As a bit of a last minute plan last weekend 3 of us headed up to Llangollen for this year's Dee River Festival.

The river was fairly low and - as I discovered with my first roll of the year - very cold!  But the sun was shining, so it wasn't too bad.
I was expecting it to be a lot busier though - I've been to other kayaking festivals/tours at the Tryweryn, CIWW, Teifi and Tyne and they've all had a lot more people show up...  Oh well, it meant we didn't have to wait for shuttle bus/trailer space.

lots of demo boats available

Post paddle we headed back to our B&B (last minute = bunkhouses all booked up!) then managed to find what was possibly the only pub in Wales not showing the Wales - England six nations game.  So I 'watched' it on live text on my phone, getting increasingly more smug with each page refresh

The evening event featured four talks/videos, plus a charity auction.

• Dave Manby's history of the Dee Tours - including video of various cardboard carnage races - good stuff
• Lowri Davies talking about Chile.  Some lovely scenery - big clean waterfalls and pointy mountains.  Probably a bit gnarly for my tastes though!
• "Yellow Fever".  this was.... not good.  Headcam footage of what was a fairly epic (in the bad way) expedition in China.. but the sound quality was shit, volume all over the place and I found myself shoving fingers in my ears several times because it actually hurt.. yeah.  sorry guys, not impressed
• the auction - some bargains in there for a few people, raising money for search and rescue.
• "High".  Having half-read various posts on UKRGB I thought this was going to include lots of UK rivers, but then it started off with big brown waterfalls in Kenya.  So that was a bit confusing.  We actually left at this point, to walk back to the B&B and get some much needed sleep.  No doubt I'll end up watching the full thing at some point.

So I've more than filled my quota of kayak film watching, having also sat through the Congo DVD earlier in the week.  Phew.

Sunday should really have been another day on the Dee, but instead we went to meet the rest of the club for the Upper Wye.  Which was very low, so what goes when everything else is empty?  The Middle bloody Usk.  I shuttle bunnied, then went and took some arty photos at Llangorse lake instead...

tags: paddling