture my calling towards the sea and my restlessness when im land locked but Pablo captures it quite perfectly.

THE SEA
Pablo Neruda, On the Blue Shore of Silence

I need the sea because it teaches me, I don’t know if I learn music or awareness, if it’s a single wave or its vast existence, or only its harsh voice or its shining suggestion of fishes and ships. The fact is that until I fall asleep, in some magnetic way I move in the university of the waves.
It’s not simply the shells crunched as if some shivering planet were giving signs of its gradual death; no, I reconstruct the day out of a fragment, the stalactite from a sliver of salt, and the great god out of a spoonful. What it taught me before, I keep. It’s air ceaseless wind, water and sand.
It seems a small thing for a young man, to have come here to live with his own fire; nevertheless, the pulse that rose and fell in its abyss, the cracking of the blue cold, the gradual wearing away of the star, the soft unfolding of the wave squandering snow with its foam, the quiet power out there, sure as a stone shrine in the depths, replaced my world in which were growing stubborn sorrow, gathering oblivion, and my life changed suddenly: as I became part of its pure movement.