Great Britain By Deb Pinniger
I’ve been back in the UK for two weeks now and it’s been a very nice close to the paddling season. I first visited Cornwall, where my sister was taking part in the World Belly Boarding Championships, she managed to take second place and win best trick, owwwwww.
From Cornwall I did a quick stint of painting at my friends house to earn some well needed cash and then it was Bitches time.
All summer long, I had set aside and been incredibly excited about the weekend of the 18th and 19th of September. This weekend was to be the equinox tides, which meant one of the largest Bitches tides of the year.
It’s bizarre how you can travel all around the world, paddling some of the best and most classic rivers and how you can still get more excited and stoked about going to a paddling spot just two hours from home.
On the far tip of Wales, a kilometre or so to the south west of St David’s Head, lies Ramsey. The stretch of water between it and the mainland offers the hint of safe passage from St Brides Bay to the North Pembrokeshire coast. In reality, Ramsey Sound is the site of countless shipwrecks, and still today it catches many sailors unawares.
Twice a day the great mass of water stretching from the Severn Estuary, round the Gower and past Milford Haven makes an inexorable journey into the Irish Sea. Pulled by the alignment of the sun and moon a small ocean of water is forced through the Sound, creating the largest tide race in Europe. Porpoises have learned to gather at the end of the channel, waiting for the fish that are drawn there; this weekend saw a rather different gathering of the clans.
The tide race is known as the Bitches, though the name really belongs to the rocks that funnel the water into narrower channels. As the sea is pulled through the Sound, it is forced over a shelf and further squeezed between jagged pinnacles, creating the waves, holes and towbacks which are the reason the kayakers come. At full flow, over 300,000 cubic meters of water will pass every second – a drifting boat would be a carried at twenty miles an hour over waves and rapids as big as than those in the Grand Canyon.
The Bitches has become a popular destination for tourists, who venture out on thirty foot ribs, powered by water-jet engines. It’s a thrill seeker’s paradise, but it is usually done in the daytime when the tides are much smaller and there is safety cover to hand.
Paddling out before dawn in a ten foot plastic boat, is a different prospect. It is an entirely different experience too, but all good fun and afterall, isn’t this called ADVENTURE!
Text and images by Deb Pinniger
Tags: Bitches · Deb Pinniger · Great Britain · Wales
