The Lake District National Park, in its wisdom, is considering a fee for  launching all boats on several lakes including canoes and kayaks on  Windermere, Coniston, Ullswater and Derwent Water. Should you wish to have your say about this you can by filling in the form at http://www.lake-district.gov.uk/survey/ it takes about 15 minutes with time to make comments.

Happy New Year !!

Whilst it may not have been a white Christmas it certainly was a wild one which has meant plenty of time on the water for those lucky enough to escape.

Thanks to everyone involved in getting Rainchasers up and running during 2006, it has been a great year from our point of view. The webcams and river levels are proving very popular for those paddling in the Lakes, and the site used over 28gb of bandwidth in December which is alot of visits.

We have a few plans for 2007 including more kit reviews we have a Neck Crux on test at the moment which is looking like a nice creek boat for the smaller paddler, and also an Astral Aquavest 300 buoyancy aid review nearly ready to go. Hopefully the Kentcam is going to get an upgrade which will allow a closer view of the indicator rock. The site is also due a bit of a spring cleaning we are working on a more streamlined version of the river levels pages as well as an overall site redesign that wont be as radical as the last attempt but will hopefully be a bit more pleasing on the eye.

Finally dont forget if you got a new video or stills camera for Christmas, why not put it to good use and create a short film to enter into our movie competition. For 2 minutes worth of entertainment you could win yourself a £700 playboat.

Anyway all the best for the New Year

 Shorty