Training day on the monnow river!

We met yesterday at 9am in the freezing cold conditions to complete our first training day. The team this year includes most of the old faces from last year Mike Fawcett (head of centre at Longtown OEC) Alice Giacomini (trainee instructor) Laurianne Mackenzie (friend of longtown and our new faces are Lee Cave (operations manager) and Tom Sharpe (trainee instructor) who are prepared to undertake this monstrous challenge, one member who is joining us Ewan McGillivary (instructor) was away on a 2 day course for forest schools so he missed out on the snowy, wet, cold day! once the trailer was loaded and our kit was ready we were ready for the off. we arrived at our 'get in' place and Laurianne regretted putting her wet suit on fully as she baked nicely at the back of the bus! whilst we got boats as well as our heads prepared for the day Mike drove the mini bus to our 'get out' point and ran back to meet us! waiting for Mike was going to take a while so tom and lee decided to give a few helpful hints on how to properly warm up for a day of paddling this included tom demonstrating the 'wax on, wax off' manoeuvre which apparently would warm up our arms and lee taking the lead on his hula hips dance moves. is this how they used to dance in the 80's? all very amusing!!

anyway back to the reason we were there, once our boats were on the water we had a useful session instructed by mike teaching us how to break in and break out of eddy's which is a technical term used in paddling for getting in and out of the current. little circuits were set up for us to practise as we needed this skills for our big journey, unfortunately for Laurianne she went to break out of the current lent the wrong way and took a dip! I'm guessing by the look on her face the river may have been a tad cold! back in her boat we all blasted down the river quickly to warm us up and to get to our most important part destination of the day(lunch stop).

once back on the water the team were now feeling the cold especially Laurianne so Lee and Mike decided to do a long section of continuous paddling to get us warmer. along the journey we in countered 2 broken weirs both which were paddleable. we didn't have a massive section of river to do but it was more of looking to improve our skills on moving water. myself and tom felt more confident as the day went on and were willing to push ourselves a bit more. I'm sure Laurianne wont mind me telling you all that she fell in again( she liked the water really) not far from our 'get out' spot so walked the last 20 metres, to say she hasn't been in a kayak since she was 17 she did brilliantly! we pulled our boats into the side and when we thought all the fun was over Mike spectacularly tried to get out of the boat onto the bank and went flying backwards head first into the water! its always nice to end the day on a high note!! nice one mike :)

Blurb

This seems to be an ongoing annual event for Longtown OEC, paddling a distance of 150 miles across Britain to raise money for charity in 7 days. Once again we have 6 keen beavers ready to acomplish this task. This year the task is to start from Northampton Abington Lock and to eventually end up in Chepstow(with out any capsizes we hope!). Our start date is Monday 8Th February to the Friday 12Th. We will then be doing a further 2 days to complete our journey at another date, the reason why we can't do the straight 7 days is that the team have to come back ready to welcome in a visiting group for the weekend (personally i just think the boss wouldn't be able to hack 7 days!!).

Things that are different from last year: 50 miles extra!!, its in rivers and the sea rather than canals and we have a different charity. This year we are raising money for Northampton Hope Centre, they provide support for the homeless and disadvantaged. This was chosen by Mike Fawcett (Head of Longtown OEC),when we were paddling our 100 mile journey last year and we came across some homeless people sleeping underneath the canal bridge in icy conditions and i speak on behalf of the team how struck we were by this. we couldn't imagine how tough and inhospitable this could have been for them.

I will be updating this blog through out our journey to tell you off any swimming or general funny moments we may in counter so be sure to keep reading and stay tuned!!

Any further info can be found at http://www.longtownoec.co.uk

Any donations will be greatly appreciated

Thank you :)