Smells Like September

I stepped out of my car into the sunshine at Sennen this morning and it smelt like September.  I mean, I had a real definite waft of the smell of September hit me, and it hit me like some sort of catnip.  I got so excited.  I don't know what that smell was…  the ozoney smell from the breaking waves of the small groundswell?  Cold sand and a warmer ocean?  Warm surf wax?  Coffee?  I couldn't place my finger on it but it was a clear aroma and it made me realise that it was September 1st.  It was an instant reminder of the beaches when schools are back in and work slows down for everyone who works a seasonal job, dawn surfs that aren't still "last night" as they can be in midsummer, bare feet on cold sand, French boardwalks over the sand dunes, Portuguese custard tarts and hurricane swells.  Oh!  September, how I've missed you so.  

The Tao of Packing

I have spent my fair share of time living out of bags; in fact for a period of over seven years I didn't spend more than six months in any one place, living on one-way tickets with nothing more than I could stuff into my rucksack and boardbag.  I got pretty good at packing.

This past month I've packed bags for two trips that had quite specific constrictions:  a bicycle camping trip where everything that I took had to be carried on my bike, and a small boat expedition that necessitated me putting everything into a limited number of dry bags to be strapped down in the boat.  I like these sorts of packing puzzles just as much as I like writing lists of what I can pack for a flight that can be carried on my back and on the ends of my two arms without incurring excess baggage fees.
At the end of last year the patagonia cleanest line blog featured a post about packing by one of their climbing ambassadors Brittany Griffith, who uses a "room" system which I really like and isn't too dissimilar to my own technique.  

Here's how it works:  you probably only need things from three of the rooms in your house (bedroom, bathroom and garage), five maximum (kitchen and office).  Each one is it's own bag or sub-bag.

A washbag covers your bathroom packing and really all you need from there is your toothbrush because you can buy toothpaste, soap and deodorant in most places on this planet.  My first aid kit is kept in my bathroom, ready to go in there too.  Bedroom is clothing so is destination dependant but normally includes a few t-shirts, boardshorts, underwear, and I always pack my finisterre etobicoke insulation layer for cool evenings, air-conditioned airports and to use as a pillow.  Garage is for all of the fun stuff like surfboards.  Additional "rooms" are the kitchen if you're camping (and need to take a camp stove, mess tins and provisions) and the office if you need to take work stuff. 

Surfboards get dewaxed so that the wax doesn't melt all over everything else if my boardbag ends up sitting on the tarmac of a hot-as-hell hub airport during a transfer.  If I'm taking a wetsuit then that protects the bottom of my board/s (zip away from the board) and if I'm taking a sleeping bag then one surfboard goes inside that for extra protection.  I pack my towel at the nose end and then roll up all of my clothes, secure them individually with rubber bands and pack these around the rails, particularly at the tail end.  Fins, fin keys, wax and pocket knife all go in here too.
My "backpack" is a normal (carry-on) size Gravis metro bag, with a laptop pocket (I also chuck a magazine in there so that I don't have to dig around in my bag once in my seat), main pocket and three external smaller ones. The smaller pockets are what's important.  Stash passport and boarding documents in one for easy access, and toiletries in the little ziplock bag that they make you go through security with in the other.  Nobody wants to be stuck in the queue behind the person who has to dig around and unpack/repack their bag at every stop on their way through departures.  I normally stick a bodysurfing handplane in my backpack because if my boardbag goes missing in transit then at least I can still get in the sea whilst I wait for it to catch up with me.  I only take a carry-on bag because I'm a pretty firm believer in the "take half as much stuff and a bit more money" rule, although I tend to not take the bit more money because that normally went towards the price of the flight.
All of my work gear is camera kit that gets packed into a pelicase ("have you got any pppelicans in there??!") so that it's safe from water and dust and so that I can carry it onto planes rather than put it at the mercy of baggage handlers because it looks all important, electronic and expensive.
Backpack on back, pelicase in one hand and boardbag in the other (or being dragged along the shiny airport floor).  Sorted, and still moveable once beyond the boundaries of the airport trolleys and out into the real world.  Oh, and don't forget to pack a good book in there somewhere.

Dive For Your Dinner

Food always tastes a whole heap better when you've got it straight from the source.  Diving for your dinner is also a really nice way to enjoy getting in the sea and seeing bits of the coastline that otherwise get floated over.  We often pass by rocky little nooks and crannies in the coast and, as with so many other things in life, don't take the time to get to know them or appreciate them for what they are.  Swimming around the reefs and boulders at the bottom of the cliffs, a lungful of air pushing at the inside of your chest, looking under every ledge and in every seaweed filled notch means that a whole lot more time is spent exploring small patches of the coast and getting to know it more intimately.  And if we come home with dinner then all the better, although the fish have a habit of making sure that it doesn't always work out like that.

Fun Is Free: Swim In The Sea

It's summer here in the Northern Hemisphere and there can't be anything much more refreshing than swimming in the sea.  In fact, it doesn't even have to be swimming in the sea - wading in and ducking your head under or floating on your back for a few minutes can achieve the desired effect just as easily. I've banged on about the positive psychological impact of negative ions before, but swimming in the sea in summer serves more than one purpose:  refreshing, cooling, relaxing and washing, all for free.  Here's the rules though - you have to dunk your head under the water and you can't wear a wetsuit.  You heard - swimming trunks or boardshorts are acceptable, but for it to have to have the maximum positive impact upon your day it really ought to be unplanned and therefore necessitate you swimming in your smalls, or if there's nobody around to take any offence, the raw.  Putting on a wetsuit implies that you're training for a triathalon, whereas swimming in the sea in your pants implies that it's summer and you know what's good for you.

The Doom Bar

The legend of The Mermaid of Padstow has it that, having been accidentally shot with a crossbow by a local man who was out hunting seals, a mermaid used her dying breath to place a curse upon the town. A storm raged for three days and nights, and when the townspeople awoke on the fourth day an enormous sand bar lay stretched across the mouth of the Camel Estuary, preventing ships from entering or leaving the harbour.

Over the course of the past 500 years the golden sands of the Doom Bar and the headlands and reefs on either side have seen the demise of over 300 ships.  Whilst you'd be forgiven for presuming that the treacherous nature of the mouth of the Camel Estuary gave rise to the name "Doom" Bar, it is actually derived from a corruption of the word "Dun", or dune, meaning sand.  
You see, there are few safe refuges for ships along the 75 miles or so of the North Cornish Coast between St Ives and Bideford, the majority of the coastline being high granite cliffs fronted by narrow beaches regularly pounded by the North Atlantic, and in a storm Padstow often appeared to mariners in distress as somewhat of a false friend.  With a shallow sand bar stretching across the mouth of the estuary and the large headlands of Stepper Point and Pentire Point both hemming in approaching vessels and providing shelter from the wind, many captains and their crews had to swim for, or lost, their lives having run aground.
These days the navigable channel to Padstow, which is dredged and maintained by the Harbour Commission, lies on the eastern side of the Estuary (the right hand side in the image above) however through much of the Eighteen hundreds it lay to the west, with the Doom Bar sitting on the Daymer Bay side.  This caused such difficulties to approaching vessels that a part of Stepper Point was quarried away (visible in the photograph) to allow ships to fill their sails and make a good run at the 220 metre wide channel.  There are still rusting capstans on the ledge under Stepper Point that were once used to winch ships alongside and in to safety after the pilot gigs had rowed out to offer them a line..

Such a lot of stories for such a small patch of water, encircled by the sea, sand and slate.  On a calm summers day when walking the low tide beaches on either side of the estuary it's hard to imagine that such a huge number of ship's skeletons lie buried beneath your feet.  

There's No Such Thing As A Seagull

My Dad corrects me every time I use the word "seagull".  There's no such thing as a seagull.  In Europe there are over twenty species of gull, with the herring gull being the most prevalent.  Large and noisy, they nest in colonies on cliffs, islands and rooftops and these days are just as often seen scavenging on landfill sites and school playgrounds as they are dive-bombing tourists for their chips and pasties in seaside towns.  They are opportunistic scavengers (politely called "omnivores") and refuse comprises up to half of the bird's diet, rather than herrings as the name might suggest.  We had one swoop from our rooftop onto the table alongside our barbeque last week and it left the three freshly caught mackerel alone and instead went for and then promptly dropped a shrink-wrapped packet of bacon, illustrating an unfortunate evolution in diet.  Scavengers or not, the herring gull is a symbol of the coast and I can't think of a better soundtrack to time spent beside the seaside.

Tea Tea Tea

“We had a kettle; we let it leak:
Our not repairing made it worse.
We haven't had any tea for a week...
The bottom is out of the Universe.”

Rudyard Kipling

Until recently, if I went into a coffee shop I was there exclusively for coffee.  That was until I was persuaded to order a chai tea latte and was instantly transported back to a trip that I took to Sri Lanka a few years ago.  Chai is just the Hindi word for tea (which can be served black or with milk and sugar), whereas what's served up in coffee shops over here is actually Masala chai…kind of curried tea.  

Back in the 1830's the British East India company started to become concerned about the Chinese monopoly on tea production which accounted for the majority of it's trade.  They began to encourage colonists to cultivate the assam tea plants that had grown locally since time immemorial and between 1870 and 1900 the consumption of Chinese tea in Great Britain dropped from 90% to just 10%, replaced by tea from British India and British Ceylon.  Despite this, tea was not consumed as a recreational drink on the Indian sub-continent until the Indian Tea Association (which was British owned) started to promote it and persuaded Indian industrialists to provide tea breaks for their workers. Chai vendors (chaiwalas) took the British mode of drinking tea and increased the amount of milk and sugar, then added various spices to flavour it further and masala chai is now widely consumed across the Indian subcontinent and the rest of the world.

 

To make a chinese whispers version of chai tea, try this recipe:

• 1 x  395 can of sweetened condensed milk
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1 teaspoon ground cardamom
• 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
• A pinch of pepper
• A small pinch of garam masala
• 1 star anise

Mix all of the ingredients together in an old jam jar and allow it to sit for a while, ideally overnight.

Make a mug of strong black tea and dollop a spoonful or so of this mixture in and stir well.  There's no need to add milk or sugar, and you can adjust the taste to suit by adding more or less of the mixture.

Last winter my good friend and bang-tidy professional shutterbug David Williams took off to India for a while on a bus-man's holiday to shoot photos.  All images on this blog post are his handy work and obviously he retains full copyright over them, so please don't pinch and repost them without asking.  I'm very grateful that he let me publish them here, and I hope that you have enjoyed them.