BCU 5-star sea assessment, day two. I wasn’t feeling so great. I dislike assessments at the best of times, and this one was going badly. I’d already made a fundamental passage planning error in the navigation test and bungled a surf landing. On top of this, I’d not slept well; a thrilling but noisy electrical storm had kept me awake much of the night, so I started the second day feeling out of sorts.

John, Paul, Anthony and I were being assessed by Andy Stamp, a BCU Level 5 coach, at Land’s End in Cornwall—the very southwestern tip of the U.K.—while a Force-7 wind and a swell to match were coming in off the Atlantic. On Saturday, we’d spent five hours going nowhere, paddling our hearts out against the rollers; today, the wind had eased slightly, and we were going to attempt to paddle out to Longships lighthouse a couple of nautical miles off shore.

The journey out was smooth enough, although I found I was feeling unusually unstable in my boat. I just put this down to tiredness. There wasn’t much swell, but the water seemed to be sliding around haphazardly under my boat making me feel slightly seasick. The swell increased as we approached the lighthouse and the string of rocks it guarded. The water was much more turbulent with largish waves breaking over the rocks, but it was nothing exceptional.

We took shelter in an eddy, and our assessor instructed us to rock-hop out along a reef and regroup behind another large rock. I was first to go and headed across a gap between two rocks, aware that a wave was surging in from seaward. As it started to pick me up, I readied myself for a low brace into it, but the wave seemed to explode upward, and suddenly I was in a high-brace position with water and spume all around me. I felt a tugging at my right shoulder, and as the wave passed, I found I was falling to my right and unable to support myself.

Once upside down, I tried to roll and at once realized that my right arm wasn’t working. Panicking that I’d dislocated my shoulder (it turned out I hadn’t—I’d just torn some tendons), I bailed out and broke the surface of the seething water, wide-eyed and spluttering with anxiety. John, Paul and Anthony came to assist me, but even with their support, getting back into my boat was a nightmare with only one working arm. The swell and the proximity of the sharp black rocks made escaping an urgent necessity.

The four of us under assessment set up to tow me the two miles back to shore. I certainly couldn’t paddle—I was too shaken even to keep myself upright. John rafted up against me while the others arranged the towlines and I flopped against him, sniveling and crying from a mixture of pain and fear. John kept me upright and reassured me. I knew that everything would be fine—this was the sort of incident that we had trained and trained for, and I knew I really couldn’t have been in more capable hands—but I was still surprised at just how scared and anxious I had become.

Our assessor had decided to treat the situation as an exercise and let the four of us set up the towing system. We had chosen Paul as the leader for the first part of the morning, but he and Anthony had linked themselves up to tow me and John, who was rafted up with me. Progress was appallingly slow. The tide was running against us, and the swell seemed to have picked up. I was feeling nauseated with the pain in my shoulder and slumped onto John’s deck.

Paul quickly realized that he couldn’t direct the tow and keep an eye on me from his position at the front. Because he was in charge, he swapped positions with John, which gave him a clear view of the situation: of me, the assisted kayaker; how well the tow was working; and the state of the other two towing kayakers.

Because we had to pick our way out through a fairly narrow gap where a fan tow would have been awkward, we had gone for an in-line tow—John towing Anthony towing Paul and me. Paul had rafted up to me on my right so that my injured shoulder was against him. This was far more comfortable for me, as my shoulder was immobilized and supported, and it left my good (left) hand free. All our energy and attention was taken up with keeping the raft together. In training sessions, I had always assumed that a paddler with an injury such as mine would be able to support himself and even help paddle with his uninjured arm. There was absolutely no way I could have done this. I was wholly incapacitated from shock, fright and pain at first, and then from the cold that was starting to take an all-consuming hold on me.

At this time of year—the end of September—British coastal waters are almost at their warmest. I was well dressed for the conditions, wearing neoprene shoes, neoprene shorts, two long-sleeve thermals, a neoprene spray deck with a full waist tube, a dry cag and a helmet. I hadn’t been in the water that long either, two or three minutes perhaps, and much of my torso was still dry. But the cold crept over me insidiously, slowly, until I was shivering all over. The wind had dropped off as we approached the shore, and the sun was shining warmly, but I was getting chilled through and through. Paul wasn’t much better off, and he hadn’t even been in the water. I was completely surprised by just how quickly I cooled down and how disastrous the whole episode could easily have become.

It’s very easy to assume that once the assisted kayaker is out of harm’s way and is being towed back to shore that the danger has passed. This is profoundly not the case. Had we not continually assessed and reviewed our situation, our problems would have worsened considerably. Having Paul monitor me and evaluate the progress of the towing kayakers was crucial to our success in getting ashore, which—after what seemed an age—we did.

I was stripped of my paddling gear—another excruciating experience, but I was adamant I didn’t want my expensive clothes cut away. Newly wrapped in layers of fleece, I began to warm up. While the others went off to finish their assessment, I was left ashore to consider just where everything had gone wrong. I have also been on the sharp end of a tow. Once, on Poole Harbor near my home in Dorset on the south coast of the U.K., I had taken a group of students out on a short day trip. One of them capsized and, despite being well dressed for the conditions, she started to cool off and became hypothermic quite quickly, to the point of losing consciousness. I rafted two other students alongside the assisted kayaker to keep her upright and confidently set off towing all three of them back to shore, a mere couple of hundred yards away.

Having practiced rafted tows regularly as a BCU coach, I was certain I’d easily be able to tow three boats the short distance to shore without much effort. I made no progress whatsoever. Towing a healthy paddler role-playing an incapacitated kayaker on a training exercise is one thing, towing a genuinely incapacitated and unstable paddler in real conditions is quite another matter.

The two students I’d rafted alongside the assisted kayaker were wholly engaged with keeping her upright and preventing her spray deck from popping off as she swayed from side to side; there was absolutely no other assistance they could provide. Any notion I’d had of their being able to paddle with one hand while supporting the assisted kayaker with the other was complete nonsense.

It only took me a few moments to realize how futile my efforts were and that the situation was very likely to deteriorate drastically if I didn’t do something quickly, so I called the coast guard. They sent a lifeboat and helicopter to our assistance. Having this experience in a location I was so familiar with affected me deeply, and I still mull over what might have happened had we not been so near assistance of the Royal National Lifeboat Institute. Its headquarters were just round the corner from where we were paddling.