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.

I like you. You’re funny. We should go paddling together sometime :)

I'm concerned because the OP made an innocent mistake and came on these forums to seek clarity from the paddling community. I believe they did so in good faith that people's responses would be reasonable and respectful. Instead, they were met with dismissive derisions and general hostility. In my v...

If there's a sign at the entrance stating explicitly what people are being charged for and how much it costs then great! Clearly there should be no confusion and I wonder why so many people are posting here about adverse experiences. At last count there's a grand total of two of you. You are ultima...

Calm down pal. I’m calm :) My impression is that the owner conducts her business in an informal, inconsistent fashion and that has led to the confusion. If the fee is part of her business model, then it should be clear and consistent. Either that, or she should expect natural variation in the respo...

Somebody needs to have a fair and frank chat with the owner and inform her that if she wants to charge a fee then she must follow due diligence, for example by publicly registering the car park and clearly stating charges upfront. She must also ensure that charges are reasonable - the OP stated tha...

Not many with water levels that reliable though!

Does anyone else know about this? Is this a one of a kind car park, with a unique charge based on your cars occupants? Or is this some kind of messed up, possibly illegal, charge to access the Dee? The last thing I want to do is mess up this amazing sport up for other people, but this just seems wr...

Mate you beat me to it! I can't make it out sounds like access charge as it's per person, and that's not cool. It’s to keep the site available for us to use. It covers car parking, toilets, changing rooms, and using private land to access the river. That’s cool. And a bargain. We have no right to u...

Have you tried Portsmouth Canoe Club? They are very active in your area.

http://www.portsmouth-canoe-club.org

jmmoxon wrote:You might get run over by diggers:
https://naturalresources.wales/about-us ... n/?lang=en

I would think it’s unlikely that they’d be doing that while the water is on

It's not immediately obvious how CT declaring the lower Tryweryn "closed" while there is water fits with CW and BC's access policy. Any thoughts?

Has anyone got a deck big enough for a Monstar that they don’t need? Doesn’t need to be new, anything usable is fine.

That didn’t last long!

Yes, it’s still the place to go. It’s run by River Active now and the charge for paddlers is just £3 which includes launching, parking and use of toilet and changing rooms if you want them. Hours are 9-5 I think. https://m.facebook.com/riveractive.llangollen/ http://www.north-wales-rafting.co.uk

Llangollen is only 90 minutes away. That counts as local in my book!

I use Tides Planner by Imray. It’s a free app but if you want more that 7 days ahead it costs £3.99 a year.

In ~25 years of kayaking I've never seen a foot entrapment. I was on a WWSR course recently and the instructor said that it was so unlikely it had been dropped from the syllabus. Clearly, from this story, it can happen, but is it a major risk or one in a million? Entrapment rescues, including foot ...