Even though England’s mighty River Thames begins just outside of the village of Kemble, that doesn’t mean that waterway navigation is immediately possible. Research in the months leading up to our trip had shown us that we might expect to cover as much as eighteen kilometres from the village of Kemble in the county of Gloucestershire to the community of Cricklade in the Wiltshire before we would hit navigable water. Before that, sources told us, the River Thames is more a state of mind than a river.
On paper, eighteen kilometres isn’t very far. It is less than the distance covered by runners in a half-marathon race, for instance. If you were walking at five km per hour, you could put it behind you in… well, not very long. I was rather looking forward to the gentle stroll.
Krista had secured a light-weight, collapsible trailer that we could use to tow our canoe along the dry early course of the Thames. Yesterday, when we first received our canoe, we attached the trailer and took it for a spin through the parking lot of our hotel. It worked brilliantly. Hooray! The weather was fabulous. Yippee!
Pulling an empty canoe on a small trailer is one thing. Hauling a canoe filled with everything necessary to traverse the non-tidal and tidal portions of the River Thames is quite another. When we left our hotel and started walking the kilometre to the start of the Thames, we found that our gear required a lot of energy to move, and the boat didn’t track quite right. But on we marched, and have photographs of ourselves with our canoe beside the marker for the Head of the Thames to prove it.
A lot of other people have similar photographs. The Thames Footpath turns out to be a rather popular route for groups of people looking to spend a day in the sunshine. A couple of foreigners and a bright yellow canoe in the middle of a dry meadow is, apparently, a crowd-pleaser. Almost everyone we met had the same question for us. “Are you doing this for a charity?” It seems that in Britain, no one goes down to the corner store for a newspaper without using it as an opportunity to ask their friends for a donation. “Nope, we are doing it because it seemed like a fun thing to do.”
Please remember those words. “It seemed like a fun thing to do.”
After less than a kilometre, it became apparent that the weight of the gear in our canoe, all of which was directed onto a comparatively small surface area above the trailer, was causing the canoe’s hull to distort. This raised the all-too-real possibility that we might crack the canoe’s hull before it even reached water. More immediately, the hull was now scraping against the wheels of the trailer, making it almost impossible to pull.
Krista and I put our heads together, and realized that if we stationed the trailer closer to one end of the canoe, where it was more rigid, we might loose the distortion problem. This caused the other end of the canoe to be too heavy to lift. Consulting our memories of high school physics, we repositioned our bags in the other end of the boat, making the boat easier to balance. Even then, with Krista pushing and me pulling, two kilometres from the start of the river, and three hours into our journey, it was apparent that the situation was untenable. We were near exhaustion.
We called for a taxi, which drove Krista to our hotel for the night, 15 or so km away in Cricklade where she dropped off all of our baggage except for the paddles. When she returned, we resumed dragging the canoe, now much lighter toward our destination. A couple of times, the Thames became deep enough to float the canoe, and so we paddled. We never covered more than a couple of hundred metres before the water became too shallow, or we met a bridge clogged by debris. Back on the path, we faced the problem of the 42,807 fences that separate Kemble from Cricklade, and the thickest patches of stinging nettles known to humankind.
The sun started to set. By our best estimation we were still five kilometres from Cricklade. We weren’t going to make it. When we pulled into the community of Ashton Keynes, Krista went in search of help. She walked up to a home with a friendly-looking yard and a low fence, and asked if we might leave our canoe in the yard overnight. Michael and his family welcomed us as though we had just walked out of the desert and into their oasis. Michael and his son Ashley helped us to carry the canoe to their yard, and put our paddles securely in their home. And then, just to prove that God watches over fools like Krista and I, Michael drove us to our hotel in Cricklade.
Krista and I will be back in Ashton Keynes tomorrow to pick up our canoe and give Michael and his family the nicest thank-you card we can dig out of our packs. Sometime after that, the River Thames should be deep enough to begin paddling in earnest.
- Glen