Tag: pictures

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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In the West

Found myself just a little bit west of here yesterday afternoon. A favourite place to be when conditions are rough… and it is always better in the winter. So…. pictures. These, I think, make quite a nice complement to the summer time series from the same area posted here: https://www.seasurfdirt.com/2015/08/21/penwith-colour

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Mid-Winter Mid-Cornwall

The ‘permarain’ of the past few weeks eased for a bit on Sunday to leave some much needed spells of sunshine between blustery showers. Rather than just go riding as usual for a few hours on the fixed wheel trainer a friend and I decided to make an all day intimate exploration of the tiny backroads and dirt trails of mid-Cornwall. It was very much a day characterised by steep hills and lush valleys, ancient …

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A little bit of Delhi

I had a little bit of time in Delhi… I found street photography quite difficult. Despite the obvious potential it is the sort of place that completely overwhelms the senses… the noise, the crowds, the oppressive heat (at least at this time of year), the bad air (apparently now the most polluted city in the world – I was permanently chesty) and one is always fending off the not always welcome attention of the locals.  Consequently relaxing …

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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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Northwest China Street Portraits

Restless on a cold and piddling wet Friday afternoon and insufficiently motivated to head out on a ride … I haven’t had a chance to do anything with respect to a proper portfolio yet so instead thought I might take 5 minutes to continue in the vein of sharing a few pictures that haven’t been shown here properly before.. so.. a few street portraits from northwest China.. mostly Uyghur and Tajik folk. Really lovely, welcoming  people. All …

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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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revisiting some Moroccan streets

For the last couple of bicycle journeys I’ve travelled really light so just used a 7″ Android tablet as a tool for updating this journal – not ideal but it did the job and took up very little room along with my camera, a Fuji x100s – I think   the most perfect bicycle travel camera I’ve ever come across. The biggest weakness of the small tablet is with photos.. and looking back at recent entries from …

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Epic Skies Afloat

I really hammered myself riding in Morocco, promptly picked up a cold on my return and have been feeling rather run down ever since, it always takes time to recover from a particularly hard expedition/ride so paddling with a couple of friends today was deliberately limited to around 16km in easy conditions by way of starting to get some paddling condition back into my upper body without inhibiting my recovery. It turned out to be a proper …

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A head full of couscous

I’m not one of those lucky folk that is just ace with languages and that can switch effortlessly from language to language, rather I have to work hard to make a language stick and need to use it frequently to be even remotely  comfortable with it, although stuff does come back to me eventually… so having been working hard to add some Arabic to my vocabulary while at the same time scraping the rust off …

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A New Beach

Last winter destruction was visited upon the coast of Cornwall by a series of storms of rare ferocity. The cockpit of a sea kayak is a perfect vantage point from which to appreciate the legacy of those storms.. whole sections of cliff tumbled into the ocean leaving fresh scars and giant boulders with jagged edges to be smoothed by decades of wave action. Even the apparently super-hard granite of the far west was not immune – calving enormous slabs into the …

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A very rare day indeed

It is a very rare day indeed when the ocean has not a ripple on the western side of the Lizard Peninsula. Fully exposed to the Atlantic there is usually at least some swell to play with as it surges around and through the various rocks and gullies that characterise this bit of coast. But not today. Not a ripple. While it does not make for particularly exciting paddling it is still a fantastic place …

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a spot of Anglesey

Last Sunday I piled into a van with a couple of other friends for the long drive north to Anglesey for a spot of Welsh paddling… the idea being to enjoy the various tidal races that Anglesey is best known for in the paddling world. There are some good races down here in Cornwall but the main feature of Cornish paddling tends to be big Atlantic swells and surf. Anglesey gets much less swell but …

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Thursday, Lizard o’clock..

Met up with a couple of friends for a paddle out of Kennack Sands, approaching Lizard Point from the eastern side for a change, and continuing on round to Kynance Cove, very much a favoured lunch stop, for, err.. lunch before heading back… It was a fabulous early winter day on the water.. mellow with a bit of sun, some dramatic skies, enough wave action for some fun and very quiet. Perfect.

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