ron-t kayaking blog
21 September 2014 ............ Penrhyn Mawr and South Stack
Good weather in the morning, and a good forecast for the day - so I headed up to Porth Daffarch for a trip out to Penrhyn Mawr, and maybe the Stacks.
It was well through the ebb tide when I set out, so the tide level was quite low - the cave round the back of Dinas Stack was high and dry beyond a big pile of boulders - at higher tides you can get a good way into it, swell permitting.
Here are a few pictures taken between there and Penrhyn Mawr as I meandered along the coast, exploring the various inlets as I went.
Here is a very strange bit of rock sticking up - with some rocks you can look at them and reckon that this is a sedimentary rock, or this is a fold in the rocks, or whatever - but what is this ?
Now here is another fascinating feature - approaching it from the far side, it just looked like a normal gap between the rocks, and would be no problem to paddle through.
However as I got closer, I saw that it was far from normal - paddling along the coast, there wasn`t really that much of a swell - as you can see in some of the above pictures, occasionally you would get a surge up onto the rocks.
However this gap was somehow catching the swell and magnifying it, so there would be a big surge of water coming through the gap that would lift the level of the sea by quite a bit.
At the same time, an opposite phase of swell came round the rock, and produced a huge hole - just at the bottom of the surge coming in.
Then the high point of the swell would come round the rock and form a huge diagonal stopper that would totally eat a boat coming through the gap on the swell surge.
If ever there was a sneaky bit of water that is going to catch the unwary, this is it - I gave it a miss !
I tried to photograph it, but it is difficult to capture this sort of dynamic activity in still pictures.
A few more rock features, before getting to Penrhyn Mawr.
Passing through Penrhyn Mawr, and out into the outer race - although it isn`t a race during the ebb tide - and a huge seal has climbed up onto The Fangs, the outlying rocks beyond the outer race.
The Fangs only reveal themselves at low low tide levels, so you don`t often see them.
The chicken run at the back of Penrhyn Mawr was rather fun - swell can have quite an effect on it, and in a big swell coming from a sort of northwest direction, it is anything but a chicken run.
There are two reasons for this - first of all, the far end of the chicken run tapers down in width, so squeezes and concentrates the swell.
At the same time, the chicken run doesn`t have a constant depth, it has a high spot near the middle, and during a low Springs low tide, it dries out - so the swell rises up and crashes over the high spot.
But on this occasion it hadn`t dried out, and although the swell outside was not that big, there was quite a bit of surging through the chicken run - it was quite exciting to paddle through it - twice in one direction, and once in the other direction.
It was more fun paddling into the swell, rather that running with it.
On my third trip through it, into the swell, just as I got to the high spot, there was some kind of a double wave or something like that, and it pushed me sideways into a sort of alcove, and held me there - it was a bit of a fight to get out of the alcove and continue on through the rest of the chicken run.
This is looking back through the chicken run - it doesn`t really show too well in the picture, but there is a swell surge lifting the water level right at the far end.
After Penrhyn Mawr, the coast line continues with some more quite dramatic rock formations - there are a couple of caves - not accessible at this water level.
A bit of a closer view -
And the other one -
A few more pictures of the coastline around there.
It was by now not too far away from low tide, so I decided it would be a good time to blast across to South Stack and back, before the flood tide started in earnest, and it would be more difficult to get through Penrhyn Mawr on the way back to Porth Daffarch.
So I set off - here it is - one of the most photographed lighthouses in the country !
Not wanting to dally, I just headed under the bridge, and turned and headed back - at low tides the gap between South Stack and the mainland almost dries out, leaving just two narrow channels.
Back at Penrhyn Mawr, and the flood tide had started - but I managed to paddle up through the outer race with a bit of help from a couple of well timed fortuitous waves.
There was an interesting channel through the middle of Tide Rip rock that would only be there at a quite specific tide level, and it had some rather good dynamic water in it, where the flood tide flowing through the channel was against the swell coming in.
After playing there for a few minutes, I headed back to Porth Daffarch after a very pleasant afternoon.
The seal was still sitting on the Fangs, with the bottom end of the Lleyn Peninsula in the background.
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