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Kayaking duo Chris Bloodworth and Paul Curwen will be paddling towards a good cause tomorrow to raise funds for charity.
The Zimbabwean engineers have been training intensively since August last year and are hoping to take off from the west coast of the island by the Saudi Causeway at 5am on their six-and-a-half day expedition travelling on 16-foot plastic kayaks.
They will be raising money through social network sites and word of mouth, which will then be donated to the Palm Association, a local charity that helps and assist Bahraini women and their children, and Makomborero, a UK registered charity that helps to relieve poverty in Zimbabwe through the education of children.
Chris, 39, a mechanical engineer at URS, from Saar, said: “It’s something that Paul has wanted to do for quite a few years now. We got permission to kayak around the country and have been training intensively for it.
“We are funding the trip ourselves and will be donating money raised towards charities that help underprivileged children as well as local families. It’s been quite a long time in the planning stages. We were supposed to do it earlier but there have been quite a few injuries along the way and also with our work commitments it’s been hard to find the time.”
The duo wanted to start the expedition at the end of February, however adverse weather conditions made the trip infeasible.
Although he had kayaked when he was younger, Chris only recently decided to take it seriously and bought his kayak in July, one month before he started training.
Meanwhile, Paul, a marine engineer at URS, has been kayaking on-and-off for eight years. It has been his dream to go on a kayaking journey on his 40th birthday, which he celebrated two weeks ago.
Paul, 40, from Barbar, said: “This is the first kayaking expedition I will be taking part in. I came to Bahrain over four years ago and bought a kayak. When Chris came to the country a year later, we chatted about kayaking and it was only last year that we decided we should actually do it.”
The journey starts on the west coast of the kingdom, near the Saudi causeway, where the duo will then head over to the tip of the island, which they hope will take them just one day.
From there, they will paddle around the back of Hawar Islands up to Askar, then to Amwaj Islands and back to the starting point.
They expect to be paddling for five or six hours a day at best and eight hours at the worst, depending on the tide.
“We will be paddling all day and stop in the evenings to set up camp,” added Paul. “We have permissions from the BDF and coastguard for everything. We are excited about the trip. I’ve wanted to do it for a while now, so we’ll see what happens.”
The pair got a helping hand from the general director of the general directorate for the protection of marine resources, Jassim Al Qaseer, who assisted them in gaining permission for the trip.
Chris thinks that in about a year or two his two children Oliver, 11, and Ben, eight, might become interested in the sport. He has taken them out on in turns on the kayak but said that as it’s a one-seater, so it can be a little difficult for all to get in on the fun.
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