Kayaking Archive

Winter Skies West

if you’re a regular reader you’ll have noticed that I spend quite a lot of time amongst the granite of west Penwith. I feel very at home with the cliffs there. It is a magnificent place and even better to arrive amongst the towering spires by making a journey, even a small one, there by bicycle.. or kayak, as in this case. I won’t bore you with lots of words, my ideal blog post takes about …

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Sunny metal-flake day

Time for a quick post of a sea kayak flavour while I ease myself into the new week with a large mug of coffee… After what feels like weeks of gale force winds and rain yesterday turned into a perfect winters day.. barely a breath of wind, cold, crisp and sunny. I went east of here to catch up with a friend and his spangly ‘disco boat’…

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Whetman Equipment Contact Line

After an awful lot of cycling-heavy content… time to get back to that other fun thing to do.. sea kayaking… Now, I’ve learned over the years that there are particular topics in sea kayaking that are almost guaranteed to spark off a lively debate.. one is rudders (yawn).. the other is towing.. methods and equipment. This is not going to be another long winded treatise on what is considered to be right and wrong, you can find …

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Kayaks on Pentreath Beach

Pentreath

This is Pentreath beach on the Lizard. Access from the landward side requires a hike followed by a scramble down a steep, broken path cut into the cliff.. so even in peak summer holiday season it is always deserted.. or close to. It produces a steep, dumpy wave at anything other than low water if there is any swell around which can make landing a sea kayak a somewhat damp but fun exercise.. worth it.. unless the swell is …

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Saltwater Snaps

A few recent (yesterday in fact) snaps of a kayaking flavour… I’ve been spending a lot of time recently trying to decide what my optimum on-water camera set-up should be. At the moment all I have is an old Lumix GF2 + 14mm lens inside a housing that lives on my deck… The camera was a cheap secondhand deal albeit with an excellent lens, important on the expectation that sooner or later the housing will …

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For a change…

Now, I rarely paddle estuaries because, you know, they’re not exactly exciting places to paddle a sea kayak.. however from time to time it does carry some novelty value and Cornwall does have a really rather good estuary in form of the Fal Estuary. Structurally it’s a ria, a flooded river valley with an extensive system of tidal creeks feeding into the main Carrick Roads. So, for a change and wanting to put in a few …

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West Cornwall Sea Kayak Meet

This past weekend was the West Cornwall Sea Kayak meet.. an informal gathering of sea kayakers from all over the country. It was excellent. Something like 80 paddlers from  far flung corners of the UK showed up which was especially brilliant as we are out on a bit of a limb down here in darkest Cornwall so it does take a bit of effort to make the journey.. the reward however is some really world-class sea …

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a spot of Penwith

It is a magical bit of coastline that has inspired writers, artists and film makers for centuries but conditions yesterday from a photographic point of view were uninteresting – the north coast of the Penwith Peninsula is one of the most rugged, wild stretches of coastline in England.. but facing northwest as it does with clear blue skies and just a lazy, small groundswell running yesterday it was very much a case of simply enjoying the …

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The Manacles

The name is derived from the Cornish words Maen Eglos, meaning Church Rocks… possibly a reference to the spire of St. Keverne church which is visible from the reef, it is quite likely however that it is an allusion to the numerous gravestones of drowned sailors and their would-be rescuers that can be found in local churchyards… Centuries of shipwrecks, over a hundred, on this notorious reef are responsible for more than 1000 deaths. The wreck of the Mohegan …

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A perfect mid-winter day

There was quite a thick layer of frost on the sand as I carried my kayak down the beach yesterday morning but with just a light northerly and not a cloud in the sky the sun soon sorted that out as it rose from behind the hills. It turned out to be a simply perfect mid-winter day. Incidentally the name of the peninsula ‘Lizard’ is nothing to do with reptiles. It is instead a derivation …

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Camp Stories

At times over the past few weeks I’ve been suffering something of a malaise which at times extends to finding it hard to get to grips with the banality of life in general. January is always a bit like that, with no firm expedition plans made yet, just ideas, and having other friends that are on the road (seemingly all the bloody time sometimes ;-) I find all I can think about on frequent occasions is …

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Not entirely disagreeable..

Well… the hoped for, and originally forecast, squally showers and fresh winds that would have made for some interesting conditions failed to materialise.. at least until much later in the day.. but what happened instead wasn’t entirely disagreeable, although significantly less interesting. Mustn’t grumble though eh, January so rarely looks like this ;-)

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Solstice sea kayaking

I don’t always take my camera with me paddling, as has been the case on recent paddling trips if the light looks flat and uninteresting I generally can’t be bothered. Other times, usually when the weather is bad, there is a great promise of interesting stuff happening.. so I do bother… but it doesn’t always work out, today being a case in point.. with the wind rising rapidly to 30 knots, some decent sized piles …

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