The dates for next year's Charity Paddle are provisionally Saturday 2009-03-21 and Sunday 2009-03-22 (the Canoe Show at the NEC is the weekend after this, according to an email from Geraldine Reeve, Marketing Manager, DMG World Media. CanoExpo will probably know next year's dates by the end of March, so I'm hoping we can be sure of avoiding a clash). Details will also be on the club website at Swale Charity Paddle homepage, and on the Info sheet document which you can download from the links below. If you have any questions which are not answered here, contact "cp2009" in domain "pennine.demon.co.uk" for a much quicker reply than you'd get from the club's main email address.
Once again, we are very grateful to Mike Sunley for stepping in to lend us his riverside field for our refreshment stop, although we were also acutely aware of how difficult a get-out this can become in high water levels, as experienced on Saturday in 2008. None of the alternative tea stops we have looked at offer parking for parties wishing to get off the river, although one or two new ideas were suggested this year, so we will try again ... Please avoid parking or taking out at Marske bridge, except in emergency, as the landowner here has requested we do not use this egress, and its use jeopardises our access to the river for future events. It may well be particularly sensitive in 2009 as we did have to get quite a lot of people off the river here in the high and cold water of the Saturday in 2008.
| Printable Charity Paddle Documents for Download | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Document | Open Document Text (OpenOffice.org .odt) |
Portable Document Format (Adobe Acrobat .pdf) |
Legacy .doc (MSWord) |
| Info Sheet | CP_Info.odt | CP_Info.pdf | CP_Info.doc |
| Entry Form | CP_Entry.odt | CP_Entry.pdf | CP_Entry.doc |
| Sponsor Form | CP_sponsor.odt | CP_sponsor.pdf | CP_sponsor.doc |
If you have a colour printer, you might like to use our 2008 advertising poster in your local club or gear shop [Sorry, next year's poster not yet prepared]. The high-resolution version is about 1.4 Mb (ie. quite big - don't bother with this if you don't have broadband) and prints nicely at 300dpi for A4 (this is the resolution saved in the file). 240 dpi will give good quality at A3, or 220 dpi will fill the paper a bit more fully and looks nearly as good. If you only want to print A4 and think 1.4 Mb is a bit big to download, there's a reduced-resolution version which works OK at 150 dpi on A4 - but will probably look crap if you push it to A3. This is barely over 400 kb, which is not an unreasonable download, even on a phone line (and it won't clobber my server quite so much:).
There's also a more detailed four-page river guide with photos, which is a 1.8Mb download as a .pdf only (the way the pictures were imported means that Open Office saves them with the pictures at much higher resolution than you can usefully print, so the .odt file is almost 7 Mb). This probably contains more detail than you really want to read - remember that guidebooks always make rivers sound much more difficult and frightening than they turn out to be when you actually paddle them, especially when you are in a big friendly group. It also contains some info on running Richmond Falls which is not part of the Charity Paddle - choosing to run this is entirely your own responsibility.
S.O.C. Members looking to volunteer to help on the weekend ? There is a List of jobs with current volunteers. Please email me at "cp2009" in domain "pennine.demon.co.uk" with your preferred job and time. Note that this email address will be removed from all systems here on the evening of 2009-03-23 (it will be replaced with an address appropriate to the 2010 CP, which I'll leave you to guess:) - all other correspondence should go to my usual address.
The 2009 Charity Paddle is far enough off that the 21st/22nd March has to be a provisional choice, but the fishing season starts on March 25th, so that will be the date, if it avoids a clash with the Canoe Show and the anglers and riparian owners are agreeable. My guess for 2010 would be 20th/21st March, based on the Outdoors Show's guess that they will be on the last weekend in March.
For information on the club's activities, see the main club website. Canoe section also maintains a (perhaps more up-to-date) webpage of it's Planned Activities.
Andy
