This festival was class craic. There was a lot less emphasis on the competing and more on just sheer paddling in comparison to Galway Fest.
Setup:The centre itself has a fair amount of facilities. There are changing rooms, hot showers and lockers. There also a cafe which does fab breakfasts and lunches. Usually one has to pay £7 for a day of paddling, but this was included in the event ticket. At the centre there is then a shuttle bus and trailer to bring all paddlers wet or dry to the top of the river, which is very handy indeed. This normally runs every hour on the hour, but during the fest it just ran non stop. About a five minute walk up river from the centre was the tent where they had the music/nightclub/bar. They also gave us a free meal there on Saturday. Everything above took card, so I didn't have to take any pounds out at all
. Five minutes walk further up the river was the camping location, which was ok. Didn't spend much time there anyways. Outside the main centre there were all the major kayak brands showing paddling gear and boats. All of them had demo boats, and I spent most of my Sunday paddling loads of different boats
. They also had a few pre production things there... But we weren't allowed to try them (I really wanted a go of a 12r
).
The river:Most videos online don't make the river look like much, but it was actually really fun. It's a reasonably short section. I finished the entire thing in five and a half minutes, but in a group catching every eddy we would spent a solid hour on the water and we weren't particularly hanging around. There's very little flat water. There's a few main drops with names (that I can't remember
) which are just somewhat/not too grabby holes. There were a few swims around them but no one ever got held/had downtime. The rapids in between these drops are very fun. Lots of eddys and flair/boof opportunities. One slight thing to mention might be that the river was surprisingly shallow in some spots, so swimming usually would result in a few bumps on your bum... But in the end we didn't have many swims anyways.
CompetitionsFor the competitions there was really just one competitive one, which was the BoaterX. There was a king of the wavewhich was pretty light hearted, and no real way of judging (someone got a prize for almost getting a boat to the face
) and also throwbag Olympics, which just had a t-shirt or something for the winner. We also got to have a go in the rafts there which was really fun too.
Anyway next year I'll definitely be going back and others should definitely go too. The centre is a little under 2 hours away from Holyhead, so very handy to get to. The river is very fun, and you could nearly get the ticket just to get the two day river pass. Trying out loads of different boats was very fun, and you could really make an opinion on them because you just run the same section of river over and over. The nights out were class, and we mainly just drank cans that we brought so worked out cheaper
. Some sesh
