Tryweryn Festival, lovingly known as T-fest by most paddlers, is without a doubt one of my favourite paddling events of the year! It has the perfect mixture of kayaking, competition and social time which makes it a truly enjoyable weekend. I wanted to share what a fun weekend T-fest is and so this article is an account of the 2023 event. Enjoy!
We did it! 24 hours of kayaking on the Dee to raise money for three brilliant charities! Over the weekend myself and 5 friends took on a mammoth challenge. Kayaking down the river Dee (horseshoe to town falls) and back up the Llangollen canal for 24 hours straight. We paddled over 100km in total and as of the time writing this blog have raised over £5000 for Young Minds, Rainbows Hospice and Air Ambulance. This article is a more detailed account of the challenge!
You can still donate here if you would like to!
At the start of May, I was lucky enough to get to attend the first-ever She Paddles festival at Plas y Brenin in North Wales. It was one of the most enjoyable paddling events I have ever attended and certainly one I will be attending in the future. The weekend was incredibly well organised and the range of activities on offer was fantastic. 74 women attended as participants and the excitement and positivity throughout the weekend was infectious. I wanted to share my experience of the weekend in a bit more detail.
Tomorrow is the deadline for this year’s application for the 2022 British Universities Kayaking Expedition, otherwise known as BUKE. I have known about BUKE since I first started paddling in the UK. It is an incredible and highly sought opportunity for student kayakers. I thought I would write an article about it so that more people know what it is and don’t miss their chance at applying. Hopefully by the end of this article, if you are a student kayaker, you will already be writing your application!
See my note at the end if you have left it a little late to start your application!
A while ago I saw Lowri from FlowFree advertise a ‘Looptastic’ course at HPP. Having bought a playboat in lockdown, learning how to loop it has been one of my goals over the last year. Whilst I have made improvements off the back of tips from kind friends, I still have a long way to go. Having considered getting some freestyle coaching for a while – this course looked like the perfect one for me! This weekend my highly anticipated day of learning to loop with Lowri took place and I wanted to share it on here!
‘I have a plan and I need people to do it. I think you could be one of those people…’ This was a message I received from my friend James Ibbotson 3 days before Christmas 2020. The plan? Paddling for 24 hours on the Nottingham loop, our local 15km loop down the river Trent and back up the canal. All in aid of raising money for the mental health charity Mind.
Never one to shy away from a challenge, of course I said yes! Also joining us would be good friends and local paddlers Sam Valman and Matt Stephenson. On the 3rd/4th April 2021, we carried out this plan and managed to raise over £4000 for Mind. This article is a summary of our 24 hour paddling challenge.
When my friend messaged me a couple of weeks ago asking if I wanted to come on a trip to Scotland I thought it would end up being a hiking trip with maybe a couple of days kayaking thanks to the dam releases. It turned out to be the best Scottish week of kayaking I have ever had! On the first day we drive up to Scotland and arrive in the beautiful sunshine at the upper Tummel. In typical kayaking fashion, it turns out we know the kayakers who are already in the layby. We have time to fit in a couple laps of the upper Tummel which I had never done before. It was a lovely little g2/3 river with one bigger rapid in the middle. I was super stoked on our second lap as I managed to get a leany-boof on this drop. As I went down first however, nobody else got to see it! Still, it FELT amazing!
If you don’t already know, I am a massive kayaking enthusiast. I love running white water rivers as often as I can and love a good down river play day. What I really don’t do much of however is actual freestyle kayaking. 6 months ago in a post Christmas – New Year haze, I was tagged in an online post. The post was from GB Freestyle advertising an introductory ladies freestyle day at Hurley, coached by world renowned freestyle kayaking coach Jacko Jackson and previous junior world freestyle champion Ottie Robinson-Shaw. Their aim was to spend the day with 10 female kayakers who had little experience of freestyle kayaking and introduce them to Hurley (one of the best freestyle features in the World). What an amazing opportunity! I put my name down straight away, thinking that is was unlikely I would get picked. So when I received a message a little while later saying that I had got a space, I was equally surprised and delighted! This article is an opportunity for me to share what happened that day and the positive impact it has had on me.
As I am sure the rest of the UK paddlers will agree, it has been sad not being able to go white water kayaking over the last three months due to Covid restrictions. I am lucky to live in Nottingham however and so have been able to do lots of flat water paddling since restrictions eased just over a month ago. Whilst I have really enjoyed my flat water sessions, it is not quite the same as white water kayaking. So when it was announced this week that my local white water course Holme Pierrepont would be opening up again it was of course met with great excitement. With careful restrictions in place, all sessions have to be booked in advance to limit the number of paddlers on the course at any one time. So I booked on for this weekend and have let the excitement build up since!
‘Noor waayy are you going to Norway?’ My friend Sam exclaimed when I told him a week before my trip last August. Sam works in Des Mes (my local kayaking shop) and I had popped in to buy some elbow pads. Whilst Sam’s excitement was probably more due to his creation of such a well worded question, it matched my excitement for my upcoming trip. My purchase of elbow pads however was in response to the extreme nervousness I was also beginning to feel.