Canford Weir

First post of 2013 Happy New Year

I've spent the past festive weeks at my home in Dorset getting out boating as much as possible on the local weir at Canford Magna or out on the sea.

The weir at Canford is on the River Stour. This location needs a lot of water and the river level rises to a state of high or flood Canford weir turns into a reasonable sized wave and stoppers. Jack and Josh, the paddlers I was boating with, both managed to have a good play on the weir however for myself it was a little intimidating looking very similar to the area where I broke my nose up in Cumbria. The anxiousness that kept coming over me as I was just getting onto the wave would then lead to me coming off the back so my efforts were always disheartening and frustrating. However we moved over to a different area where my efforts were rewarded. Level with the weir on river right there is a sluice gate that on this day was producing a long boxed in surf-able wave. At first from the water you couldn't quite see the whole size of the wave or its origin, putting me off even dipping my nose in this one. However we needed to do some gardening to to make it easier to get onto the wave. This gave me the oppotunity to see the wave fully and after I had removed the foliage that was obscuring our play area I jumped back in my boat and had an awesome number of blasts on it. The wave was very fast and I struggled to flatten my boat out to surf it straight therefore I kept zipping back and forth across the face of the wave which was a great success for myself. I recon I might have been leaning back to much which casued this. Next time I aim to slow it down a bit and stay on longer. Hoping to see Josh's footage from the session to take some personal points to work on.