Cornish Sea Kayaking Meet

The Cornish Sea Kayaking Meet

On the August Bank holiday weekend we headed down to Penzance for the Cornish Sea Kayaking Meet organised by Richard Uren of Paddlecrest Coaching.

The area around Lands End is a magnificent coastline for sea kayaking. There are many small coves to launch and recover from, with varying degrees of effort.

Day 1 launch point – Porthgworra

On the Friday evening we went to the Minack Theatre and on the Saturday we had a great view of the theatre set into the cliffs at Porthcurno from the sea.

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100 km Audax DIY through West and North Dorset

Bat daughter Kathryn

Audax United Kingdom is the internationally recognised long-distance cycling association in the UK. The end of the Audax points collecting year is fast approaching at the end of September, so to try and get my years total to 3000km I am cramming in a few extra rides. In the absence of any local Calendar ride today I did a 100km DIY event. DIY events are permanent events where you plan both the route and the date of the ride.

This basically involves:-

• Submitting a completed entry form.
• Purchasing a brevet card to record your ride.
• Telling the DIY organiser when and where you wish to ride.
• Doing the ride and obtaining suitable proof of having done so.
• Sending the completed brevet to the organiser.

This was a DIY by GPS so I recorded the ride on my Garmin Edge 800 (which thankfully behaved itself) and then I send the record of the track to the Audax South West DIY organiser Tony Hull for verification.

Audax 200km Permanents:-Valley of the Rocks and Exmoor & Coast.

The Valley of The Rocks 200km

The Valley of The Rocks is an Audax event and takes place in April. It is a 205km route (without getting lost) and it attracts 4 AAA points as it has 3900m of ascent. We were riding it as an Audax permanent in the hot, dry, mid summer.

The weather was very hot on the day we left Honiton at 06:00 and headed for Sampford Peverell. Audax rides generally avoid main roads and follow an intricate, often precipitous route through narrow lanes. In the summer-dry and dusty, in the winter-wet, muddy and gravelly. The route was very pleasantly undulating and I enjoyed the shady lanes and cooler early morning temperatures.

Sharing the road in the shade

The first control was at Dulverton and we used this as a good excuse to eat a couple of pastries each from the Co-op.

Garmin Edge 800 GPS

Garmin Edge 800

I have a Garmin Edge 800 bike computer. I had previously owned a Garmin Forerunner 405 which I used principally for running, so the device was not completely alien to me when I got it in October 2012.