London, SayYesMore and a Poole Harbour paddle

This last month or so, since walking the Norfolk Coast Path has been jam-packed full of little adventures.

We kicked things off about a month ago, when we headed to London to pick up a folding canoe from Dave Cornthwaite. We needed to stay south, so we decided to spend a day as tourists and have a day in town. We camped over in a surprisingly good little spot next to the Royal Naval College in Greenwich.

While in London, we did all the touristy bits. The London Eye, Dungeons and had a look at Parliament. We upset one or two commuters by having to get off and on the escalators ‘side by side’. It was a nice day, but that’s enough city now for probably the next 12 months.

Our next destination was ‘The Yes Bus’. We recently became ambassadors for SayYesMore – a cool little movement that aims to get people to say yes a little more often and doing more of the stuff they love. It’s pretty awesome to find something we can be ambassadors for that is so closely aligned to what we are wanting to achieve that all we need to do is exactly what we are doing already. Awesome!

Except it’s not exactly the same anymore because at the ambassadors training weekend at The Yes Bus, we learnt a few new things about social media, how to podcast, met a bunch of new awesome people and got a new matching hat, t-shirt and hoody too. It’s just like before but a bit smarter and better! Sweet!

As the ambassadors weekend drew to a close, we still were undecided on what we should do next. We had a folding canoe, an awesome weather forecast and wanted to do something. Poole Harbour and Brownsea island was suggested so we said Yes and headed down.

We didn’t have any BAs (buoyancy aids) with us, so we made it our mission to try and find somebody to lend us a couple that evening so we could take the folding canoe out to Brownsea island in the morning. After lots of messages we got it sorted thanks to The Watersports Academy . We popped there in the morning, picked up 2 BAs and set to work on building the canoe.

We didn’t realise how hard it would be. Two and half hours of graft and it didn’t seem quite right. It was almost there, but not quite enough. We headed back to The Watersports Academy which was just over the road from the harbour to see if they’d lend us a boat to go with the BAs and they did! We unfolded the canoe, got changed and went for a paddle. It was incredible, at least until Lauren dropped the GoPro into the sea (a deeper bit too). It took half an hour to locate and rescue it, which we fortunately did! We didn’t go to Brownsea island but it didn’t matter. Take a look at the video:

A video from our paddle in Poole Harbour

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