Now that the days are starting to get a little longer, I thought I’d take my Cetus LV on a long day out.

I launched in the dark…

…and nearly thirteen hours later, I landed in the dark. In between I paddled round the Isle of Wight, a distance of 92km. The Cetus LV was fast, and most importantly after such a long paddle it was still comfortable. I love it!

Two more new team members here – Donna & Don Thompson, from St Petersburg, FL. We’ve been anxiously awaiting our new team kayaks, which arrived during our show schedule at the Florida State Fair. We were scheduled for 9 shows, but added on and did 15 shows.

On the last day the sun came out, the temps reached into the low 60s and the wind was above 18 knots. What a great day!

I had been watching the Olympics on TV and noticed how the skiers always held their skies up for the pictures after each run. I sensed a photo opportunity there at the fair, and decided to do the same thing to show off our Scorpios. Donna went along with the idea, and with the help of a quite stout friend, we were ready.

If you look carefully you will see parts of a large man hiding behind Donna’s kayak. Being quite windy, he was there to save anyone who might be in the landing zone should a gust of wind knock the kayak away from Donna. Little did he know, that Donna is more stable than I am. He should have been behind my kayak.

Snow skiers don’t have to work this hard for their photo. Notice the flags blowing out straight.  The wind was so strong (how strong was it?) that the camera person couldn’t even keep the camera level.

The Baltic sea is freezing and melting here by turns. That leaves the shore pretty interesting at places:

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The Kayak Coast2Coast team have gathered up some of the footage and photographs from last years trip to make a short film to tell the story. I asked my friend Helen Lagoe if she would help and she kindly agreed. Helen has done and wonderful job with the video editing. She has whipped up a really watchable film out of a collection of photos and what must have seemed like an endless string of footage.

Another friend, Michael McGoldrick let us use some of the music from his albums: ‘Morning Rory’ and ‘Fused’.

The 12 minute film will be featured at the increasingly popular Sheffield Adventure Film Festival in one of the ‘On the Edge’ evenings. Kayak Coast 2 Coast can be viewed at ‘Cafe Euro’ 7.00pm Saturday 6th March.

I was asked to join the p&h sea kayaks paddlers team as representant of paddlers in Switzerland. I run the sea kayak center (www.seakayakcenter.ch) a paddling school and a test center for Touring and Sea Kayaks.

Touring paddling is growing here like crazy, mostly people paddling on the lakes in our country, but some really get bitten by the sea bug too! Of course many people grin when I say I am a Sea Kayaker from Switzerland. The sea is actually closer to us than for many Germans who have ther “own” coastline – the Italian Medeteranian is approx 350 km from where I live in Central Switzerland. Ok, you lot in England can just laugh at that … but Sardinia and Corsica are fantastic areas easy to get to for a few good days paddling. Apart from that, various lakes in Switzerland offer great scenery. I live within walking distance to lake Zug, on which you get  good views of the Alps most days. I love being out there, just outside my front door so to speak,  playing around in my kayak, getting turning strokes as efficient as possible, or powering along in a training session.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve been paddling a P&H Sea Kayak since I first sat in one on Skye about 5 years ago. It was a rental kayak I used on a course with Gordon Brown. I went home and ordered myself a Quest! I began teaching kayaking at that time, and was fascinated by the handling of the Quest on edge, also how comfortable the seat was over long periods of sitting. The Quest is actually too big for me, so when the Cetus came on the scene, with a slightly lower cockpit and even finer responses to edging, that was my boat. We have various brands of sea kayaks in our testcenter, but I still find the P&H Sea Kayaks the best choice for myself.
Last Oktober I sat in the prototype of the Cetus MV, which fits me even better, still leaving enough boat volume around for bigger water.

More about that here soon!