Category Archives: Inflatable Kayaks

Book review: Bradt Paddling France

In a line
Mouthwatering selection of river- lake- and inshore paddles right across France, but packboats go unmentioned, despite lauding the use of public transport.

What they say
This award-winning new Bradt guidebook provides 40 itineraries for water-based exploration around France by SUP kayak & canoe to suit all abilities. It is the first practical guidebook to explore the whole country by SUP (stand-up paddleboard), canoe and kayak – waterborne activities enjoying a popularity boom.
Experienced paddleboarder, travel writer and local resident Anna Richards has toured the country’s rivers, lakes and coasts to handpick 40 outstanding itineraries for water-based exploration that suit all abilities from novice to expert, enabling readers to experience Metropolitan France as never before!
Rrp £19.99. 41 maps, 230pp

Review copy supplied by Bradt Guides. Book images found on online previews.
Additional contextual review info by French boarder, Gael A.

• Varied selection of paddles right across the six corners of l’hexigone and Corsica
• Nicely written descriptions
• Maps are small but routes are short so they do the job
• W3W works well for pinpointing locations
• Nice layout and paper
• Printed in the UK – better sustainability

• Routes appear to be composed almost entirely from set rental/guided itineraries
• Most are short return paddles
• When it comes to paddling knowledge, the author seems a little out of her depth
• Nearly all photos are stock library shots
• IKs and packrafts virtually unmentioned, yet as transportable as a rolled up iSUP

Review
Thanks to its topography, rich history, culture and proximity to the UK, on river, lake or sea, France is a fantastic paddling destination. Paddling France: 40 Best Places to Explore by SUP, Kayak & Canoe replicates Bradt’s Paddling Britain by Lizzie Carr which, in its first 2018 edition, was a long-running hit, possibly supercharged by lockdowns when demand for inflatables boiled over.
Like many others at this time, author Anna Richards discovered the wonder of paddleboarding, moved to France to become a travel writer and, knowing the country from childhood holidays, zig zagged around for over a year to write and research it all.
Paddling France isn’t aimed at enthusiasts attracted to the challenge of developing skills by juggling tidal streams and winds, river flow rates or the logistics of multi-day tours. Most SUP owners are into casual paddles, but probably outnumber the former by ten to one.
But unlike Lizzie Carr’s original Paddling Britain (which I checked after writing this), faced with an equally monumental task, in most cases Anna Richards seems to have either rented kayaks (and maybe boards), used their shuttle services, or at sea sometimes joined tours. Although all are great paddles, I didn’t get the impression any routes were original selections born from years of experience, the usual prerequisite for authoring a guide like this.
Initially I understood ‘… generally with the assistance of local clubs that kindly loaned me rigid… kayaks‘ (page xix) as a euphemism for arranging rental freebies in return for a listing in the book. But it’s possible the author actually believes ‘clubs’ – in the social/membership/lessons UK sense – is the right word to describe a commercial rental, tour and sometimes training service. Only Route 21 lists a ‘Club Nautique‘ sailing school which also rents kayaks and boards. All the rest call themselves versions of watersports centres or ‘location canoë-kayak‘ (kayak rentals) of which there are many more in France than in the UK.
Once you get your head around this you ask yourself: well, it’s a short-cut but in France does it actually matter? What are most Brit paddle tourists’ experiences in France? Is it flying or railing down with a packboat, as I’ve done? Or is it driving around with kids or campervan, then chancing upon a lovely waterside spot which offers day rentals and a lift back? It’s almost certainly the latter. That’s what I’ve done elsewhere in the world.
It’s clear the author put in the miles, paddled every route and composed a detailed description and practical info, although images of her in ‘off message’ kayaks are absent, replaced by stock library photos with fill 90% of this book. With mainstream guidebook sales in retreat and corners getting cut, these are all understandable measures to still produce a nicely designed and illustrated book in full colour for just £20 that’s printed in the UK, not the other side of the world. That alone deserves a sustainability rosette which the publisher should laud.
I wouldn’t consider blagging a freebie rental in return for a mention as unethical, as long as it’s clearly flagged. Many routes start and end right outside an outfitter’s base. I could be wrong, but if that’s the case better to be upfront. Skimming through Paddling Britain, that book appears to have been written and researched the old fashioned way – though again, no mention of packboats ;-(

Ironically, Anna Richards likes iSUPs for some of the same reasons we all rate IKs and Packrafts: ease of use and transportability. Yet as said, many routes seem to be in rental hardshells, while IKs get dismissed in the Intro’s second para (left) as too awkward to travel with compared to a SUP.
I looked up what a 12.5′ inflatable paddle board weighs: about the same as a Gumotex Twist 1, and 2-3 times more than a packraft, though I admit a 4-metre FDS IK (above right) is ridiculously bulky. What a shame then she missed out on made-in-France Mekongs packrafts rental service. Some rental outfitters listed even supply Mekongs. On a lively river I’m sure she’d have been thrilled. So, no IK or Ps in this book (bar p5 photo), but of course, conditions permitting, all routes are suited to packboating.

Evening splash hour on the Ardeche (Route 27). SoT and IK heaven

The author seems more enterprising travel writer with a SUP hobby, than experienced river runner. She has a talent for filling out evocative descriptions with not much to go on. For an inspirational as much as practical title like this, that may be a better balance, but it’s a shame we can’t have both. If you’ve used serious paddle guides, Paddling France falls a little short in places.
What I now realise are linguistic mistranslations of French paddling terms jar, suggesting the author was inexperienced in writing an English paddle sports guide that must include accepted terminology and elements of technique, appropriate gear, water hazards and safety regs. Page 16 and 18 excepted, the frequent use of disembark to ‘get off’ [your board/the river] or even ‘set off’ [for the paddle – p66] get particularly grating. This is a literal translation of a similar French word which doesn’t always work in English. Marinas get described as ‘ports’ or ‘harbours’ or even ‘pleasure boat ports’ – also not the same thing. Nor is a weir a dam in English (though in the US they call them ‘low-head dams’). It took me days to realise this. I now wonder if paddling newb Anna Richards learned her paddling and nautical terminology in French while researching this book, then translated some words literally into English. Hence the odd use of port de plaisance – the clumsy French phrase for marinas. Or assuming barrage translates to dam, weir (or roadblock), when all three are quite different things. As and aside, a few times a SUP board is called a ‘paddle’: ‘inflate your paddle’ roll up your ‘paddle’. Maybe ‘paddle’ is slang for a SUP in French? Probably not*
But then an often-repeated claim dawned on me: English vocabulary is many, many times greater than French or any other language – no wonder L’Académie Française is so defensive ;-) You won’t drown horribly as a result of all this, but if writing a paddle guide in English for English readers, use or learn the right words – or check with someone who does.

Actually it is! Gael writes: Some years ago the term “paddle” has been inexplicably adopted as the official French word for SUP. Stand Up Paddleboard would translate into something like “planche propulsée en position debout au moyen d’une pagaie”, or PPPDMP which would be difficult to pronounce. Italians called it “tavola da SUP”, which is shorter but nearly as ludicrous.

‘Paddle This Way’
Working through the book, up front after a handy country map which you’ll be referring to a lot, we get 26 (or xxvi) pages of what and how. Flying is discouraged for environmental but also supposedly impractical reasons even if, despite what’s claimed, a packboat or iSUP is easily loaded on a plane. There’s good info on the various car regulations including urban emission restrictions which could catch a foreigner out.
On a Eurostar there’s no weight limit, so if you can get two bags like left (IK with camping gear on a folding trolley) you’ll not pay excess fees, despite what’s said. With a packraft there’s nothing to it.
There follows a section about paddleboarding with the ‘accessibility and flexibility’ words I see mentioned so often, but which have long applied to packboats too, and especially packrafts (sorry; we’ve had this argument!). How to SUP, choosing a SUP and washing SUP; it’s all summarised. Kayaks and canoes get slightly less detailed treatment from expert contributors lifted from the Britain book who list elementary turning strokes a child would guess. Better to suggest a technique I found less intuitive: pushing on the upper arm, not yanking on the lower, as so many kayak newbs do.
A box on renting boats and boards (also listed locally after each Route) recommends French outdoor retailer Decathlon’s IK rental service (and which might have included Decathlon’s packraft range, cough, cough). But I couldn’t find any rental boats on decathlon.fr and think that side of the service has been dropped.

Talking about gear, much of it makes sense, but it’s odd to see a manual SUP pump listed as ‘the biggest regret of the project‘, with the advice to get a 12-volt car inflator. So much for using public transport then! You can have both of course – long/thin SUP pumps are bulky compared to pocket packraft inflators, but the autonomy they offer changes the game by being able to ditch cars.
A ‘Wear a Buoyancy Aid’ heading on page xx unfortunately appears right below a stock shot of half a dozen SUPists clad only in skimpy swimwear (and again two pages earlier). I read here 62% of UK ‘boarders don’t regard a PFD is an essential safety item. I rarely see them worn, but then I rarely see SUP boarders actually standing. I suppose as long as you’re leashed to your board (skimpies are unleashed), in deep but calm water you can crawl back on, providing you clung to you paddle. But on some of the listed rivers I know a leash can also be an entrapment hazard. Not mentioned. This is where handbooks or guidebooks written by paddling pros like Bill Mattos, Peter Knowles, Mark Rainsley, Laurent Nicholas, Luc Mehl and even Bradt’s own Lizzie Carr have the edge. I’ve learned a whole lot from nearly all of them.

To her credit, every photo of Anna Richards on a board is in full wetsuit with pfd. What a shame there was no shot of her on Route 31 in Lyon, her home town, just more stock imagery. River rowers never wear BAs either, but it does seem to be a blind spot with SUP users. As said, most of the book’s images come from photo libraries, and of the SUPs pictured, half have no BA, compared to only 1 in 10 kayakers.
With off-season paddling often covered, you’d think then here’d a good place to mention the perils of cold water shock (scroll down to ‘C’) to drive the PFD message home: you drown flailing in a breathless panic long before succumbing to hypothermia. On Lake Annecy (Route 33) winter water temps are a ‘distinctly refreshing 4°C‘.
There’s also no mention of the real menace of weirs (barrage in French; ‘low-head dams’ in the US) which led to that Welsh SUP tragedy and was also drummed into my paddle reading early on.
There follows some boilerplate stuff on responsible paddling. Good to learn wild camping in France is a bit less illegal than I’d thought; it just emphasises how satisfying multi-day routes are (as in the Britain book). And I never knew canal paddling wasn’t allowed either*, nor the Seine in Paris. No wonder the French are so militant!

* Gael A adds: Canal paddling is allowed in many places. Inland waterways can be rivers or canals. Those capable of commercial shipping are managed by the public company Voies Navigables de France VNF. VNF decides which type of craft is authorized on each waterway or portion of waterway. For instance the Seine through Paris intra-muros is not allowed to sailing dinghies, skiffs, canoes, SUPs etc., while it is allowed downstream near Boulogne-Billancourt or Maisons-Laffittes and upstream near Saint-Fargeau for instance. VNF manages wide and deep waterways open to large barges. Older narrow gauge canals still in operation like Canal du Midi, Canal de Bourgogne or Canal de Nantes à Brest are no longer used for shipping and from now on dedicated to recreational navigation, which includes recreational barges, river yachts, canoes, SUPs, etc. For instance, when I couldn’t paddle on the river Marne because it was in spate, I went to Canal de l’Ourcq, although canal paddling is boring actually.

Division 240 sea regs
With sea paddling routes included, I’d have expected a reference or at least a link to France’s Division 240 regs and how they might apply to SUPs. Another thing that could catch foreigners out, just as with driving. IK&P’s French SUP correspondent Gael A explains the regs as follows:

Division 240 applies to SUPs more than 3.50m [11.5′] long.
SUPs shorter than 3.50m fall into the beach toy category, consequently they can’t go beyond 300 m from a sheltered shore.
SUPs longer than 3.50m can go beyond the 300m limit up to 2 nautical miles [3.7km], by daytime only, provided they comply with watertightness, stability and buoyancy requirements described in Division 245.
To make a long story short, a SUP must have 2 chambers. A SUP with only one chamber is considered a beach toy even if longer than 3.50m. Obviously watertightness and stability requirements don’t apply to SUPs.
Navigation in the 300m-2nm zone requires the following safety gear:
• leash
• PFD 50N or wetsuit or drysuit
• waterproof signal light like a strobe or a headlamp, or even a cyalume stick provided it is attached to the PFD.

So my single-chamber, 2.8-m TXL packraft would sadly be demoted to the beach toy it resembles and be restricted to less than 300m from a shore. But just as with having a high viz vest, warning triangle and breathalysers in your car (all detailed on pager xi), you do wonder how- or if all this is enforced but it’s a guidebook’s job to inform readers.
Winds will always be unpredictable but there’s very little tidal information on the salt water routes, and whether it might be a factor. The much loved MagicSeaweed app listed on page xx went offline mid 2023, 10 months before the book was published, and its replacement seems surf based. (There are similar online resources.) Down on the Med tides aren’t a thing, but Brittany has some of the world’s highest tidal ranges, reaching 15 metres on some routes. Not everyone may fully appreciate how if could affect some paddles.

Rental SoT shoots a chute on the Tarn (Route 23)

Odd that there’s no mention or imagery of thrilling glissades or passe canoës (canoe chutes, left), a French speciality rarely seen in the UK.
Built especially for paddlers (and sometimes fish) to avoid tedious portaging around weirs – neither glissades are listed in the Paddling Vocabulary on p222. They’re an added highlight to many rivers I’ve paddled there and you’d think it might be fun to try sat on a SUP too.

Location and nav
Like other guidebooks, the Bradt uses the What3Words GPS location app to precisely pin down riverside put-ins as well as passing POIs on third party mapping. I got into using the W3W website (not the app) to orientate myself with the book’s routes and ///graphics.dads.inched is much easier to momentarily memorise then type correctly than 48.85840, 2.29447, although the Rivières Nature en France guide uses QR codes which go straight to map; no typing needed. Only once on Route 27 did the W3W launch point end up near Tomtor in far eastern Siberia – the coldest settlement on earth. All the others were spot on. The W3W app also provides the conventional numerical waypoint equivalent (as above) which a GPS device needs, and which will work on all other mapping apps, not just W3W. Both (and QRs) are so much better than the OS grid ref system used in the first edition of Britain and Pesda guides.

Talking of maps, I’d have expected a tip towards the IGN Rando app, (left) the French equivalent of the UK’s excellent Ordnance Survey equivalent. Widely used Open Source Maps (OSM, on which the book’s mini maps are based) can be free, but in my experience you can’t beat centuries of refined cartographic know-how.
And with mapping apps like IGN (or indeed Google) you can download an area of map for offline use when there’s no 4G – quite likely if backcountry France is anything like the UK. All phones have GPS so W3W will still work, or at least show points. On long river days in France I’ve often lost track of where the heck I was and how far salvation might be. A handheld GPS device (eg: Garmin) or a mobile app running offline maps is the answer to nav connectivity.

The Routes
About three-quarters of the 40 routes (full list right) are there-and-back or loop paddles in the 5-12km range and can be just a couple of hours on the water. On a lake a loop makes sense, but where possible, I’d rather paddle a river or a coast one-way and bus or even walk back. The outdoorsy author has done big hikes herself; it’s a shame she missed out on ways to combine both for those with portable inflatables like hers but there and back day trips are what most people do.
About 15 routes are inshore sea paddles divided equally between Atlantic and Mediterranean. Another 15 are rivers (9 are one-way), and 7 are lakes, with a bit of overlap all round (estuaries, reservoirs, canals, weir-ed urban rivers, and so on). As you can see in the Contents, each route gets a descriptive heading which is a nice touch.

Each route also gets difficulty ratings from 1-5 for SUPs, and another for kayak/canoes. As you’d expect, most are easier or safer in a kayak, but all will be dependant on experience, river levels or coastal winds. The few one-ways are all great rivers in the Massif, like the Tarn (only 10km), Allier (11.5km) and the famous Ardeche – at a full 32km by far the book’s longest. The shortest is less than 2km, or 3km through the Il de Ré’s salt marshes (Route 16) – the sort of paddling probably better appreciated standing on a board.

Essentials for Route 33: Lake Annecy in the Rhône-Alpes

Routes I know
Like any know-all reader I ‘tested’ the four routes I’ve paddled through at least once to see how they compared with my recollections. I read a few other interesting ones too, then skimmed the rest.

€20 riverside lunch at Milandes – Dordogne (Route 20). Sure beats a Greggs on the Thames.

Route 20 on the Dordogne is a swift one-wayer of 11km passing several chateaux and ending with an easy bus trip back to the start. That’s what we want. I like the way some historical context is added into the narrative; like in the UK, it can be centuries deep in France. As it is you’ll be less than two hours on the water so best to string it out exploring some of the riverside villages.
The Dordogne was my very first French paddle in 2005: a full 101-km of meanders and piffling riffles between Bretenoux and Tremolat. By the end I found it all a bit easy, but still fondly recall a deliciously expensive lunch at Milandes (left), then randomly crawling off the river exhausted that evening, dumping the Gumotex in some undergrowth and squelching onto the grounds of what I now see was the luxury Manoir de Bellerive hotel. I was too tired to talk myself out of it.

We’ve done the full 86-km of the Tarn (Route 23) from Florac to Millau at least 2.3 times using trains, planes, buses, taxis, IKs and packrafts, and the 11-km of this route took us just 90 dawdling minutes. As the book suggests, your eyes will be out on stalks, but it’s a shame to come all this way for half a morning in the amazing Tarn Gorge.

We also put in at La Malene one time, but following the easy 10-minute portage around Pas the Soucy (left; we clocked 9km), we did another 12km via Les Vignes to Le Rozier, capping a satisfying and spectacular day on the Tarn.
The book advises to ‘disembark’ before Pas de Soucy a ‘gnarly waterfall… which shouldn’t be attempted … unless you’re seriously professional‘. Shooting waterfalls can be a survivable stunt, but Soucy is a far more deadly rockfall with several syphons – another white water paddlers’ nightmare. It’s an odd mistake to make as photos show the author on her SUP so she was right there.

On one of my favourites, the Allier (Route 27; 11km), you wonder why the hard to reach put-in at le Pradel, when Prades hamlet with shops, toilets, parking and a popular put-in beach is just a mile up the road? Perhaps partly because the rental outfit dropped the author here?
Many of the book’s one-way river paddles seem predicated on the put-ins and itineraries of local kayak tour/rental operators (who each get a usually sole mention), rather than what would suit independent paddlers in their own boats and other means of getting around. With or without vehicles (or unwilling to use taxis), such paddlers could do a lot worse on the Allier than Langeac to Brioude, 38km. The two towns are just four stops (30 mins) apart on the Cevenol train line which followed all the way up the Allier gorges is a day out in itself.

Route 29 is the Ardeche, the longest in the book by far at 32km, of which the author says: ‘If you do one route in this book, make it [the Ardeche]’. This proves Anna Richards gets the appeal of doing a full day, one-way paddle, instead of two-hour there-and-backs which can be done back home on any summer’s evening. ‘It will leave you speechless…’ she continues. There’s certainly nothing like it (or the nearby Tarn) in the UK which is why in high summer you might get crushed in a white-water logjam of upturned rentals.

For a long time I was put off the Ardeche, misinterpreting Rivers Publishing’s description, and for Paddling France the author recommends using an SoT over her paddleboard. A lot of the time long, damage-prone fins are given as the reason not to ‘board similar rivers, but surely shorter or bendy fins are available? I’d assume the bigger risk is losing balance and whacking your head or breaking your collarbone in shallow rapids. Or the fact that when sat down for safety, your average SUP steers like a sea kayak with half a paddle.
In a bombproof packraft the Ardeche was plain good fun, made all the more memorable by the hoards of flailing revellers I’d normally seek to avoid. We came down over a week from Les Vans via the Chassezac tributary, covering about 70km.
Many famous spots like the fabulously chaotic Charlemange rapids just before the arch (above and above left), and the Dent Noire rock (where emergency services stand by on busy days) go oddly unmentioned.

Of the rest, everyone will find some great discoveries in Paddling France. Who’d know to try out the allotment-fringed canals of the hortillonnages off the Somme below Amiens’ gothic cathedral (below; Route 9). Other urban paddles also offer a novel viewpoint on a city which SUP-ing makes easier. Then there’s amazing Etretat on the Normandy coast which is probably geologically contiguous with Dorset’s Studland stacks over a hundred miles away. You’d hope that the rest of the sea paddles on this wild coast have been selected for their accessibility – probably so as rental outfitters will mean they’re a recognised thing. The sight of the book’s sole IK on p5 (Route 1, Corzon peninsula) was heartening, and the glittering granite sand spits of Glénan islands look like a mini Scilly Isles, though you’d think calm days here are infrequent.
There are loads of tempting locales, and of course the book’s many brief itineraries can easily be extended if you ask around or consult other guides.

For her first guidebook Anna Richards has done a great job putting it all together. While it’s not that hard to find brilliant paddles in France, each route offers a locale with a proven appeal and rentals on site. Paddling France is easily worth 20 quid to have this information and inspiration in your hand to browse.
A lot of my reservations are picky, but a printed guidebook from an established travel publisher carries an authority than online braying cannot always match, and with it comes responsibility. More so for paddling, I believe, than walking or cycling guides, for example. After a quick flip through Paddling Britain seems to have achieved this. As detailed above, a tiny amount of work would get Paddling France close to the calibre of that book and the other paddle guides mentioned. If the author didn’t have the paddling experience before setting out to write this guide, you’d think she had it by the time the book was finished.
When I first got into river paddling I thought ‘How do you know that round the corner you won’t get swept into some deadly rapids or sluice with no way of easily getting ashore?’ For this reason, river guides are different other outdoor activities. You can’t always get off the ride. Your typical happy-clappy SUPy Puppy (and budget IK user, for that matter) buys a paddle craft online and hits the water, literally not knowing one side of a paddle blade from another (as the author also notes). Paddleboarding may be associated with the trendy Slow Travel movement, but on the water you can get in trouble fast, which is why it’s important to be across the risks and regs.
We all have to start somewhere nut in my experience, despite months of hard work, all this can often be too much to catch first time round, and to a busy publisher it’s just another title in the production line. Bradt is not a specialist in nautical publishing but a quick pass by a paddle-savvy editor would have caught most of the clangers. With a bit of distance and feedback, very often a guidebook’s second edition is what an author endeavoured to write first time round. I look forward to reviewing that one too.

Evening on the Allier near Langeac (Route 27)

Jurassic Coast: the Mystery of the Freshwater Steps

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Unsatisfied with my bank holiday paddle-by, two days later we hiked back to Chapman’s and packrafted back round to Punta P. We left right on LW spring, but either my tide timings were wrong (don’t start me on that) or Chapman’s shore doesn’t dramatically transform, like Kimmeridge beach.
It was less than a mile’s paddle, but a strong SSE was blowing and once out of the Pool, it got choppy around Egmont Point, especially into the wind on the way back. It didn’t help that I had the TXL’s floor mat fitted for extra glide, but which I know doesn’t work well for a rear paddler: higher floor = less or no backrest = not relaxing.

Once at the cliff face and with the boat resting in the shade of the Freshwater rock spur, the Mrs easily found fragments of ammonites in the shingle (why always ammonites?). We edged round the spur’s tidal shelf onto Pliosaur beach where a woman looked down from above and asked
‘Ow d’you get down there?’
‘We paddled.’
‘Uh..?’

Despite an exceedingly dry spring and summer, a cascade was still dribbling down the cliff face through tendrils of moss, ferns and algae (below). It was the end of the South Gwyle, a short stream with a big catchment. Augmented by a couple of landscaped fish ponds up the valley at Encombe House (more below), ‘gwyle’ is an old Dorset word for a tree-lined stream.

Fallen and weathered concrete slabs below a protruding step on the cliff edge: the remains of the mysterious ‘Freshwater Steps’

With nothing more to learn about the pliosaur, I was curious about the odd limestone wall up on the clifftop, seemingly bridging the stream. Clearly visible on aerial imagery, I’d noticed it walking back the other day to Kimmeridge, but was too hot and bothered to explore. Perhaps the ruin of an old mill?

On the east (other) side of the dark shaly spur from which the cascade falls, the protruding end of the wall is being undermined, and now hangs over the cliff edge (below). Cracking under its own weight, one day it’ll collapse and fall to the beach. We parked the packraft here, in the shade of the spur. The face was full of fossils, but bits of grit were constantly dropping from above.
While here I had a look at the probable site of the landslide I’d seen on Saturday (left), but it must have looked more dramatic than it was on the beach, and these little slides must happen all the time.

Overhanging east end of the wall from above and the beach, slowly being undermined by the receding cliff (2025)

Photos by Phil Champion on Geograph from 2008. On the left note the ‘other’Ladies’ Steps’ (‘for ladies to climb easily to a path leading to the Carriage road‘) descending to the wall: the old footpath still part of the SWCP in the 1970s but now under thick brambles or thin air. The wire fence and all the pillars seen above have disappeared, bar one. It’s amazing it’s all lasted so long, given its exposure, but the east side of the spur has lost several feet in height and width in 17 years.

Freshwater Steps and the Hydraulic Ram, map 1901 (Source)

Back on the west side of the spur, ‘Freshwater Steps’ is a name I’ve seen on older maps (above) and, as expected, locally born geologist Ian West’s geological and historical page had some answers, as well as many fascinating old photos.
In fact ‘Freshwater’ seems to have been a name for this locality (left) which preceded the Steps. Perhaps a place a boat could pull in to top up the water barrels? I’ve noticed another ‘Freshwater’ on the south coast of Devon.

Encombe House, 1857, photolithograph, John Pouncy (source)

As far as I can unravel, the story goes that round 1840, the Freshwater Steps were built down to the beach by John Scott, the 2nd Lord Eldon whose Encombe estate enveloped a grand Georgian mansion (above) bought in 1807 by his grandfather, former Chancellor Lord Eldon (also John Scott; d. 1838; right). History has not judged the first Lord too fondly according to usually impartial Wikipedia, as well as this writer who puts him alongside the famously loathed Castlereagh of the late Regency era. Since those days the estate has grown greatly.

The falls today at Freshwater Steps. The last hanging step visible top left

The surviving stone wall is actually the portal of a finely built, 60-metre, stone-lined culvert passing under the South West Coast Path (gallery above). Downstream, a cobbled canal once redirected the stream over the promontory’s tip (another image from 1965), though the 2004 Purbeck Revealed book (see below) seems to explain this as a natural feature, despite the stone-lined canal.
Freshwater and sea storms eroded the spur and the stream receded to its current position (left) – the same geological process which, decades later, saw a pliosaur snout drop to the shore with an unheard thud.

Google Earth historical imagery. In 2002 the coast path still took the old way close to the cliffs and through the scrub (as still shown of Google Maps today), the wall and canal appear intact with a pillar at each end of the wall and another (which has been moved but still survives in the grass) marking a gateway to the Steps whose lower have have collapsed to the beach. At least 2 metres of cliff have also slipped down from the eastern side of the spur. Another, more overgrown image from 2005; the canal wall remains intact and the waterfall tips off towards the end. Note the gully above the as-yet unfound pliosaur, it may have contributed to the erosion which eventually exposed the snout. By 2014 the SWCP had rerouted north, the western canal wall had collapsed, littering the beach below and putting the waterfall in its current position, although the upper Steps are still evident. The wall is collapsing on the east side. Current GE imagery appears to extend the east wall which suggests artificial enhancement, possibly AI?

Why all this work diverting the gwyle through a culvert and building the Steps? Perhaps, along with the estate’s fine gardens and numerous carriage roads (one cutting right across long subsided Houns Tout cliff to Chapman’s; left), it was all about impressing visitors with picturesque ‘follies’ along with the supposed health benefits of bathing in sea water (see pump house below) which had helped put nearby Weymouth on the map.
Purbeck Revealed (2004) by Ilay Cooper may have another explanation. Born in Swanage during WW2, the author describes larking about on the Encombe estate as a boy. According to his research, the second Lord was responding to water shortages on the estate with bold Victorian engineering, not engaging in late Regency frippery. The gwyle’s catchment was not so broad after all, necessitating the digging of long, stone-lined tunnels and laying pipes into adjacent valleys in search of springs. The Freshwater project may have been little more than a spin off while the builders and masons were in. Certainly Encombe sat right on top of lashing of Purbeck stone from which the house itself was originally built.

The Steps and Falls may have modestly been trying to outdo the 1831 Clavell Tower folly (right), three miles west along the SWCP on the adjacent Smedmore Estate. The Tower survived a little better than the Freshwater infrastructure, but a century on, it was a ruined, burned out shell. By 2007, in poor shape internally and fast becoming the ‘Leaning Tower of Purbeck’, a funding campaign finally succeeded in having it dismantled brick by brick and moved back from the cliff edge.

Note that especially on the east side, the cliff is much more receded than this modified map, based on the Definitive County Map, shows

Near the Steps, this doesn’t look like a ‘hydraulic ram’ as shown on maps.

On another visit here, exploring the area just north of the wall, a friend noticed a rusted iron fence and overgrown steps (left) leading down to a domed chamber. Inside a heavily corroded crank and flywheel (above) looked like the ‘Hydraulic Ram‘ noted on late-1800s maps (below) and listed on Dorset Heritage. But the position doesn’t line up with old maps and I must admit, the device we saw doesn’t resemble any vintage ram pumps found online, each with their distinctive bulbous ‘accumulator’ chamber. With the hand wheel and crank, this looked more like a means to vertically open a sluice valve. Maybe there’s more elsewhere or below the stone floor.
At Encombe, old sources say the pump was used secondarily to move sea water up to the house where people could bathe in privacy, not on the beach like the hoi polloi. It may explain the small side shaft I noticed passing through the culvert probably directly under the pump house – an outlet for the sluice or the ram’s ‘waste valve’ perhaps? Assuming sea water bathing didn’t go on round the clock at Encombe, the chamber we found may have been a valve to get the hydraulic ram pumping.
The pump house was also alongside a shorter trail to the SWCP, joining it just before the steps climb westwards.

A ‘hydram’ is an ingenious ‘uphill water pump’ invented by one of the Mongolfier brothers in 1796, a decade or more after their famous hot air balloon flight (left) also turned the concept of gravity upside down. The pump uses the free energy of a constant water source and the ‘water hammer’ effect (the bang when you shut off a tap quickly) feeding pipes fitted with a pair of one-way valves. Once balanced, it slowly but surely pumps water way above the inlet source with a little wastage from the first valve – see vid below.
Requiring no external power and little maintenance, hydraulic rams and similar devices were common in the pre-electric 19th century, and have been rediscovered today by off-griders and remote villages in the developing world.

There’s a good account extracted from local born Bob Dorey’s (1892-1995) memoir – Odds & Ends from My Century (1992) – on the Kingston history page. Here, the old village pub was renamed the Scott’s Arms after WW2. OS maps also show ‘Eldon’s Seat’ half a mile to the northwest of the Steps, the first Eldon’s private viewpoint.

Finely built culvert, nearly 200 years old. Crawling through here was all a bit ‘Famous Five and the Mystery of the Freshwater Steps’. At the end of the tunnel I was expecting to find a lost smugglers’ hoard draped by a couple of skeletons. Maybe I’ve read too many books.

Storms raged and the soft shale crumbled, slowly taking the Steps, and parts of the wall and channel with them. The falls broke through to spill down the mossy cliff some time after 2005, and around 1978 (according to Purbeck Revealed) the Steps, long undercut, collapsed entirely, never to be trod again.

A castaway’s last desperate attempt at rescue.

Deary me, we have drifted a long way from packrafting and adventures in packboats. We set off back to Chapman’s, the TXL riding over bigger waves like a dead pliosaur. The Mrs was not at ease and next day Poole Coastguard reported being swamped with incidents.
I was also surprised how sore the shoulders were next day after just 2.5 kms there and back in the wind and waves, compared to Saturday’s calm 6-kilo ride over from Kimmeridge. Seems it was more effort than it felt, like a short but rough MTB ride vs a longer road ride. Repeating that crossing today in a packraft would’ve been utterly exhausting if not an outright Bad Idea. But that’s why we wait and wait for the 10% chance of <10mph tailwinds with favourable tides.

Preview: Gumotex Aurion

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It’s the end of 2025 but there still no mention on the Gumotex website of their new decked single seater Aurion, announced in 2024 (video below), and sold for months in some European outlets at around €2400 with the new 5-year guarantee. Cool name and it looks good too – but so does the Rush 2 and so did my Seawave with the optional deck (left). Something about a deck can make a long IK look more like a sea kayak.

Positive video reviews have appeared in Europe in recent months, pre-production prototypes dished out to reliable influencers in strong IK markets, but there have been actual purchases too. Apart from above, currently most reviews seem to be videos in German, but we take what we can get here at IK&P.
Normally I’d scoot over to Laurent Nicolet’s Rivieres Nature YT channel (French Gumotex importers). They’re paddle pros not influencers, who often get new Gumboats early and shoot great vids with minimal chat, showcasing everything from the Gumocatalog from white water to sea with no piece-to-camera exposition. But so far they’ve only filmed the revised but still door-wide Swing 1 2025 (also fixed deck; their pics below), though Laurent did announce the Aurion on the French IK forum.

One chatty German video from ‘RoGa‘ offers an AI-generated English translation – ‘adjustable fruit stand with push valve … for securing pastries‘. Good to know, but other segments make sense, and you get a good all-over view of the hull, inside and out, as you do on the garden vid below by Austrian? Kayak Kev. (translate ‘closed captions’ to know what’s being said). Another vid of his bottom of the page.

Anyway, the Aurion
The Aurion (look it up) announces itself as the hybrid replacement for the possibly outgoing Framura (getting discounted right now). So like the old Solar span off the DS-floor or ‘hybrid’ Thaya, and the Seawave begat the longer hybrid Seashine, so the Framura has cloned into the Aurion.

The Framura was a boat which Gumotex always pitched as ‘the fastest Gumotex’. But as I wrote here back in 2014:
I’m not convinced the 0.2 bar Framura is that much faster than a longer, stiffer Seawave [or later Rush 2]. And I also suspect it has not been such a sales success either. Perhaps claiming the former has something to do with the latter.
Indeed I wonder if ‘fastest’ was nothing more than a marketing label for the Framura to separate it from the dumpier, also-decked Swings. Someone needs to do a drag race or time trial with all of them.

**I-beam**: parallel linked tubes, like an old lilo. This was the original way of making an inflatable ‘plank’ but was vulnerable to over-pressure and rupture if left in the sun (as happened to my Feathercraft). Automatic PRVs are a solution, but can be prone to leaks with grit-swill down on the floor. Lockable PRVs, like on my Zelgear Igla was another way round it, but for minimal weight gains, super rigid dropstich puts the whole issue to bed and turns out th light.

The new Aurion seems to match the Framuras LxW dims at 410cm by 75cm wide. This is actually only 3cm less than my 78cm Seawave (verified), no matter what the official dims claim. The Aurion’s payload is said to be 140kg.
Oddly, the Framura retained old-school 0.2 bar all round; low-end Gumotex pressures. The new Aurion runs 0.5 bar (7.5psi) in the dropstitch floor, and 0.25 in the sides, while gaining a kilo (17kg, same as a Seawave) and ditching floor PRVs. That will be as rigid as a Grabner (who, fyi, manage stiffness and high pressures without DS). Only half a bar in a floor is nothing for dropstitch, and anyway, DS is much better at managing excess pressure (from blazing sunshine) than vulnerable I-beams (like an air bed, see left). Along with less thick panels and of course rigidity for a negligible weight gain, this is the reason to incorporate DS in IK hulls.

Your Aurion’s DS elements aren’t just a slab of SUP board joined at the hip, like FDS IKs costing a third less, but complex hydrodynamic forms (like the X500) which partly helps explain the price. Like last year’s Seashine, the narrow floor has a shallow V, but only on the front half (with protective strake), producing a keel effect which flattens out to the back where the skeg mount sits. They claim this narrow floor helps make the Aurion 10% faster than its predecessor. As someone observed, the Aurion may be 75cm wide at the sidetubes, but it’s much less at water level which should mean less drag for a better glide.

If you’re spending €2450 on an Aurion, for another €400 you could get yourself an old school, 5 psi (0.3 bar) twin side tube Grabner Escape 1 on sale at Arts.de. Very similar dimensions except it weights 22kg and in the video looks as massive an an FDS, once rolled up. The day Grabner adopt dropstitch will be the Kitzsteinhorn glacier stops melting. Of there’s Gomotex’s tandem Rush 2 which, with the optional deck, works out about €2300.

I haven’t visualised exactly how, but the single chamber (or linked) side tubes are said to be DS at water level, but regular round tubes above, but presumably running 0.25 bar which won’t strain the DS. In this way the upper non-DS side tubes act more like stability pontoons, and many testers report the Aurion may feel tippy initially, but has good secondary stability when leaning right over (or broaching along a wave) like a proper sea kayak. My Igla had the same overall dims and was perfectly stable to me.

No one’s shown an out of the bag assembly yet, but the Aurion uses a pair of alloy supports fore and aft of the cockpit to hold the deck convex so water rolls ofF. The front one can also give something to brace knees against, as I found on my Seawave (no thigh straps needed) and supposedly, they tension the boat; holding the sides in as it flexes and opens out midway in heavy seas or rapids. You’d think the DS floor would see to that, and if these bars are anything like what my Seawave had (left), there’s a neater MYO option.

Meanwhile the seats still look crude, heavy items made (I suspect) from Nitrilon off-cuts (unlike my Seawave adaption above left). They can easily be swapped out and so can the footrest. They insist on retaining a blow-up cushion, but at least it’s now adjusted by two straps running up to the cockpit. For tensioning it’s a big improvement over the older, floor mounted set up, and you could easily replace the pillow with a piece of hard drainpipe, as I’ve done on my IKs for years (left).
With a narrower than normal IK you’d definitely want thigh straps to steady yourself, unless the front deck support brace works. Combined with a proper footrest, it all makes a huge difference to connection and control or flat or lively water.

Some people have been exorcised by the grab lines on the sides, but they’re just a safety requirement for inshore sea use in French markets. Talking of which, there’s also a rudder attachment hole on the back. Having experimented with rudders on my longer Seawave, it’s important to understand that on a kayak, rudders aren’t primarily about steering like on the QE2 liner; they’re more for compensating against crosswind drift on open water. With a rudder trimmed to one side you can paddle normally across a side wind and not have to haul hard on one arm to compensate. Very handy at sea, especially on overnight paddles where you may end up with winds you didn’t ask for.

Re-entering a decked boat from deep water. Needs practice and calm seas. Who ever capsizes in calm seas?

The cockpit takes a flexible coaming rod for a proper spray skirt, at which point you have to ask, would you want a fixed-deck single seater IK? You lose all the benefits of easy entry from or by the water, just to avoid a little paddle splash, though I admit a fore deck is handy for gadgets and snacks. They you have the cleaning and drying issues, baggage loading complications and so on – all for what? In that way the similar but slightly longer and wider Rush 2 is 10% lighter, probably as cheaper (though maybe not once you buy the deck) and can take a second paddler which has proven benefits to well being.

It’s good to see Gumotex leading the way with non-PVC hybrid IKs: first the basic Thaya slab, then the more sophisticated but initially troubled flat-floored Rush models, and the half V-hull Seashine which has been copied to the Aurion, but with semi DS side tubes. Each iteration refines the Gumotex hybrid format, but at a price that’s unlikely to see it chart in the UK.

Slackrafting 2025: Video of the Week

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Slackrafts main page
Slackrafting Clashnessie NW Scotland
Slackrafting Northwest Australia (videos)
Slackrafting France
Slackraft Sea Trials
Testing a cutdown Sevy
Packraft Quick Guide

Remember Slackrafts? Around 2011 that was my made-up word from for cheap, vinyl, ultra-low-psi pooltoys using the same technology as children’s paddling pools.
At the time they were some 3000% cheaper than the then dominant US-made TPU Alpackas (left), while looking vaguely similar to the paddle curious adventurer. For that price you really did wonder could there be so much difference? Experimentation proved the answer proved to be yes: a good TPU packraft is 3001% more enjoyable to paddle and 3002% more durable than a vinyl PoS.

Skinned SeaHawk results in minimal freeboard (Clashnessie)

Just before the subsequent Chinese-made packraft onslaught which must have just about peaked by now, Slackrafts was a dirt cheap way of trying ‘packrafting’ without the expense, responsive performance or durability.
All you had to do was keep the thing from puncturing or bursting long enough to make up you mind. That might take a few hours or a few of days, especially once you cut off the outer chamber to make a slimmer, less bin-bag like raft (left) which retained adequate buoyancy for lighter paddlers. A decade or more ago various chums and I experimented with Slackrafts locally as well as in France, Scotland and remote northwest Australia, chartering a light plane to the headwaters of the Fitzroy, Australia’s longest river.

Fast forward to 2025 and YT algos led me to a bunch of Parkouriste youtubers called Storror with no less than 11m followers. In 2024 they set off in a boat-train of Intex and BestWay slackrafts for a paddle-less drift along the swiftly flowing Canal de la Toba, a hillside waterway of viaducts and spooky tunnels paralleling the Rio Jucar in Cuenca. The Toba starts near the town of Uña, midway between Madrid and Valencia, providing a reliable feed for a power station down the valley.

Entering the grease and WetWipe choked Kebab Death Weir Tunnel

The Canal de la Toba is very much not a recognised recreational paddle backed up by a leaflet in the local tourist board. In fact it’s almost certainly illegal or severely discouraged and could be deadly – like many of Storror’s hugely popular parkouring stunts – or indeed the Kebab Death Tunnel Weir (above) on a bad day.

At one point just before entering a long tunnel they realise that using these rowing rafts backwards, with the thinner, flat-ended stern in front, puts your mass in the much more buoyant ‘bow’, so eliminating annoying back-end swamping when slowing down or when a breeze-driven wavelet passes by.

Jeff on the Fitzroy, stern first in his loathsome BestWay slackie.

Going blunt end down does nothing for hydrodynamics, steering or speed, but in the vid the floaters let the canal’s current do the work 12km to the ‘meat-grinder’ grill at the canal’s end, above Villalba de la Sierra.
The entire cost of Storror’s seven-boat flotilla was still probably less than the cheapest TPU packraft you can buy today, and like many of the best filmed adventures, it came across as less dangerous than it looked. In a packraft it might have been too easy but let us take heart that the Spirit of Slackrafting lives on.

Slacking down the lovely Ardeche. Within a few days the raft was in a campsite dumpster.

Taking the Piddle: Wareham Two Rivers Loop

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TXL main page

You do one paddle in two years then do two in a row. Honestly, you could not make this up! Take the Saxon walled town of Wareham – wrested back from the beardy Viking hordes by King Alfred in 875. It sits snuggly between the tidal reach of two rivers: the Frome to the south, and the smaller Piddle (aka: Trent) on the northern edge.
East of Wareham there’s a Two Rivers Walk which more or less replicates this paddle: down one river and up the other. I’ve paddled up and down the Frome loads of times. In fact 20 years ago last week I wobbled along the Frome in my very first IK – an early Gumotex Safari (left) that was tippier than a hog on ice.

The Piddle flows below the northern remnants of the old Saxon walls, and I’d long assumed it was clogged, weir-ed, patrolled by angling militias or otherwise inaccessible to the recreational paddleur. Not so, said our paddle-boarding builder who ID’d a put-in near the pre-Norman church of St Martin’s on the Wall, the oldest in Dorset. I recall checking it out in the 1990s while updating a UK guidebook, looking for the tomb-like effigy of T.E.Lawrence (left) who was died on his motorbike up the road at Bovington.

We walked down a private drive/footpath to North Mill (above; a self-catering) and put in by the brick bridge (left). It felt like their front garden, so next time I’d cross the bridge through the gate and put in somewhere on the north bank.
It’s a brambly, 3-foot drop either way into the swift but foot-deep Piddle. Piddle is of course a Naughty Word, so I should not bandy it about, willy-nilly, but in the ancient Saxon dialect of Dorse, it means a small stream. Along its upper course, several west Dorset villages: Tolpuddle, Affpuddle, Piddlehinton Puddletown, Mein’dapuddle and Piddletrenthide, take their names from it. (Test: one of those names is made up).

We left about 4 hours before HW at Wareham so we’d be against the tide (and a SE wind) as we neared Poole Harbour, but later have both at our backs as we heaved wearily up the Frome back into town.

Below the bridge the old mill weir was easy to walk down (to spare the skeg). It’s not always so; sometimes the water meadows here get inundated. I bundled in and held on while the Mrs caught up. Once in the boat we felt like kids wearing oversized trench coats. I’d forgotten that when not using the Multimat floor (which makes less space inside when two-up) you inflate the seat bases right up. That done, we navigated down an overgrown channel, dodging overhanging branches and other rampaging midsummer verdure.

Soon we passed under Wareham North Bridge and its famous 18th-century sign strongly discouraging bridge vandals with a life sentence to Botany Bay.

We paddled through a hidden world of drooping willows and silent lilies. At times it all closed right in and we were pushing and pulling through the dense overgrowth and branches, while getting pelted by dropping insects.

The detritus of bawdy summer parties.

Gradually the Piddle opened out. Somewhere around here we reached the tidal reach and entered a dreary, reed-lined corridor. The pace slowed down as tide and wind pushed against us.

Near Poole harbour a few of these old rowing canoes caught my eye. They looked like something left over from D-Day training. Or maybe just long unused fishing club water craft. Anyone know more? Waterfowl punts I hear from the back.

Out in Poole Harbour the water was less than a foot deep so we aimed for the red and green deep channel markers leading south to the mouth of Frome. Up ahead, the Arne peninsula. We turned into the Frome and the long hack back inland began. Even with a backtide, the Frome meanders to all corners of the compass so at some points you’re into the wind. Thick reeds to either side make you wonder how you’d get ashore if the call to abandon ship was announced.

A nice red boat – a sloop perhaps?

Paddling onwards, energy levels were also beginning to sloop, but we finally pulled in at Wareham Quay where early evening revellers were feeding the ducks. Originally bequeathed to the town by Alfred the Great following his expulsion of the Norsemen, a Purbeck legend has it that should the ducks ever leave Wareham Quay the kingdom will fall.
It was fun to try something new, but we’d not rush back to do the Wareham Two Rivers Loop.

Down the Piddle, into Poole Harbour and up the Frome to Wareham Quay. 8.5km and about 3 hours

Back home disaster struck me down. As anticipated, my Anfibio handpump’s vulnerable handle snapped off in transit. Anfibio revised the pump by making a screw-off handle (below right), but mine was the old type.
A new one is £15 posted in the UK so I bodged mine by simply gluing and cable-tying the hose directly to the shaft, then adding a bit of garden hose to make a hand grip while pumping. Assuming it lasts, it ought to be much less snap prone. You can’t buy this type of balloon pump on eBay any more, but I found a smaller ball pump for 6 quid (left) which could be as good with the black adaptor modified. We shall see. Every inflatable needs a pump or two.

Bodge. It didn’t last. I surrendered an bought the Anfibio screw-on, top right.

Review: Zelgear Igla 410 kayak

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By Gael A

Igla main page

In spite of last ditch efforts to extend its life by another season, I eventually had to resign myself and pronounce my 25-year-old Grabner H2 dead on the water.

I was considering ordering a new H2 from Grabner when my compassionate friend Chris suggested sending me that Ukrainian iK he had been testing. His reviews were convincing, the price was fair, so off it went.

The boxes were delivered to my place in Sardinia several days apart. The smaller one arrived intact, but the second one had suffered some damages during transport from the UK to Sardinia. It was ripped open and barely holding together by the rope previously nicely tied, probably another unfortunate consequence of that ill-fated Brexit (not to mention the paperwork hassle Chris had to go through in order to get the thing shipped over)

To my great relief, there has been no damage to the content and no parts missing.

I proceeded to assemble the Igla. Surprisingly enough, my Decathlon Itiwit pump connected perfectly to the valves, no additional adapter needed. That pump can inflate anything up to 20 psi and is fitted with a pressure gauge which proved useful to get the DS floor at the recommended 5 psi. After that it didn’t take many strokes before the side tubes release valves started hissing.

With the floor and both side tubes inflated, the general shape of the Igla looked fairly elegant, at least as compared with the H2. The V-shaped bottom, the relatively sharp bow and the general stiffness of the boat let me expect superior seaworthiness.

Converting from Solo to Tandem
According to the manufacturer, the Igla 410 is “suited to tandem day paddles with the optional second seat”, which was just my intended program. However this particular model had obviously been fitted for solo paddling only. I had to figure out how to attach the second seat and the rudder pedal board behind the front seat, which I did, thanks to some soft shackles, straps and pieces of shock cords I always keep just in case.

Except for the pedal board, I discarded most of the Zelgear steering system components. The steering lines were too long, the rudder stock was too thin, the rudder assembly was too heavy. I recycled the H2 steering system instead, including the pedals.

I modified the original pedal board in order to make it fit the width of the floor and wedge itself between the lower tubes.

I used thin straps tied to each chunky Igla pedal to fasten the impeccable H2 plastic pedals. The recoil cords are tied to conveniently located tape loops. The base plate is held down by the forward seat adjustment strap, while another strap prevents it to slip forward under the paddler’s thrust.

The steering lines run through another pair of tape loops. So as to accommodate the thicker stock of the H2 rudder, I removed the small metal tube embedded in the Igla’s rudder mount. Both the H2 rudder head and the stock fit perfectly in the Igla’s rudder mount.

The result looked a bit awkward but proved to work pretty well.

Shake down paddle
On a hot and breezy August afternoon I loaded the Igla on my car roof and drove to a relatively sheltered beach for a test paddle before venturing further offshore with my wary and mutinous crew.

I pushed off for a 40 minute solo paddle. First I checked that the steering worked well, which it did.

Sitting high above the waterline, because of the floor thickness, I expected some wobbling but I found the initial stability remarkably good and the secondary stability perfect, thanks to the shape of the lower tubes. The directional stability proved very good as well, I barely needed to use the rudder, even going crosswind.

The crew came aboard and embarked for a 20 minute test paddle. Paddling upwind through some steep chop, and with the bow cutting cleanly across the oncoming waves, we had a fairly dry and comfortable ride. Not sitting in a puddle while paddling was new to us.

The last test for the day was to check how the Igla performed in cross waves. Not only did it hardly roll, but no sea went over the gunwale, and no hard steering was necessary to keep a straight course.

Back to shore I released some air, enough to remove the floor. It required taking off the seats and the rudder pedals board, which is a bit cumbersome. Here we come to the main drawback of the Igla : a lot of grit (sand, gravel, pebbles, shells) get stuck between the floor and the hull bottom, that need to be rinsed off, in order to prevent possible chafing and punctures. It’s also the only way to clean and dry the bilge.

Exploring the Ogliastra islets
This popular destination lies about 1 km offshore. The distance was 1.5 km from the beach. Conditions were excellent, light breeze, minimal swell, flat water, manageable powerboat traffic. It was an easy 15 mn crossing, the Igla was fast and required no effort to maintain a straight course. Then we put the maneuverability on the test by rounding nearly all islets and rocks of this mini archipelago, going through numerous nooks and crannies. My makeshift rudder didn’t go deep enough to allow sharp turns, and the kayak slipped sideways when turning.

We crossed back to the mainland and paddled along the shore against the southerly breeze that had picked up in the meantime. We had no difficulty to move upwind. Unlike the H2, the Igla was not stopped by steep short waves.

We logged 13 km in 2 hours and 45mn, which was a slow average speed but we reached 10 km/h max speed while paddling downwind at the end of the trip. Click link to watch a Relive Reenactment. https://www.relive.cc/web/view/vXvL1jeo47O

Carrying gear
Another issue we have faced with the 4.1-m Igla was the lack of storage space. The DS floor takes most of the inner space. The “horns” leave little room in the fore and aft ponts points, the hold behind the rear seat has no depth, there are no decks that you could tie a bag on. There is barely enough room to put a medium size drybag behind the rear seat.
Gear list: Pump and repair kit in drybag, parasol tied to the front carry handle, water, food and beer in soft cooler, moka coffee maker, gas stove, windscreen, mugs, spoons, knife, groundsheet, beach towels, mats in a large drybag.
Carrying a pump is necessary for a full day trip during the Mediterranean summer. The PRVs let the air go off during the hottest hours, which leaves the tubes soft when the temperature drops down at the end of the afternoon, requiring a few strokes to put the regular 0.25 bar/.3 psi pressure back in.

Another Relive Replay: https://www.relive.cc/web/view/vKv2YKpNZ4q

Rough conditions
As it happens in the Mediterranean, one day we met a sudden weather change near a conspicuous stack called the Pedra Longa, about 5 kms from our launch site, with no exit routes in between. In a few minutes, the wind picked up from light air to a solid F5 northeasterly breeze, raising steep 3 foot waves, and soon the sea was covered with many white horses. The crew being too scared to paddle, I had to steer the Igla singlehandedly most of the way back to shelter, which took about 1 hour.
In these unnerving circumstances, the Igla performed splendidly and demonstrated its seaworthiness: solid stability, going in straight line in the following sea, with little tendency to broach when hit by a steeper wave, and little water splashing over the gunwale.

Conclusion
Some comments on Chris pros and cons

Everything in the huge bag except a paddle
Removable DS floor for quick rinsing and drying
Unusually light on the water, easy to keep going straight.
Adjustable footrest tube, but useless in tandem configuration
Seat feels great – confirmed by the crew
Knee braces are stock – yes , but I didn’t install them
Twin (stacked) side tubes keep width down
Ready for optional rudder (supplied) – good rudder mount, needs a different rudder
Closeable sidetube PRVs – don’t forget to close those PRVs when the temperature drops.
Fittings for a deck (supplied) – if you need a deck, if not those fittings are annoyingly protruding
Three-year warranty

Poorly designed but complicated steering system
No standard tandem layout fittings
Limited storage space. The inside space is mostly filled with the DS floor, especially the “horns”
No beam spreader bar. If the DS floor deflates , the boat would collapse inward under the weight of the paddlers.
Like many PVC IKs, it’s bulky (if not necessarily heavy)
Alloy skeg appears to be an extra; and would prefer it in plastic – I would prefer no skeg and good rudder. Skeg can’t be removed without deflating DS floor – a skeg is an annoying accessory that gets snag when paddling over shoals and prevents landing safely in shore breaks

English South Coast Packboating

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Search also: ‘Thames’

A map below with links to the dozen or so day trips I’ve written about on the more interesting sections of the South Coast of England using IKs and packrafts.
You need to click the map’s top right ‘Full screen/View larger maps’ icon to get to the actual map where each route has the link to the post on this website. Or just search the category ‘English South Coast‘.

Quick review: Kokatat Leviathan PFD

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In a line
A busty PFD at a great price and more pockets than the Crucible in May.

Weight
1.01kg (size M/L)

Cost
£40 (heavily discounted on ebay)

What they say
The ultimate kayak fishing life vest, the Leviathan has 14 pockets and multiple fixture options allowing anglers to carry lures, tools, and gear wherever they choose. This high-back, performance, recreational life vest features body-mapped Gaia foam panels contoured precisely to allow the life vest to wrap the torso in a secure fit. Fleece-lined handwarmer pockets are a bonus for those chilly days. This Life Vest is certified for use in both the US (by The US Coast Guard) and Canada (by Transport Canada). You do not need to select a certification. The life vest is dual certified for both countries.

Review
I read somewhere that a PFD loses its buoyancy over the years and should be replaced once in a while. In that case my 15-year-old, much travelled Kokatat Bahia Tour (right), bought at REI, Denver in 2007, must be well overdue for retirement to a golf resort in Spain. It’s been discontinued, and the Leviathan could be headed that way too, judging by the discounts.

Kokatat make some reassuringly expensive dry suits and sponsor big sea kayaking adventures, so it’s a trusted brand. I’ve never tested my old Kokatat, by choice or surprise, so have never experienced its floatability. Hopefully I’d not sink like a stone, but with a GPS in one pocket, a camera in another and a rescue knife, a bit more flotation might not go amiss. As it is I’m at the upper range of it’s body mass index
When I spotted the Leviathan for just £40 on ebay (normally about £150), I set aside any stylistic reservations and clicked BIN. My compact, inflatable Anfibio Buoy Boy is OK for easy rivers or short crossings, but doesn’t claim to be a certified PFD and would be inappropriate alone on the open coasts around here in Dorset where you want to feel secure.

The Leviathan is a paddle fisherman’s PFD which explains the vast array of pockets. They’re handy, but I knew straight away 14 was OTT, even if four are tiny mesh pouches and two more are handwarmer slots. All this storage, along with generous foam implants give the Leviathan a busty appearance, even before you pack it with fishing paraphernalia. Or maybe I’ve had another well-fed summer. It won’t be as discreet to wear as a Buoy Boy. I’m not sure what the corrugated grey plastic blocks are, velcro’d on the mesh pockets. I’ve seen this on ‘tactical’ clothing: possibly for attaching insignia?

I like a front zip PFD, but will miss the second upper clip under the zip, as on my Bahia. It meant you could paddle on hot days with the PFD unzipped but still snug fitting.
But one thing the Bahia lacked was a large pocket for a mobile phone in its waterproof pouch. If you paddle with a phone for safety, the advice is to have it on your person, not stashed awat in a dry bag somewhere on your packboat cartwheeling away downwind. The olive colour I quite like, though I admit it lacks the visibility of my Bahia’s faded mango.

My Leviathan was not one hour out of the box when I set about it with a scalpel to trim the pocket count by 43% (6 pockets) while barely losing any functionality.

That done, I transfered my whistle, knife, biner and camera leash (in a pocket) from the Bahia and am ready to try it out on my next paddle.

Igla 410: The Kimmeridge Ledges

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Eastwards from near Tyneham Cap: Kimmeridge Bay and the Ledges beyond on a very windy day

We took a lovely evening walk along the Purbeck coast east of Kimmeridge Bay, where for millennia the bands of bituminous shale have been burned or squeezed for their oil, like Kalamata olives. Good page here on Kimmeridge and its geology over the eons.

Just west of Kimmeridge Bay there’s even a lone oil well (right), nodding away incongruously since 1959 in the pastoral Purbeck idyll that inspired Enid Blyton’s Famous Five adventures which I devoured like Opal Mints in the Sixties. Blyton holiday’d for two decades in Swanage and elements of some distinctive Dorset icons, like Corfe Castle, find themselves transposed onto her book covers (left). There’s even an Enid Blyton Trail, which lists Kimmeridge.

East of the bay are the notorious Kimmeridge Ledges, submarine clay or dolomite beds which reach out to sea a few hundred metres. With the right sort of swell or wind (top of the page and below) they can catch out unwary paddlers when waves suddenly rise up and break far from the shore.

Windy day looking east across Kimmeridge Bay to the jetty below the Clavell Tower

Our evening walk coincided with low tide and calm conditions exposing parts of the ledges. They’re said to be rich in fossils and over the decades a local man, Steve Etches has collected enough to fill a museum in Kimmeridge village.
We walked as far as the outlook over Egmont Point where the path turns inland on its way over Houns Tout to Chapman’s Pool, just before St Alban’s Head (below).

Chapman’s Pool, just before St Alban’s Head

To reach Kimmeridge Bay you continue past the village onto a private toll road to a huge car park with a daytime cafe. On both visits no one was at the toll booth which saved a few quid.
The east end of the bay has a handy slipway by the Wild Seas Centre. What a luxury it is to drive down to the sea’s edge and pop the kayak straight into the water to let it cool down and soften up while I parked the car. The high tide was just on the turn, but out here away from the headlands, the effect of any tidal current is minimal compared to the wind.

I’ve got into the habit of opening the two side PRVs plus airing down the floor a bit at the end of a paddle for the drive home. Providing it’s not baking hot, I paddle with the PRVs closed which keeps the boat as rigid as a stick. Today I realised you can’t top up with a push-pull barrel pump stood in the boat on the water; you need to drag it all back ashore to stand on the ‘stirrups’. It takes just a few strokes to fully inflate the Igla back to 0.5 bar.

Round the corner the south easterly feels a bit more than the predicted 8mph. Perhaps the tall cliffs channel and accelerate the wind along their face. At least it should make for a good sail back.

Heading southeast, I can’t help but feel a bit exposed out here; open sea to the right, rocky beach below a steep, crumbling cliffs to the left, and lethal ledges lurking ahead. What next – fireballs falling from the sky? But away from the corner the seas settle down a bit. The Igla cuts through the headwind at around 3mph.

Nearer the cliffs the water turns green over the clay ledges not far below. But bigger waves rise up occasionally so I prefer to stay out which means I see less. As there are no sea caves to paddle into on this stretch and no skerries to paddled around, in a packboat I decide this unusual area might be more interesting to explore at low tide. You can easily hop in and out of an IK or packraft and wander across the ledges which few people ever access, looking for ammonites and other curiosities. Next time I’ll know.

Otherwise, with linear cliff paddles, in a kayak this Jurassic Coast can be all or nothing. You either commit yourself to a full run to the next normal take-out, or go somewhere and come back.
It’s only 3.6 miles to Chapman’s Pool, but I wasn’t ready for that today. (I packrafted it in 2025). As it is, once there, with a 4-metre boat on your head it’s an unrealistic take-out up a 400-foot climb over a mile to the nearest parking.

It’s the same at the next possible take-out at Dancing Ledge. We checked that out on midsummer’s eve. In calm conditions it’s an easy enough landing providing the lower ledge is exposed, but you’d then need ropes to haul an IK, either inflated or rolled up, up a 15-foot scramble (left) before another steep walk up to Langton village via Spyways Barn. One for a packraft noseabout on the next calm day.

As it is, Dancing Ledge is on the far side of St Alban’s Head where the tide can kick up a bit (left). Good timing and some nerve are required, even if a kayak can tuck in close to the shore inside the race. This is why Mark R says in his South West Sea Kayaking book. [Kimmeridge to Swanage is 19km and …] “… a commiting trip with big tides races and few opportunities to land. This also happens to be the author’s local (and favourite) paddle.”

Back to the present. Lured by a curious triangle jutting up from the stones, I park up on a narrow beach and hop out for a bit on a look around. This is Clavell’s Hard, site of former shale mining.
At ordinarily inaccessible spots like this you’re bound to find something interesting.

Like a beached red plastic ‘fake clinker’ dinghy.

Anywhere near seaweed there are masses of aggressive ‘sea-horse’ flies. The other week nearby Weymouth beach was blanketed in this kelp which soon started rotting during the hottest month ever. ‘Clear it away! cried the holidaymakers. ‘Stop your whining; it’s a natural phenomenon!’ responded the local council. ‘Get a grip‘ suggested Springwatcher General Chris Packham. Buckets and spades were flying and Trip Advisor turned molten with rage.

“This decision [to ignore the seaweed] supports our commitment to preserving the ecosystem’s integrity and avoiding any potential harm that may arise from interfering with its natural course.” chirped the council unconvincingly. A week or two later later they caved in and cleared the beach. Honestly, it’s just one scandal after another these days.

Compared to northwest Scotland, I’m surprised how little fishing detritus there is here. Are southern fisher-folk more tidy? I help that effort by snagging a superb, self-draining crayfish crate-bench to add to my collection.

I approach the mysterious shark’s fin.

It looked like the upper half of a retractable drop skeg (fixed rudder) with its mounting plate, similar to kits you can buy for hardshell sea kayaks (left), except it weighed tons, not ounces. I thought it might be off some old wreck.

You can see a pivot pin up front. A cable might have winched it up and down. But then any ship that size would obviously have a rudder. Who knows, but I now think it’s abandoned mining junk.

The fin made me think of the SS Treveal which broke in two on the ledges about 1.5 miles southeast of here in January 1920. The Belfast-built steamer was on the return leg of its maiden voyage from Calcutta to Dundee, and had left Portland earlier that day where someone observed that the too northerly heading was inauspicious.
Most of the 46 crew drowned when their lifeboats capsized near the shore. It’s said the tug which came to salvage the cargo also sank alongside. There’s no trace of the Treveal now, even on marine charts and wreck maps. But how do you dispose of a 5000-ton steamer snapped in two? Bit by bit I suppose.

It’s unlikely subsequent storms washed that huge hunk of angular metal a mile and a half to the base of this cliff. More probably it was placed there by shale miners. There’s more on the SS Treveal on Ian West’s geological pages here (scroll to the bottom of the long page).

I wander into a nearby cave, perhaps excavated during the ‘Blackstone’ mining era.

Inside I see just how friable this oily shale is. I can easily peel bits off.

Underneath Silurian millipedes inhabit the tiny cracks, feeding off microbes that feed off the oil. Probably.

Time to head back. I’m all fired up for a good sail with the tide.

Benign, weed-covered ledges lurk not far below. On the far horizon the chalk cliffs of Mupe Bay, just next to Lulworth Cove. Might try there next, but the army firing ranges restrict weekday access. We’ve been hearing machine gun fire all week; Ukrainian soldiers getting trained for the front line.

I throw up the sail but it’s not happening. I creep along at barely 2mph. Maybe I’m too far out (left) and the wind got intensified near the cliffs.

I paddle back to the corner of Kimmeridge Bay…

And carry on to the other side where waves are breaking off Broad Bench ledge. On the left horizon is Portland Bill dangling below kelp-clad Weymouth.

I turn back to the jetty, de-air the Igla a bit and strap it to the car roof.

And though I haven’t really earned it today, I treat reward myself to a seaside seafood basket by the seashore.

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Igla 410: The Kimmeridge Ledges