Is Div.1 K1 Men Too Large?

[CeeBee]

Of the pumped White Water Courses, Pinkston has managed to set water fees per hour that are affordable for weekly training. Granted, it is not a prem level course but it is easily a good Division 1 course and is a great venue to train on.

For the Division 1 this year, it will cost about £1200 for the Water and for this year, this has been included in the standard entry fee (although I think this will need to be looked at for 2016 as in my opinion, you want to make enough money for your club when you run an event to cover the amount of man hours you need to put in).

Pinkston costs about £65 per hour to hire so if you have 13 paddlers (which the course can easily accommodate), it works out at £5 per person. ( If you only have 3 paddlers, you are at Lee Valley rates of £15 per hour!)

This is £5 more than say Grandtully which is free to use but the water but Pinkston is located within easy reach of 80% of the population of Scotland and what we spend on Water Fees, we save on fuel costs to get to Grandtully. So, we now have both an artificial site useable all year round and an real river useable at what ever level the rain dictates.

[jjayes]

Cebe,
it sounds like Pinkston is feasible at the moment. Is there anything is place to stop charges going too high for slalom use in the future? The volume of water being pumped is obviously a factor in the cost of using artificial courses.

[CeeBee]

Pinkston is run almost exclusively for canoeing and isn't suited to be a commercial site where lots of money can be made from rafting.

Under the current Pinkston management, I would expect that fees will remain at a reasonable affordable level. Alan and Ian, who manage the site, have a very good attitude towards developing the use of the site so it is used as much as possible. It has been a team effort and many slalom paddlers such as Stewart Pitt, Gary Gibson, Neil Caffrey, Johnny Brown, Chris and Ken Baillie have supported Pinkston since before it opened and have worked with Alan and Ian to get all the Slalom gates in place.

[djberriman]

So Tryweryn is now full and it looks like most Div 1's may be, no room for paddle ups or even all the div 1 paddlers who want to enter.

As mention earlier perhaps we need another division (as I beleive there used to be), which if we do would mean that canoe slalom is being successful.

Of course the other reason is more people doing more than one class which again is a sign of success.

This problem appears to have bubbled up through slalom over the last couple of years without us really noticing.