Sea Kayak Trip Plans Just A Click Away

The Sea Kayak Wales project is launching a free, automated service that presents sea kayakers with customised plans for day paddling trips. The Beta service launches on 25th March 2013 with an initial focus on the popular sea kayaking coastline of Anglesey, North Wales.

Paul Griffiths, who came up with the idea and built the initial proof of concept, has a clear vision that he describes as follows. “The intention is to get more people paddling sea kayaks and to open up new stretches of the coastline to paddlers. Planning a trip in a new area can be a daunting task, the Sea Kayak Wales project takes care of the detail leaving the individual sea kayaker to just decide when they want to go. Our web service will deliver detailed trip plan suggestions for paddlers to choose from.”

The web based service can be found at www.SeaKayakwales.com Signing up is a breeze as you can use an existing Facebook, Twitter or Google log-in to join the service. The trip plan service just requires the paddler to choose the day they want to paddle and optionally set a preferred start time and skill level. The service does all of the rest. Taking tides and wind forecasts into account it runs a calculation that will present trip plan suggestions that fit the forecasts for the chosen day. A sea kayaker can then get an overview of each of the suggestions with a detailed paddling plan available for each.

The primary service is aimed at paddlers at the BCU 3 star level and above. However the beginner has not been forgotten and the service will also take tides and weather into account to suggest suitable paddling venues where a newcomer to the sport can build their skills in suitably sheltered and safe surroundings.

While safety is an important factor in selecting trip plan suggestions, the importance of retaining an element of acceptable challenge has not been forgotten. The Sea Kayak Wales service makes trip plan suggestions and it is up to paddlers to ensure they have the skills and appropriate equipment to tackle any of the trips proposed. Paddlers should double check wind forecasts and general condition prior to departure.

Launch Date

Anyone who visits our home page at SeaKayakWales will see that we have announced our launch date – the 25th March.

“What happened to the service in 2012?” you might ask. Well by the time we had everything tied down and running well enough to invite some initial testers to give it a try the days were shortening – sometimes to the point where if the tides did not co-operate there were precious few paddling trips we could suggest. Rather than disappoint, we decided to put off the public launch until more paddlers were likely to be looking for trip suggestions and when the days were longer – giving our service more suggestions to make.

One positive aspect of this is that we have also been able to add a facility to support relative sea kayaking beginners by suggestion great paddling venues where they can develop their skills in relatively sheltered and secure surroundings. Just as with the main trip plan suggestion service, winds and tides are taken into account to ensure that we can provide full details on times as well as places. Plus we can eliminate some venues when conditions are likely to be adverse.

We have also been working to extend the capabilities of the service to provide support for paddling areas beyond our initial launch focus on Anglesey. These will come on stream as quickly as possible and with the help of the community will allow the site to grow quickly to make SKW the default answer to the question “Where shall we go paddling tomorrow?”.