ron-t kayaking blog
31 August 2014 ............ Penrhyn Mawr
Going sea kayaking wasn`t on the menu for the day, I had other things to do, but by lunchtime I found that I had to twiddle my thumbs for a few hours whilst I waited for some stuff to set, it was a good day weatherwise although the wind was set to increase later in the afternoon, so I went up to Porth Dafarch, and round to Penrhyn Mawr.
All the way round it is a striking bit of coastline, here are a few pictures taken on the way.
Between Porth Ruffydd and Penrhyn Mawr I found an opening into a sort of inlet that I don`t recall ever being in before - a fairly narrow opening leads to a bigger area inside, with several nooks and crannies in the steep sided walls.
I did discover that it isn`t really a good place to be in windy conditions if you value your gelcoat !
This is looking out through the narrow opening.
And can you see the face that is watching me ?
Because of my late start, I had missed the whole of the flood tide through Penrhyn Mawr, so no tidal current - however it certainly wasn`t calm, as the wind was driving the sea quite a lot, so there were plenty of wind blown waves.
This is looking back across to Dinas Stack from Penrhyn Mawr, with Rhoscolyn Head away in the distance.
One of the things that I noticed was that since there was no tidal current, I had time to look at other things, and realised that Penrhyn Mawr was looking rather good, with lots of rocky islands, blue sky and sunshine.
So here are a few views of it.
Just approaching Penrhyn Mawr, I found this very low arch away in through the rocks - it was rather narrow and the sea was quite choppy, so I couldn`t really venture any further in.
I headed round and went into the inlet that you can only get into at high tide, landed on the stoney beach there, and waded through a pool to get this picture of the other side of the arch.
Whilst I was landed there, I wandered around a bit and found that there is quite a bit more to the inlet than what I had realised - there are several narrow inlets off the main section, which I hadn`t realised were there.
The other thing that I found was there is a way up from one of the narrow inlets up to the plateau above - so it might be useful some day as an emergency exit off the sea.
The main problem with it is of course that you can only get into the beach at high tide, at anything other than high tide the whole area dries out and some big boulders completely block the way in.
Having had a wander around, and a tea break, I nearly got marooned on the beach - I had to drag my boat across a lot of sea-weedy rocks to get out - so it was a bit of a close call.
Once out, I found that the wind had increased, the sea had increased considerably, and was also I think against the ebb tide - so Penrhyn Mawr was quite chunky, with bigger longer lumpy waves.
I paddled out and came through the middle race - it was interesting !
Away from Penrhyn Mawr the sea eased a bit, but I still had to keep a very close watch on the lumps that were coming for me.
Round Dinas Stack the sea was much bigger - it was quite challenging and needed constant concentration to watch out for what was about to hit me - Dinas Stack does seem rather prone to magnifying the size of the sea.
Fortunately, the tide was still high enough when I got back to Port Dafarch that the sea was well in, so I could land without the worst of the waves hitting me.
An interesting few hours, with a lot more of a chunky sea than I had anticipated.
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