ron-t kayaking blog
10 November 2014 ............ Menai Straits
One of the things I have never seen in all my time in Wales is the middle of the Menai Straits and the Swellies at high tide, and I have never seen an ebb tide either.
All the times I have been around the Menai Straits have been in the early part of the flood tide, as that is when the Swellies wave is going.
So a couple of days after Springs, and the tide timings are just about right for a trip along the Straits from Moel-y-don to Menai Bridge.
I launched just about on high tide, and paddled off - on my previous trip out from Moel-y-don, I had a look at a nicely built opening in the wall built along the edge of the Vaynol Estate - at high tide it is negotiable -
Inside there is a small area of water, and then another opening, which leads into a what looks like a river, but isn`t, as it just goes for a hundred metres or so and stops.
I couldn`t see any reason for it, but the water was quite dirty, with foam on it - I have a vague recollection that somewhere away in the hinterland there is a sewage works, but I don`t know if this waterway has anything to do with it.
This is heading back out again, looking throught the inner opening to the outer opening, and the rest of the world outside.
A bit further along the Straits - and the shoreline outside the wall has been colonised by a row of sycamore trees - quite a surprising place to find these trees, as at the highest Springs, their roots are going to be under water.
It is really a bit weird paddling along this bit of coastline at high tide, as there is no beach as such, it is much more like paddling along a river, with cliffs and trees that hang right out over the water.
There was a fair current against me under the Britannia Bridge, but close to the shore it was do-able - in at the Menai Bridge there was a strong current, and I couldn`t get through the arches or up the main flow.
Just at the corner of the outermost pillar there was a fairly evil looking hole - I casually drifted slowly along the side of the pillar towards the hole to have a look at it, and I suddenly realised that I was accelerating right into the hole - so I needed some hard back paddling to get away from it.
I eventually got past the Menai Bridge by doing a ferry glide right across the main flow almost under the bridge, and got up a slower flow through an arch on the Bangor side.
Once through, another ferryglide took me back over, and I went for a paddle through the car park !
Time to go exploring up another river - underneath the A545, underneath an older bridge, and up the Afon Cadnant - I got a bit up, then ran out of tidal water and into a small rapid, so couldn`t go any further.
The biggest problem was then trying to turn round a 5 metre sea kayak in a river that isn`t 5 metres wide - eventually I made it, and this is heading back out before going back under the old bridge.
Maybe I should dig out my river boat and go find some rivers to play on.
From there I headed out around one of the islands that are only islands at high tide, and back to the Menai Bridge - now this is where the hole was - I am very glad that I didn`t have a go at playing in it, I think the rocks would have been quite a problem.
There was a bit of a wave train there -you can just see some of them in the picture - I almost got a surf on them, but they weren`t deep enough. I wonder if they would be playable during a big Spring tide - as you can see, there is a very handy eddy next door.
There was still a good current coming through the arches, so a bit of white water there - no waves as such, but plenty of whirlies to keep you on your toes.
It is a good couple of hours after high tide, and the Swellies are still a massive area of moving water, with few signs of any of the islands that appear along the Anglesey side at lower tide levels.
This was the only rapid in the whole of the Swellies - it is just beside the island with the house on it - so I had a play on it, although I am not sure I really achieved very much.
Back through the Britannia Bridge, and behold - because it is winter and the leaves have gone - I can see one of the lions - there are four of them, one at each corner of the original railway bridge.
The Menai Straits are somewhat unusual in that they provide an environment that rarely exists elsewhere around Anglesey - ancient oak woodland that reaches right down to the shore line - a large part of the way from Moel-y-don to the Britannia Bridge has it, with Plas Newydd and Plas Llanfair causing two breaks in it, and also to the east of Menai Bridge.
Here is an amazing example of an oak tree growing out of a cliff right out over the water - I wonder how old it is.
It has a huge trunk, the picture really needs something of a known size in it to give some kind of reference, you don`t really get any sense of how big it is from the picture.
And so back to Moel-y-don, against an increasing westerly wind against what was left of the ebb tide.
An interesting and somewhat different kind of sea kayaking - I think it might be worth another visit during the later stage of a large Springs ebb tide, so that there are a lot more exposed islands and channels.
It might not work, because it appears from my somewhat limited experience of the Swellies that there is a significant difference in timing of low water and slack water - it looks as if slack water is at least an hour before low water, so it may well be that there is never a time that the ebb tide is flowing through between the islands. By the time the water level gets low enough, the ebb tide may well be dying or gone.
I don`t know, I`ll need to try it sometime.
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