Action Stations and man the pumps. Conditions are finally benign for a paddle from Kimmeridge Bay to Chapman’s Pool – a distance of over three point six miles. It’s not exactly rowing the Pacific, but in a dumpy packraft you need to pick your moments when there are no take-outs from one end to the other, followed it’s a stiff, four-mile walk back. A big spring tide was inbound for HW about 8pm and the wind was forecast at just 8mph SSW (onshore) and dropping by late afternoon. Plus it was sunny, too. Which was nice.
I packed a paddle in my pack and rode down to Kimmeridge Bay.At Kimmeridge Bay’s massive car park field, bikes are only £1.20, but it’s a choka bank holiday weekend so I hope the lad at the pay shed was on a percentage today. I asked him about tides which have been doing my under-stimulated brain in. ‘Err, there’s a board over there’ said laddy. At last, the Kimmeridge Question was solved, I thought, admiring the first apostrophe, but sighing at the second. It turned out the board lazily repeated UKHO Mupe Bay/Lulworth Cove timings, about 5 miles west. You’d think that would be adequate for an estimate, but not necessarily.I’m still baffled by the tides on Purbeck’s eastern Jurassic Coast. The problem is getting reliable times for Kimmeridge Bay or Chapman’s Pool, the most useful put-ins hereabouts, and timings matter the longer you’re on the water. The UKHO posts times for Mupe Bay and also Lulworth Cove which is less than a mile away. The times are identical. And then there’s nothing until Swanage, about 12 miles to the east as the black-tipped tern flies and a doable day’s paddle in a long boat. Such gaps in UKHO stations are fairly normal along the UK coast, and you’d think just estimating Mupe Bay ± ~30 mins will give a time for Kimmeridge. But around here the tidosphere is all warped. Above, a few days before neap tide, it looks like Swanage rises in synch with Mupe and then ‘holds on’ to HW for hours, before dumping five hours ‘late’.And then I found this Insta post (above) from Sharon Lee in Brighton who makes tide times posters. But not for Kimmeridge because, as she observes: ‘Notice an arc of weirdness around Dorset? That’s an amphidromic point. Which basically means the tides around Dorset (particularly the Isles of Purbeck and Portland) are utterly mad.’ Amphidromic (or a tidal node) was a new one on me, but may explain the Mupe-Swanage Incongruity (MSI), as tidal philosophers have called it since Pytheas skimmed pebbles with Posidonius. You’ll find many tide times websites supposedly offering times for non-UKHO locations, but many just list the nearest UKHO location with no real-world adjustment. As unless I am over-thinking it, Mupe Bay to Swanage needs quite a bit of Amphidromic adjustment. And while I have your attention, what is the point of UKHO listing identical times for Lulworth Cove and Mupe Bay, just a mile apart? Is it because one is civilian-touristy and the other military most days of the year? So what? Yes, there are no less than four UKHO tidal locations in western Poole Harbour (+ Wareham) as closely bunched, but it’s a busy area that drains out to mud flats at low water and the timings are all different.Mysterious tidal nodes appear all over the world. They are the Black Holes of the Oceans; go there and nothing happens. Spooky. Source Then I saw in Kimmeridge’s Etches Fossil Museum shop a locally published tide tables booklet. ‘… West Dorset’ said the cover, but ‘Covers the coast from Swanage, Dorset through to Salcombe, East Devon‘ claimed the shop’s online blurb. The publisher’s website said as much (… the whole of the Dorset and South Devon coast…). Not in the copy I bought. The tables give every day of the published year, but only for Exmouth, Lyme and Portland. There’s nothing east of Portland in the booklet, unless you include a spot check on Portsmouth or Dover. No mention of Swanage, Lulworth or other local adjustments for Purbeck. You’d think I’d not be the first to notice this, I’d have saved my money for two more moto parkings were it not for chappy behind the shop counter advising: add an hour to Portland for BST, then 15-25 minutesfor Kimmeridge. It’s Portland’s sticky out Bill that puts a spanner in Purbeck’s tidal flow, he explained. The formula was not Mupe Bay ± 30 minutes, as I’d guesstimated, but Portland + 15-25. I coughed up my £2.50 as an offering for this handy tip – I’ll appreciate it and the booklet when AI implodes the internet. But hold your paddles, there’s more! Also on the Etches website I found a link to Willy Weather with a page for Kimmeridge Bay that wasn’t just a paste from Mupe Bay, but believably adjusted times. I compared KB times many months in the future using the Portland booklet formula and Willy, and found them to be within 3-13 minutes of each other. Assuming both are broadly correct, that will do me. Willy don’t list Chapman’s Pool but do have adjacent Egmont Point which seems to be KB + 2 minutes. I’d heard of Willy Weather, but it wasn’t in my tidal bookmarks. It is now.Still reading? At the jetty by the Wild Seas Centre a pair of well prepared sea anglers were setting out in their double outrigger SoTs. Talking of gear, this is a proper sea paddle so I’m in my proper Kokatat Leviathan pfd, but it feels like wearing a folded tractor inner tube full of ice cream. Leviathan – it’s in the name. At least I won’t be too gear-shamed when the RNLI fish me out by my ear and shake me dry.I head out of the Bay and turn east. Oh MG, breaking offshore waves already! But I needn’t have worried today. There were a few more later on, but nothing the TXL+ couldn’t ride out. I actually think tackling this stage with a rising tide flooding the Ledges is the way to do it (in either direction), as any waves will diminish as the ledges submerge – won’t they? It’s more down to the wind of which there was little today, but as you paddle along you still want to glance offshore once in a while in case you’ve gotten on the inside of a building wave which can pop up out anytime, any place, any where. This is why I stayed quite far out. Not normally what I like to do alone in a packraft.
The Ledges from above.
And on a windy day west of Kimmeridge. Frothier than a Costa cappuccino with sprinkle.
The waters are clear and green. At many points I could have hopped out and waded along.
In fact, I did for a bit.
It took me back to Shark Bay, 2011. Jeff and Sharon and me in my Gumotex Sunny wading north to a unearth a cache near Peron Point after battling a stiff headwind all morning. What a great paddle adventure that was. Easily doable in a packraft too, with added dolphins, dugongs, rays and yes, sharks.
I’m on the look out for ‘Iron Skeg Beach’ I found with the Igla IK a couple of years back. Above looks similar but is not it. In the Igla I turned back at ISB to Kimmeridge as paddling on to Chapman’s would’ve meant paddling back. First time out here and with a head full of Ledge Lore, I didn’t want to get caught out as tides and winds turned, and hauling the 17-kilo boat back along the coast path would have been too much. As I was about to find out.
There is the rusty triangular ‘skeg’ (also below) sticking up. This is actually called Clavell’s Hard and studying Ian West’s page for this area, I think the object (below) may have been something to do with oil shale mining right here in the 1890. There’s a semi-naked castaway looking for treasure. I hope he knows how to get back.
The strange cast iron object that looked like a ship’s skeg – from the SS Treveal, wrecked at nearby Egmont Point in 1920? It’s more likely a piece mining gear, a winch stand perhaps.
The soft, shaly grey cliffs, rich with ancient marine remnants.Four colourful kayakers close to shore, like I should be. There’s more to see there.I pass what could be Punta Pliosaurus.
I see sailboat masts ahead behind big rocks and am a bit disorientated. Chapman’s is tucked in on the left somewhere? I check the GPS and am nearly there, getting ashore 80 minutes out of KB or 4.5kph average with a bit of dawdling, and quite a lot at 6kph, according to the Garmin. People want to know this stuff!.
Along with some moored yachts and beach bathers is a trio of menacing jetskiers playing their satanic music. But this is Purbeck so it’s not blaring, and at least they weren’t tearing up the Pool like houns en tout.At Chapman’s there are ammonite fossils everywhere you step.Even getting off the beach by the waterfall is a loose scramble, especially backpacking a holdall. As I leave, I hear the jets gun off to Kimmeridge or Swanage. I presume that’s what they did as you can’t get a trailer down here. With a packraft you can go anywhere you can walk.Up the steep, overgrown gully and across the parched field for the 500-foot climb up to Houns-tout hill – all in less than a mile from the shore. My pulse hits the rev limiter. What does Houns-tout even mean?Kimmeridge 3 miles. In these shoes? No way, Jose.
Tranquil Chapman’s and St Alban’s Head from Houns-tout summit. And actually my Teva Omniums are not the problem; it’s the wobbly, 8-kilo holdall hanging from my shoulders. But on the way back I have a brilliant idea. More here.The steep decent from Le Tout gave the underworked knees what for. I could do with my packstaff. I sold the 4-part Vertex paddle which it fitted. I need to convert my Anfibio Wave 4P but it’ll require some whittling.
Then back home I dug out an old, 55/170cm telescopic monopod (£18 on amazon Basics). It’s more gear (370g) and may slip under pressure, but zero bodging required and will work for long-arm selfies.
I witness a landslide near Punta Plio. This country is falling apart! I should get down there houns tout suite and see what fossil treasures came down with the rubble. ‘Get me Professor Etches, I found the tail. That pliosaur is longer than you think!’In places the path is very narrow: barbed wire right to spike my raft, big drop left to spike everything else. The first half from Chapmans is tricky in places. Don’t be part of the next landslide.The SW Coast Path is cracking up. Must be the drought. Come the next deluge it could all come apart and slide into the sea, a few feet to the left.All around as parched as southern Spain. At one point a cheerful passing walker observes ‘Ooh, paddles. What’s in the bag?’ ‘A boat‘, I reply. ‘Oooh, luvlay juvlay!’ she saysAt last, the rotund edifice of Clavell Tower just as the battery warning light starts flashing and the legs wobble. I hobble down the steps like Steptoe with a hangover, passing pouting Instagramers capitalising on the golden hour.I’m a sweaty, achey mess but it’s been a lovely summer evening’s walk up and down 340 metres along a tiny part of the South West Coast Path. They say the total elevation gain on the entire 630-mile trail from Minehead to Poole is a staggering 115,000 feet (over 35,000 meters). That’s like climbing Everest from sea level four times. And yet hundreds manage it every year, signing off with thighs like telegraph poles. They’ll see many amazing things, like Kimmeridge Bay an hour before spring HW: not a foot of a beach to spare.The ride home via a refreshing ford cools me off.There you have it: KB to Chapman’s. A lot easier to paddle than to walk. That’s another stage of Weymouth to Poole ticked off, leaving the trickiest 8 miles for last. First, Chapman’s east around St Alban’s Head 4 miles to Dancing Ledge. Then about the same distance from there to Swanage, around Durlston Head, another tidal pinch point and with no take-outs. In a sea kayak you’d swan through in one go, slicing through whatever the tides bring. But you can’t pop it in your pack and bus home. Alone in the TXL I’d pick the neapest of neaps and lightest of winds – and still break it into two manageable stages. Summer is coming to and end. Maybe soon or maybe next year.
Inflatable Kayaks & Packrafts 
