Shropshire Paddlesport Blog

At yesterday’s social evening we were delighted to make a number of awards to different people for their paddling over the last year. For the record, these were as follows:

Most Improved Slalom Paddler - Matt Whittle

Hasler Marathon Shield - Dave Barnes and Kate Jinks

Karan Porter award for most improved whitewater paddler - Dave Reevy

Swimmer of the Year - the Wavehopper K5 team of Ellie Barnes, Tim Bevan, Will Bevan, Marcus Whittle & Hayden Gauge

Comedy Moment of the Year - Dave Barnes & Kate Jinks

Open Boater(s) of the Year - Christine Barstow and Dorothy Haughton

Young Boater of the Year - Florence Whittle

The club also recognised the achievements of all its paddlers across many disciplines - Slalom, Marathon, Sprint, White Water, Open boating, Bellboating and Recreational.

Finally, thanks were expressed to everyone who has been involved in the club during the course of the year - through coaching, fixing things, driving people around to races and training events, organising trips, raising money, working on the rebuild of the shed or just through coming out and enjoying their paddling!!

Hello everyone and happy New Year. As you may have seen from my emails we’re going to be having a club social and awards evening on SATURDAY JANUARY 30th at 6pm in West Felton Village Hall.

The last one worked just fine so we’re not changing much and so we’ll split the evening into three chunks.

We’ll start from 6 with just an open social event. Like last time please bring along your own food and drink and enjoy sitting having a natter with friends and team mates. If you have Photos from any of the year’s events can you let Andy or deb know and we’ll try and put some kind of display together.

At somepoint in the evening we’ll move onto the awards ceremony where we
* Review all the good things we’ve got up to over the last year or so
* Bring you up to date with what’s going to be happening over the rest of this year
* Hand out a few awards for various things to deserving people

Finally we hope to be able to give you all the opportunity to get up and dance the rest of the evening away and work off your dinner - well it was either that or bring the Ergo along ! Watch this space for details.

Hopefully we’ll see lots of you  there on the 30th. Any questions or queries (or things you think I’ve missed out) then please give Deb or Andy a shout.

We had a text from Paul yesterday to say that Harry Crisp was born at about quarter to four on Saturday morning weighing in at 8lb 7.  All are doing well. Congratulations to Paul and Natalie.

Just to let you know Deb gave birth to Catherine Elizabeth just before 12 today. Both of them are doing fine but staying in hospital for a little while and I expect them to be home sometime over the weekend.

Andy

If you think that you might get bored the day before our own club race (and you’re not busy helping us get it set up) you could always pop down to Worcester and have a go in their mini-sprint regatta.

Saturday 27th June 2009

Worcester Canoe Club

Grandstand Road

Worcester

Worcestershire.

WR1 3EJ

• Registration open from 12pm - 1p.
• Racing 1.30 - 4.30.
• 4.30 - 6.30 “the plastic boat challenge”

To quote Sue Hawthorn “Don’t expect split second timing, don’t take it too seriously, do come and have fun”

Andy & Deb have more info so call us if you’re interested.

One of the things about being based on a skinny canal is that working with *really* big boats is a bit tricky - if you try to put something like a K4 in the water at the shed then you have to go all the way up to the winding point by the aqueduct before you can turn it in that direction and if you’re going down the canal you’re limited to picking it up and turning it around by hand.

So, as a result, we don’t have K4s at SHP, however when Deb and I were at Nottingham for the coaching conference we got talking to some people from other clubs and came away with an invitation to “come down and play in one of ours”. So with her “girly rep” head on Deb set up a trip and last Sunday she, Ellie, Alice and Emily took a trip down to Burton to have a go in their K4.

As it turned out it was an absolutely beautiful day for paddling and the people from Burton were incredibly welcoming and helpful (even to the extent of lending is one of their Junior girls so that not everyone had to be on the water all the time). Much paddling was done and no falling in happened so all in all the day must be viewed as a success.

We even have pictures…

Well Saturday morning dawned beautifully sunny up at Queens Head, but of course it was all still frozen. Despite the beautiful weather if we had gone ahead I think we’d have had quite a lot of teams chosing not to travel because of the bad weather forecast and also the sound of a large number of very expensive boats being chopped up by the icy waters of the Montgomery Canal.

The usual suspects turned up anyway to stand around and gossip in the sunshine and to turn away anyone who thought there might still have been a race on, but thanks to emails, the blog and some heroic ‘phoning around by Bruce the message seemed to have got through to everyone that we’d cancelled.

It was very pretty up there though…

Winter view of the road bridge

Is the pub open yet...?

Mike is organising a club open canoe trip on the 28th (Sunday) December at the Poachers Pocket near Chirk. This is a beautiful bit of canal and should be well worth doing. And it involves a pub so it must be good. Please contact Mike by the 27th if you’re interested.

Deb and I are both struggling with “the lurgy” so we won’t be out paddling this week. We hope you all have a pleasant and restful Christmas however and wherever you are spending it, and we’ll see you all in the New Year.

When Deb and I used to belong to the Potteries paddlers in Stoke on Trent, one of their trips was a “sociable” paddle on New Year’s day morning - a nice gentle couple of hours paddle ending up in the pub for a warm up (or a hair-of-the-dog) depending on how alcoholic your previous night’s partying was.

Does anyone fancy doing the same this year somewhere around here? Something not too strenuous (and which hopefully doesn’t involve breaking any ice)…