New for 2026 is the Gumotex Caleya single seater kayak (left) which seems to fill the gap between the two ten-year-old Twist models. It’s 40cm shorter than a Twist 2 solo/double (below left), but 60cm longer than a dinky Twist 1.
Up front you get a half deck which I find less useful than they look (you’ll still get wet) as well as an optional metal brace behind the seat. On other Gumotex boats like my old Seawave, these OTT and bulky metal braces support a removable spray deck, but they also add tension to the hull and push the sides apart to make it more rigid all round – probably. It’s also an admission that, without dropstitch flooring (as on the pricey Rush models), a tubed inflatable hull needs some help without raising pressures. Warranty claims apart, you wonder why Gumo don’t up the side chamber pressure rating to 0.25 bar and fit PRVs, then ditch the metal brace. I did the same to my old Seawave and I bet the Calaya can take it.

Longer is faster in the water, so the Caleya will be nippier than a 9-kilo Twist 1, but a Twist 2 is a lot longer again and can of course take one or two paddlers. So right now I don’t see the value in buying a new Calaya over a used Twist 2 for a couple of hundred quid. You do wonder if a 3.8-m Caleya 2 might be in the works.

	Twist 1 (since 2017)	Twist 2	Caleya 2026
Length m	2.6	3.6	3.2
Width cm	79	83	85
Weight kg	9	13	12
Chambers	3	3	3
Pressure bar	0.2	0.2	0.2
PRV	In floor	In floor	In floor
Fabric	Nitrilon	Nitrilon	Nitrilon
Max load kg	100	180	120
Price UK	£429	£700	£849 (‘pre-order’)

Packrafting Durdle Door

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Anfibio TXL main page

The last time we paddled this part of the Jurassic Coast (video above; more here) we were zipping along under sail or navigating in choppy waters and I didn’t get a chance to have a good look around. Now the latest heatwave and strong winds has subsided, today I wanted to take a slow ride along this world famous section of coast riddled with geological marvels.

The Lulworth Estate owns this spectacular stretch of coastline and makes several million a year off what must be the most expensive car parking in Dorset. And while you can get here on a bus, I’ve got a new way of getting around for packraft day trips: an e-MTB which can tackle bridleways and traffic-free backroads with the boat shoved in the panniers.

My e-bike weighs 28 kilos – double a normal MTB – and, along with the delicate electronics which have already played up in the rain, is not a good candidate for seawater bikerafting. That proved hard enough the other week with my folding bike at less than half the weight of the e-bike. So at Lulworth Cove I locked the bike to a fence and covered it, hoping I’d not get clamped, then set off for the long haul up and over Hambury Tout to Durdle Door beach.

Thankfully some of the parking millions has been spent on a cobbled path making the climb as easy as you can expect. But in one go it’s still like 20 minutes on a cross trainer.

My plan was to trek to the far end of Durdle’s gravel beach, paddle through Bat’s Hole arch, then come back via Durdle Door and Stair Hole to Lulworth Cove. All up only about 4km. A neap tide was coming in and winds were a cooling 5mph from the east, turning onshore at noon.

Crowds thicken as you near Durdle Door and you’ll easily hear half a dozen foreign languages as pilgrims the world over come to view the limestone marvel.

And you can see why. From the top it all looks amazing, though not always after a busy day. I’m pleased to see the sea is glassy smooth.

At times Durdle Door must be the most culturally diverse location in all of Dorset, and is especially popular with people of an Indian heritage after a Bollywood comedy called *Housefull 3*, was shot here.

I trudge on and pass a woman inflating her SUP. Perfect day for it.

While the fine gravel gets jammed in my Omniums, at least there won’t be the nuisance of sand to wash off.

Approaching Bat’s Hole. By the time Durdle Door collapses into the sea and becomes a stack, Bat’s Hole will have grown enough to become the replacement, producing a seamless transition in parking fees.
The TXL zips along but oddly, I’m wobbling about on the seat like it’s over inflated, which it’s not. Unusually, I’d put it in with the baffles longways and wonder if that’s the cause. I turn the seat 90° with the baffles now across the boat. The wobbling stops.
Paddle board woman catches up but, despite the perfect conditions, I’m disappointed to see her kneeling, grappling with the over-long SUP stick. In the dozens of paddle boarders I pass today, only a couple stand up. Honestly, I wish someone would tell the kneelers and sit-downers they’d manage so much better with a kayak paddle, like this chappy, or even one of these.
Full disclosure: like gravel bikes, I don’t get paddle boarding, which merely goes to show how stratospherically out of touch I am with the popular zeitgeist.

I hop out behind Bat Hole and top up the TXL. These big volume packrafts often need a second top up 10 minutes in (it can be done on the water). My bodged balloon pump finally breaks (the better 2-part Mk2 version waits at home). I also install the inflatable footrest like I should have before setting off, then go all out and deploy the thigh straps too. That done, I’m reminded how connected and comfortable you feel in the TXL with all these things in place. It’s like standing on a paddle board!

A light breeze is blowing through the arch from the west, the opposite of the forecast. Oh well, it’s light enough not to matter and will blow with the tide for the ride back. On the far side of the arch an unseen air pocket is huffing and puffing and snorting with the swell.

Careful to dodge swimmers and unseen tombstoners (gruesome vid), I pass through Durdle Door and again leave the throng for now. I used to love tombstoning; the thrill of jumping into thin air and landing harmlessly, feet pointed and nose pinched. But falling 200 feet from the top of the Door would be very painful.
I continue through St Oswald’s Bay / Man o War and as predicted, around noon the wind pivots to onshore and ruffles the surface. I pass a bloke standing on his SUP with his Mrs laid out on her elbows between his feet, like a forward gunner. ‘*That’s how to do it my man, with your reposing young lady providing added stability by virtue of a lowered centre of gravity!*‘ I should have exclaimed.

I weave in and out of the rocky maze around Dungy Head, where it’s said late Neolithic farmers once span dried cowpats off the cliff as votive offerings. The practise survives today in Kentucky.

I reach Stair Hole, an intriguing network or arches and caves, packed with young revellers. You can enter a mini cove, but need to go out again then enter one arch to exit the other, again on the watch out for tombstoning lads and furtive snorkelfolk.

The Lulworth Crumple they call, this. Reminds me of Morocco’s Anti Atlas ranges where such formations are common.

I probe a sea cave with a sandy beach at the end, and am reminded on Moonfleet, just a few miles away

The sea view of Stair Hole. Note the boarder paddling with dangling legs; good for the pecs and CoG, I suppose.

Talking of pecs, on the right (east) arch I realise it’s not just another bunch of young daredevils egging each other on, but proper climbers taking turns to traverse the arch’s overhanging span. I was never into the clobber of climbing. How great it must be to free climb with just shoes, shorts and chalk bag, knowing it’s a short, harmless fall into the water. The bloke in the black shorts made it across to a round of applause; blue shorts bailed.

By now the sea has kicked up and is bouncing clapotis off the cliffs. But I feel stable and safe in the pitching TXL, partly because I know it’s not far to go.

Entrance to the calm waters of Lulworth Cove. It’s a shame to end so soon.

Walking back to the bike, I’m struck by the steepness of the path up Hambury Tout. No wonder I was puffed out. Ready to go, my boat and gear in a bag weighs 8.6kg.

Riding home, some bridleways pass right along the edge of the Lulworth firing ranges and I hear the sound of heavy calibre machine gunfire. They were still at it at 10.30 that night.

Did I tell you I wrote a packrafting guide book during Covid? I mention it as I happened to reread it the other day after having scanned something similar. ‘Information dense’ I’d call my style – they only gave me 48 big pages. I should have been nominated for an award from the ITF.

Bikeraft Sailing

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Bikerafting Christchurch

Bikeraft sailing sounded like a good idea I’d not tried yet, and now in the midst of this summer’s third heatwave, it’s high time to get on the water! Lately I’ve been distracted by other outdoor activities. Today’s 10mph easterly ought to work well across Poole Harbour, followed by the dreary reed-bound slog up the Frome river back to Wareham. So I took a train to Poole, cycled down to Lower Hamworthy shore, folded up the Dohon Mju and unrolled the boat.

I realised later I’d ridden over the impressive but troubled Twin Sails Bridge completed in 2012, but closed for years at a time. I wonder if the two are connected, as in trying to be flash backfired? It’s so called because the lifting bascules or spans are joined diagonally, giving the dramatic appearance of two sails when raised (below; video).

One worry about bikeraft sailing is that until you have a secure set up, ripping along at 10-12kph you don’t want 11 kilos of bouncing bike to deal with or get tangled in. But as things worked out I needn’t have worried. If it was 10mph, I’d forgotten that that’s not enough for a good ride. The problem is, my WindPaddle has narrow operation window. Beyond 15-20mph it gets overloaded and starts swinging from side to side, though it’s possible my wide-mount Transverse Bowsprit idea (below) has fixed this.

I paddled right out into the middle of the channel opposite Arne to get clear of moored sail boats and turned into the wind. The TXL+ moved along under sail, but I was hardly clinging to lines like something out of a Roadrunner cartoon or in Knoydart one time. The weight of the Mju is more or less equivalent to an overnight camping load, so another 5mph of wind would have been ideal. One side benefit: with the sail down and paddling, the sheet keeps the briny splash off the bike.

Motorboats were bombing around towing water skiers and other contraptions which made me nervous, but this part of the Harbour is allocated to such activities. I inched along like a water snail and eventually I knew I’d have to turn southwest and go across the wind where the boat felt even more sluggish and the bike and pulled down sail up front pushed the bow offline.

It was going to be a long old slog to the river entrance, followed by an even longer haul against a dropping neap tide to Wareham. So I sailed across the channel as tight to the SW as possible, then when the sail collapsed, paddled along while a windsurfer up ahead made better progress.

The dropping tide was exposing the silt to either side and soon the navigation poles: red left, green right, converged and guided me towards the otherwise hard to find river entrance where I knew the Frome turned sharply and I’d get a bit more sailing in. Now in a corridor of reeds, I sailed past the windsurfers who’d been met by a tiny inflatable dinghy who’d tow them into Wareham. As the afternoon heat pressed down, it made the thought of my long meandering slog of nearly 4km to Wareham all the more galling.

Left Pill, Right Pill
So at a (non public) sluice jetty I’d noticed before (above), I crawled up a ladder, hauled the boat up and rolled it up. This was right on the Path of Two Rivers. The path is a loop which follows the Frome’s banks and then turns west back to town along the parallel but smaller Piddle. We paddled this once. We also walked the 2RP in autumn and it was fine, but in summer the Frome section had been very overgrown with reeds and nettles.

I was right at the path’s apex; about the same distance back back to Wareham along either river walk. Unfortunately I turned left and took the Frome path which was a really bad idea. Had I turned right, or even just stepped a few metres to the north and climbed over another locked gate, I’d be on the track alongside Swineham Lake where we go swimming twice a week and I’d have arrived in town in just 16 minutes looking fully normal. But even with the OS Map App showing all this on my phone, I chose left, thinking we managed the Frome bank path before.

These thick reeds did not let up for half an hour. In fact it got worse with added nettles and brambles

Even at the best of times the path here is less than a foot wide, uneven and rutted. Too tricky to ride safely. Soon I was pushing through reeds as thick as a jungle, and much worse than I recalled from our summer’s walk. Pushing the bike ahead on its back wheel like a trolley, at one point I recognised the gate leading to Swineham lake and knew the road was right there, just 100 metres away. I walked down off the embankment into what looked like a path through the reeds but suddenly sank down to my knees in mud and swill, with the bike on its hubs. I was lucky to get out with my shoes. OK, forget that idea.
Looking later at Google sat (below), I see the whole Frome path to Wareham is actually an embankment with the river on one side and the dyke in which I’d foundered on the other, all swathed in thick reeds so you can’t see what’s left, right or underfoot.

Never Get Out of the Boat
Back into the reed hell, I pushed on. From the walk we’d done I knew what was coming next: brambles and nettles. Now early-afternoon and probably 30°C again, off the water, the windless river banks were suffocatingly humid and hot.
This utter misery went on for half an hour. Nettles swept across my shins, brambles sawed at my forearms and reeds slapped me in the face, or tripped me up. I got to a cleared and rideable section (below). Rideable, yes, but not well suited to a 2-speed with 20 inch wheels. The Mju is not a stable bike at the best of times, even less so off road with a backpack while trying to gain momentum to steady the front end. Soon enough I hit an unseen hole and was catapulted over the bars, headbutting the track with a thud propelled by the boat on my back. Oy yoy yoy, today was turning into a right old shit show. I got on again but, deflected by something unseen, I nearly went down the reed bank into the river.

By now I was parched and my arms were streaming with sweat and blood from pushing through the brambles. The legs would still be throbbing from stings next morning, but I reassured myself that there’s some therapeutic benefit to mass nettle stings, isn’t there? At one point I passed a nonplussed couple of middle-aged wild swimmers who looked like they’d been caught by the tide and current, grabbed a jetty with a ladder (like me earlier) and now had a long shoeless walk back to town in their swimwear.
Getting back on the bike, determined to reach town sooner for a drink, inevitably one of the many thorns stuck in the rear tyre pushed through under my weight. (By next morning the front tyre was flat too with 3 holes). I should have stayed on the river. What was it Willard said in that film? Never get out of the boat. Abso-lutely god-damn right.

I marched on, visualising the drinks selection at Sainsburys near the quay. One good thing about the Mju is it weighs nothing, and neither does the packraft on my back. Up ahead a woman with a walking stick and her son with a dog walked by, heading the way I’d come.
You know it gets really overgrown in a few hundred metres. I said.
I showed her my arms.

Gosh, that looks frightful! Thomas, this chap says it’s very overgrown up ahead.
I want to go on, said sulky Thomas.
Oh well, maybe you’ll read about us in the papers, she said with a grin.
At least she had a stick to beat her way through.

I reached the much vaunted extended boardwalk which led to the Saxon-era church near the quay with public toilets where I could sluice myself down. I pinched some guest wifi from the pub and before I knew it, geef was there with a bottle of water and the a-c on full blast.
What happened to your head? she asked.
Oh, just the usual.

Bikeraft sailing? More wind needed with a bike, but now at least I knew a good way to dodge the upstream Frome river slog into Wareham when the tide is wrong, on foot or with a bike. Take the right pill. Abso-lutely god-damn right.

Kayaking the Abel Tasman coast (NZ)

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See also
Doubtful Sound (NZ)
Packrafting NZ

A few days after paddling Doubtful Sound we rented another hardshell double at Abel Tasman NP, at the top of the South Island. A much more popular kayaking location, a string of sandy, aquamarine bays and beaches punctuate wooded granite headlands dropping to the sea. Less rain-drenched than Fjordland, the vegetation here has a more Mediterranean appearance.

Blink and you’ll miss it Marahau is the main access point, serving visitors to the park. Here they have a really good system of water taxis which can drop or collect paddlers / walkers at any number of idyllic, granite-sand beaches along the NP’s sheltered east facing coastline. Most are walking all or parts of the 60-km Abel Tasman Track back to Marahau (as we did one day, below), staying at designated basic camp sites, if needed.

The Aquataxi operation is very slick: passengers board the motorboat on its trailer in the yard (below left), get tractored down the road to the beach and backed into the surf to head up the coast with various drops offs and collections, and of course a drole commentary. Returning to Marahau, a tractor waits axle deep in the surf, the boat takes aim and rides onto the submerged trailer, gets clamped down and we’re all driven back to the yard.
It got me thinking something similar would work well along the Jurassic Coast and the Southwest Coast Path between Weymouth and Swanage in the UK to save circular walks. It’s true there’s a bus, but boating the coast would be loads more fun to or from a walk. I imagine rougher weather for nippy beach launches, plus a host of red tape kills this idea stone dead.

The rental agencies offer the same service with their kayaks, but on day-paddles get you to paddle out from Marahau before bringing you back, where getting dropped off first to paddle back would be more fun.
But with your own paddle boat, a taxi can drop you at the top of the park (below) to make your own way to Marahau. We may have struck unusually good weather again, but as we saw it, this would easily be doable in a packraft. Each day a late morning northerly sea breeze wafts you back down to Marahau.

The reason the rental outfits require you to set off from Marahau is to give you a detailed safety briefing (left) before watching you set off in a plastic sea kayak. The boats were well equipped with a spare paddle, bilge pump and flare, but despite the demo of the technique, righting a 50-kilo double full of water, then getting back in and pumping out sounded quite daunting.
On a day like today that was exceedingly unlikely unless you messed up a beach landing (or were in a tippier single; see below), but even then there are plenty of water taxis bombing around to help out if needed. I also spotted some double SoTs, much shorter and slower for sure, but which could be covered in a 5-second safety briefing: ‘Fallen out? Silly Billy! Clamber back aboard; paddle on ;-)’

After the safety briefing, they took us to the beach and watched us get in and acclimatise to the Mission Eco Niizh 565s (18.5’). It was a similar classic to the Necky we used in Doubtful, except it was no less than 77cm wide and weighed a massive 55 kilos in the extra-rugged outfitters version designed to be knocked out for years by rental operators and their clients.
But once on the water the Niizh had one big advantage over the Necky: a much better car-type pedal arrangement for the rudder, not the Necky’s awkwardly angled, self-folding side pegs. The action was much more taught and responsive too; we both found it much easier to track straight in the kayak without continuous micro-adjustments.

You can feel quite smug in your untippable, bath-wide, Eco Niizh double, but I don’t think I’d have been quite so sanguine once greased up and stuffed into a Shearwater single (above right) which, at 4.8m, is nearly as long, but 61cm wide and with a notably smaller hatch. They do look great though, like a proper sea kayak does.

I took the GPS this time but we only clocked 8kph flat out, though could easily sit on 6-7kph. I suppose that’s normal for a relatively wide and very heavy double where no amount of extra effort will overcome its shape and mass. As with IK doubles, two paddlers don’t add up to more power, just a potentially greater range.
The Mission felt less uncomfortable too, but we only had a morning to spare here.

So now I can vouch that Abel Tasman would have been one spot where lugging my TXL packraft would have paid off. With loads of storage in the side tubes, relatively sheltered conditions, coastal path access and even water taxis to hail if it all gets too hard. A sail could even catch the afternoon sea breeze and on the way you might pass egrets and stingrays (left), except this in predator-free NZ, not Australia, so the stingrays don’t even sting.

Kayaking Doubtful Sound (NZ)

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Fjordland National Park in the far southwest of New Zealand’s South Island is a huge, barely inhabited warren of 1000-m+ mountain ridges, deep 40-km inlets and glittering alpine lakes. Milford Sound is the best known of these glacier-carved fjords reaching inland from the Tasman Sea. Every day convoys of buses drive up the spectacular Milford Sound road to cruise the Sound.
We chose the less visited Doubtful Sound further south for a spot of rental kayaking.

However you do it, getting to Doubtful Sound is a bit of an affort. First you cross the 35-km width of Lake Manapouri (pics above, map below) to a jetty at the west end, alongside NZ’s biggest hydro electric scheme (left). Unseen below is a huge machine hall carved out of the granite, housing the turbines
Just about every South Island lake seems to have been repurposed for power generation, producing up to 85% of the island’s electricity.

From the jetty a steep road leads over Wilmots Pass (above), then drops to the Deep Cove at the eastern extent of Doubtful Sound, noted by Cook on his 1770 expedition. This private road was originally built to serve the remote hydro construction from the sea. Once finished in the 1970s, one and then another tailrace tunnel was carved through the granite 10-km from Lake Manapouri to Doubtful Sound, the 180m-drop generating electricity for a smelter in town of Bluff, 150-km away. Five hundred cumecs (m³/sec) of water rush out of the tunnels, which adds up to a billion litres (1km³) every three weeks, freshening up the salty reach of Deep Cove with a couple of jetties and a hostel.

There’s little worry of Lake Manapouri running dry as the prevailing westerlies off the Tasman Sea dump up to 8 metres of rain a year, sustaining a dense, primeval rain forest of evergreens and ferns right out of Jurassic Park. They cling to the steep valley sides from the ridge crests all the way down to the tide line, and mineral, vegetable and probably some slow moving animals too, everything gets clad in bright green moss (left), even old rope.
But for all this running water and greenery, it’s barely inhabitable terrain dominated by 60° slopes or outright cliffs, all thick with impenetrable vegetation.
We’d arrived after a not unusual spell of rain which saw 1000-foot waterfalls streaming down the slopes, fed by unseen tarns far above. By the the time we headed out of the valley a day later, they’d dried up.

This is the hydro scheme’s spillway, with a swift current running into the Sound.

Our guide Blake explained there was no soil on these slopes. Once exposed by the retreating ice cap 12,000 years ago, lichen (algae-fungus) attracted moss, then ferns gained a footing and finally huge beech trees rose up, clinging to cracks in the rock and each other. Periodically they let go in a spectacular ‘treevalanche’, exposing a strip of bare rock comonly seen, and so the floral colonisation process resumes.

A service boat from Deep Cove jetty means kayak groups can be dropped off or collected anywhere in the Sound in minutes, depending on the day’s winds. Our afternoon paddle saw us left at the head of Halls Arm, 13km from Deep Cove. Down here only about fifty days a year are sunny, and we were lucky enough to grab two in a row. It was a bit disappointing to see passenger tour boats here, but they kept their distance or provided fun wakes to bounce across.

In Halls Arm eight of us slipped into four Necky Amaruks, a discontinued 6.4m roto double from the 1990s, just 66cm wide but clocking in at 42 kilos. We probably last paddled a hardshell double along Croatia’s Kornati Islands, some 30 years ago. The good thing with hardshells is you sit virtually on the floor and below the waterline, like a packraft but at nearly half the width. This means the boat is stable and fast, while still sitting low on the water and less prone to winds – the bane of much lighter and buoyant inflatables.

Today I sat in the back with the rudder, but failed to adjust for comfort, which ended up disagreeing with my bad leg and bad back. Occasionally an Omnium wet shoe would slip off the awkward side peg – less thick soles are better. After flailing hopelessly trying to reconnect my foot, I’d have to pulled back the skirt and reach in to unfold the peg.

I’ve experimented with or had IKs with rudders, but in the end decided they weren’t essential for my sort of fair-weather day-trips (as opposed to overnighters, where you’ll get all sorts of weather when a rudder can help).
You’d think you just set the rudder straight to go straight, but I found myself constantly finessing the pegs and zig-zagging, while trying to synch with the Mrs’ cadence up front, a bit like patting the head and rubbing the stomach.
By the time we got back to Deep Cove after two, 2-hour spells, me and another similarly older guy had to be winched out like sacks of wet wheat. The minimally-padded seats saw to that, not helped by the lack of a solid footrest for support. He and I were not the first to experience this hardshell discomfort of course, but like bike saddles, you either get used to it or find one that suits you.

Next day I grabbed the front seat and directed the Mrs to the steerage area. This was much more like it! Solid foot placements and a great view. This time we paddled down the Sound alongside Elizabeth Island, passing a textbook hanging valley carved out by a former side glacier.

Returning up the north side of the island, we took a break in a tidal cove free of sand flies which had pestered us yesterday and which are the famed nemeses of New Zealand’s sodden west coast. Blake said yesterday’s smoko had been sand fly hell, but being bigger, satisfyingly swattable and far less dense than tiny Scottish midges, I’ll take Kiwi sand flies any day, even if they give the same itchy bites.

Heading back up to Deep Cove we came across some of the troupe of bottlenose dolphins which inhabit the Sound. The pod passed right by our boats, jumping and diving as they went.

The last half hour turned into a slog. It wasn’t a headwind and it couldn’t be the Sound’s meagre two-m tide, even though it was on the turn. Which only left Manapouri hydro turning the taps on full as the the ally smelter down in Bluff just got a big order in.
Other than that, the tour’s pace was slow and the day after we both noted the lack of shoulder aches common after a first paddle in ages. When we were in synch, the Necky zipped along at an easy 6kph or more. It would have been interesting to see how it – or we – handled windier, choppier conditions.
Even then, a spell of hard shelling in a clammy wetsuit reminded me why I like IKs and Ps. Out in the fresh air, you can see your feet, access stuff easily, sit on a cushy pad of air, and of course hop in and out like a squirrel on a pogo stick. They say the Necky Lochsa which replaced the Amaruk had bigger cockpits, but you’ve still got 20 feet and 40+ kilos of plastic to store and transport; I saw one on ebay.nz going for just 300 quid. But for this type of use – rentals left on site for months – they’re ideal and indestructible. An SoT double would be door-wide and slow, and after all, most paddles here are in the rain.
It was great to paddle Fjordland and revisit to the dark side to revalidate my prefs. For the sort of paddling I enjoy, I’ll still take an IK or P.

Surf’s up at Kimmeridge

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After Storm Chandra came the calm. Well, just a day of calm with a 5mph onshore breeze, sunny spells and single digit temps before seasonal deluges resumed. The artillery was pounding at Lulworth so the west side on Kimmeridge Bay within the MOD firing range was definitely off limits, but it might be nice to pootle along the base of the Kimmeridge Ledge cliffs and back. There could be a stormy after-swell, but small waterfalls may be be running too. I even thought it might be a day to sneak round St Alban’s Head from Chapman’s to Dancing Ledge…

I’ve droned on about trying to pin down unlisted Kimmeridge tide times. The short answer, I’ve decided, is Willy Weather. Today a harmless neap tide was rising just half a metre in 8 hours to top out around 2pm. Interestingly, the High Water time moved by 20 minutes from the evening before, which suggests it’s not just some publish-and-forget-it table of predictions, but based on live inputs.

Hoping to take the scenic route, at Holme bridge the River Frome’s water meadows had spread into a vast lake, submerging the road, long before I even got close to the ford, which I read later was 5 feet deep. So after a couple of other attempts, I settled on the long way round over the flood-shedding Purbeck Hills to Kimmeridge Bay.

On Purbeck ridge the mist still clung to the flooded valley bottom.

Coming over the last hill before Kimmeridge village, I realised I’d underestimated the after-swell; the stormy winds and rains may have passed but the seas were still animated.

Overlooking Kimmeridge Bay. Lively.

Down at sea level in a dumpy packraft it looked like it would be a struggle of good timing, desperate acceleration and luck to get out quick through this surf without getting swamped. I didn’t have my drysuit and as things looked, today was a day for a decked or bailing packraft.
At times the surf seemed to flatten off and you could have scooted out on a paddle board. Then it all rolled back in, streaking the Bay with white foam.

There were look-outs stationed round the bay. How thoughtful, I thought. Who lays that on then? Then I realised they were probably contracted by the MOD to make sure sea users kept away from the shells potentially raining down on the west side of the bay.

I thought if I could sneak through the east edge of the bay it would be OK round the corner, so I climbed up to Clavell Tower to have a look. Sea mist clung to the Bay.

If anything it was even more lively, with the Ledges kicking up the swell for hundreds of metres out. So much for a quiet cruise along the cliff base. Unless I went right out, I’d be forever glancing right to see what was incoming, and on the Ledges, waves can lift up out of the blue without warning.

We tried packraft surfing up at lovely Achnahaird one time, in far more benign conditions with waves barely at knee height. It was a laugh but packrafting today would take some commitment.

Today was a day for the surfers: get in the water and stay in it. Sadly, as I’ve noticed before, watching surfing live is not like a trailer for Big Wednesday. To paraphrase Gregory Peck: “They pay me for the waiting, the surfing I do for free“.
It took me 15 minutes of watching four surfers bob around before I grabbed the shots here of a 15-second ride.

Back at Wareham, a swan was parked in the middle of the Causeway. You can see why they call it the Isle of Purbeck.

Wareham Quay was awash, with barely a foot under the road bridge to the Causeway which was why the river was backing up.

And it was only just possible to reach the station off the bypass where a bloke was putting in his sea kayak. At least someone got a paddle in today!

Book review: South West England Paddle Boarding (SUP, Canoe & Kayak)

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See also:
English South Coast category
Book review: South West Sea Kayaking, Mark Rainsley
Book review: Bradt Paddling France, Anna Richards

In a line
Promising selection of rivers, canals and inshore SUP paddles right across the beautiful Southwest, but just one map.

What they say
Explore the best of South West England’s rivers, canals, lakes, estuaries and beaches by paddle board, canoe and kayak
Paddle along meandering estuaries, wild swim and picnic on silver sands. Featuring more than 100 stunning locations across Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Wiltshire and Somerset, this trusted guide provides all the practical information you’ll need for trips out on the water by paddle board, canoe or kayak, whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned paddler.
Illustrated with sparkling photography and offering a variety of routes, this is a beautiful and inspiring book for water lovers and adventurers afloat.
Rrp £18.99, £8.99, 2023, 255pp

Review copy supplied by Wild Things Publishing (WTP)

• Covers over a 100 paddles from Wiltshire to Lands End
• Nicely written descriptions and genuinely useful practicalities
• Most photos by the talented author, not Shutterstock etc
• Responsible take on PFDs which are often pictured in use
• Now uses decimal degrees (D.D°) waypoints for start/end points (and the obsolete OS grid ref). In the pdf, along with website urls, D.D° waypoints are hotlinked to Google Maps
• Details for public transport returning to start point, where it exists

• No route maps means added effort required to work out what, how and where
• Doesn’t say where printed so presumably not UK
• The ‘Getting There’ descriptions of lefts and rights and road numbers is redundant these days. A postcode or D.D° for the satnav or phone is adequate

Review
Getting in on the wild swimming craze early, WTP moved on the ‘boarding a short while after Lisa Drewe brought us her original and award winning Islandeering guide in 2020.
A proper, experienced kayaker turned SUP evangelist, the author knows her paddling, in particular what’s important, safety wise. Like Bradt’s Lizzie Carr, she’s also an environmental campaigner or conservationist, and it seems her SUP epiphany in the US was similar to my own while there. Suddenly there was a new and accessible way to explore the blue bits on a map.

The book is subtitled ‘canoe & kayak’ to catch the likes of me who don’t get the SUP thing, but that’s the last mention of boats in words or most pictures. Of course, what you can SUP you can easily packraft or IK, and the range of inland and inshore paddles is much more accessible to the majority of recreational paddlers than Pesda’s South West Sea Kayaking.

Up front you get a map covering all 100+ paddles, followed by a table including gradings and distances ready for you highlighter pen. The lengthy intro leads on to choosing a board and getting trained, then there’s a detailed section on trip planning for sea or rivers and what to wear pack.

Covering one location per spread, you can flick open any page, like above or below, and be presented with a mouthwatering paddling suggestion. You get nice photos, a description and solid practical info in the yellow box, which occasionally includes public transport links for your rolled-up inflatable which might not be an iSUP.

The Pesda South West sea kayaking book knows what counts and provides sometimes near full-page maps of each suggested route. This book has pretty pictures of aquamarine bays. The lack of route maps in a route guide is baffling and relegates it into the ‘lifestyle’ category not everyone rates. How else can you effectively and concisely express this information? It’s not a space issue; any one of the generic shots could be have dropped or resized. I’d have happily paid another £1 for route maps because read any paddle description and you soon start thinking, ‘hmm, sounds good but what does it look like on the ground?’. A map depicts this information at a glance. The author’s Islandeering book (not a paddling book) had great maps and other Wild Guides, including their well-known wild swimming books at least have regional maps to supplement the main map up front. I’m told it’s a combination of space, aesthetics and cost.

Take Route 91 for example: the ~5-km Salisbury Loop. Sounds great, easy access and a lovely picture of ‘boarding past the willows below the cathedral spire and no license required, we’re told.
Now try to make sense of the dense network of rivers and canals surrounding the city (left) from the text. ‘Nadder Island’ is mentioned to avoid a weir, but it’s not even on the OS map (it’s the crescent below Churchfields). You want to hope you don’t take a wrong turn and get sucked into the municipal sewage compactor sluice.
The two paddles covering Christchurch (which I bikerafted recently) are another example, and it’s the same with so many other paddles in this guide: they’d be so much easier to visualise and so get inspired by with one less photo and a basic map to cross referenced to a more detailed OS map or whatever’s on your phone. Failing that, link to an online map like here. Lisa Drewe is an ‘OS Champion‘, after all!
The book ends with detailed sections or water safety and how to paddle responsibly – the sort of solid, concise but practical information which was missing from Bradt’s France book. With maps South West England Paddle Boarding would be a perfect, self-contained paddling guide to this magical region. As it is, it’ll still give you loads of ideas, even if you need to work for them.