Category: Uncategorized

PHOTO BY AXEL!

We’re driving south – still in the UK right now and heading towards Dover for a 2pm ferry. We’ve decided to stop for a night or 2 in Sion, Switzerland because my dad is there, and I just realised how close it is to our planned route through France & Switzerland. The ferry to Porto Torres in Sardinia only goes every other day anyway, so instead of rushing for the Monday night sailing, we’ll get the Wednesday night sailing, arriving Thursday morning.

On advice from Rene Seindal, we will drive 40km to the small town of Fertilia where there is a secure carpark where we can leave the van for 1 Euro a day. It’s also a pretty place to start, and means we have a section of coast with quite a few landing options to start with. The coastline anti-clockwise from Porto Torres is more cliffy with an often rough headland to paddle around and few landing options. That will be a nice end to our trip for us, instead!!

In the meantime, I’ve been featured on a website called ‘Go! Girls Outdoors’, a website for anyone (including men) interested in the issues facing women in outdoor education and recreation. Click here to see my profile, or HERE to go to the site homepage

I finally ( with help from Sanoodi) uploaded the track of mine and Barry’s paddle to Ireland on New Years Day. Well, it was actually 1.30am on 2nd January by the time we left, but we hadn’t been to sleep so it felt like it was still New Years Day!

We followed a bearing of 280 degrees the whole way across but the tide took us north, then south and then north again. It was really strong as we approached Wicklow but turned as we arrived so we had to fight a tidal race off Wicklow Head before we could land! If you missed it, you can read about the crossing on an earlier blog here.

If the track doesn’t display properly then you can see it on the Sanoodi website here. The stats given on the website show a distance of 59 miles in 11 hours 53 minutes, an average of 5mph. This is statute miles – it was about 52 nautical miles I think.

We plan to get a ferry to France on Sunday and drive down to Italy as tourists ( i.e slowly!). We should be in Sardinia and paddling by early April. First, we have to pack!!

It was Christmas here yesterday and a batch of ‘Eastern Horizons‘ DVDs arrived at my door, ready to go to eager viewers in the UK, Europe and Australasia. It’s now for sale in the CackleTV shop!

I also took delivery or another batch of “This is the Sea” DVDs as the classic DVD is still popular and I’ve nearly run out. At the time when I first made ‘This is the Sea’ it cost about £25 per colour for the artwork on the DVD. Money was tight and I chose a very simple design with just 2 colours. Or so I thought….. I actually got charged for 4 colours anyway, as the blue and yellow that I chose weren’t the blue and yellow that they had in their palette so they had to mix different colours to make them! So much for money saving!

THE NEW ‘THIS IS THE SEA’ DISC BESIDES THE OLD ONE!

In May it will be 5 years since ‘This is the Sea’ first came out so when it came time to get some more made a month ago, Derrick from Kayak Quixotica suggested making a special anniversary cover! Well, we left the cover that Jim Westcott designed as it was, but Derrick designed some new disc art using a photo of Hadas Feldman and I from Kamchatka. I’m really pleased with it and think it looks great! So if you order “This is the Sea” from the UK, Europe & Australasia store from now on, then you might get the new look DVD! Some of the DVDs are headed to a shop in Sweden today aswell!

SARDINIA

This weekend, Barry Shaw and I are packing up the van and driving south in search of the Sardinian sun!
Barry kayaked around the next door island of Corsica a few years ago and enjoyed himself so much that he wanted to return to paddle around the bigger neighbor. At around 900km of coastline, we expect it to take us around 4-6weeks. We expect the surf to be less than in New Zealand! but it is a very windy place so that will be our biggest challenge. You can read more about the trip here.

Whenever we have a phone signal we will be recording the route we paddle on our blackberry, using free SMap software from Sanoodi. You can follow along by ‘following’ CackleTV on Twitter, or by checking the twitter feed on this blog, at the top of the page. You’ll see a message saying, ‘CackleTV’ is kayaking in Sardinia with a link. click on the link to go to the map of where we are. If the twitter feed doesn’t work, then you can also go to the Sanoodi website and search for routes in Sardinia.

Not long now, I’m busy preparing for the trip… lots to sort out!

BARRY IN CORSICA. PHOTO BY JOHN-BOY