Thanks all. That was a much more comprehensive response than I was expecting!

Chas C wrote:Should his land be an SSSI then you could be committing a criminal offence by landing/standing on it, something fishermen are excluded from by an act of parliament.

That’s interesting and I haven’t come across this before. Have you got a reference for it?

I am aware that is a commonly held belief, but I have never seen a credible explanation of which law it would be breaking, and I am not aware of anyone having been prosecuted. To be clear, we are talking about letting off handheld flares in a private place. Letting off a hand held flare on private ...

Mine is allegedly for 4-6 people. It would be very snug with 6 people in and I wouldn’t bother with anything smaller. It’s not heavy, and it’s no problem getting it into my boat with the rest of my kit. It doesn’t get used very often, mostly for keeping the kids entertained while I’m running the shu...

I have taken my kids to the Ardeche with TNR Outdoors a couple of times and can thoroughly recommend them for a laid back holiday combined with excellent coaching and support. They’ll do kayak and/or canoe to suit you. Adventure Ardeche also come highly recommended but I don’t have any first hand ex...

Have you been in touch with Portsmouth Canoe Club? They are very active sea kayakers and may be able to point you in the right direction.

There are pros and cons of DSC handhelds. The main benefit is that they can give automated location details in a distress call, but they are bigger, more complicated, more expensive and have shorter battery life due to the GPS. My personal choice would be a simple handheld VHF and a PLB for emergenc...

Standard Horizon HX300e is good. Not too big, waterproof, floats, USB charging. Not expensive either.

Icom are good too, but generally more expensive for no real benefit. Cobra are a bit cheaper, and although some people are happy with them I’d avoid as the quality isn’t in the sane league.

I’ll look out for it next time [emoji106]

John fancy ruining a conspiracy theory! Yeah, sorry. I keep forgetting how unfashionable facts are these days! :D on the weekend you can park in the high school car park if you make a donation in an honesty box. I’ve used this car park a few times but hadn’t seen or heard anything about an honesty ...

And it will have been Powys County Council (who do have Traffic Wardens!) who issued the tickets and not the police.

As mentioned above, with a few exceptions parking on a pavement isn’t an offence in itself. In this case though there are double yellow lines and these apply all the way to the highway boundary, including the pavement. So it will just be a ticket for parking on a yellow line and not actually for pav...

Werner Nantahala are pretty much bomb proof.

Thanks, I hadn’t seen that.

TheEcho wrote: dodging the police launches who will be trying to stop you going into a restricted area without a licence?

Where’s the restricted area, and what licence is required?

I think it needs to be a group rather than a page.

Facebook most likely. That’s where most forum traffic in general has moved to over the last few years.

Jackson Monstar, the big boys play boat! Comes with Happy Feet (needs new pump bulb), Happy Cheeks Seat, air bags. Used but not abused. Usual scrapes but nothing nasty. £550 Collection from Brighton or can send by Parcelforce at buyers expense (about £75). May also be able to arrange delivery to Lee...

I’m on holiday in North Devon (almost Cornwall) and want to find somewhere with some small surf for the kids to have a go on. Tried Sandymouth Bay today which was too big, really need small stuff no more than 1-2ft. Any ideas for places where the surf is too small for real surfers?

Or further down the Thames is also good. There’s canoe hire at Henley and it’s a great two day trip from there down to Windsor, overnighting at Cookham.

If you reckon on about 3 miles an hour you probably won’t be far wrong. Shiplake to Cookham makes a good day of gentle paddling. Unless it rains a lot you can assume that the flow will be negligible though.

Have you booked your camping at Cookham?

gp.girl wrote:Just looked at their website - not good news

https://vepaddles.com/

I had an email exchange with Stu a few weeks ago and it sounds like it won’t be permanent with a bit of luck.

kayakbiker wrote:Does anyone know if VE are still manufacturing paddles?

Not at the moment but they hope to be back up and running before too long. Great paddles though.

Thanks Mark, unfortunately that’s rather above my budget at the moment unless I can find a second hand one. I’m really not sure how I’m going to get on with this boat so don’t want to put loads of money into something I might not get much use out of. I’m thinking more along the lines of a basic Palm...

Can a kindly person please recommend a spray deck that fits the larger than average cockpit of a Monstar? Ta :)

I like the Alpkit Airlok Xtra drybags. They are lightweight and flexible but really tough and have yet to key me down.

I’ve found one that isn’t on holiday, so now sorted :)

Does anyone know of a Canoe Leader assessment scheduled for sometime in April?

We have a basic web site but all the day to day stuff runs on a Facebook group. Quite a lot of us only use Facebook for paddling-related stuff and that seems to work OK even for people who don’t “do” Facebook (as far as I know we only have one determined refusenik). Membership and trip signup is all...

My club uses WebCollect and it works well for us.

We have it set up for booking onto pool sessions and club trips as well as for membership. Most of our payments are by bank transfer which don’t have any charges, although we do accept PayPal as well for convenience.