Packrafting the Wye: 1. Glasbury to Preston
One Thursday back in July 2024, I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to pack my packraft and camping gear into the car and head to the Wye Valley for a weekend of packrafting down the River Wye. Spending all day in a kayak can be a bit much, so I planned manageable distances: Day 1 was Glasbury to Locksters Pool (12 miles), and Day 2 was Locksters Pool to Preston-on-Wye (8 miles).
While the idea of a packrafting trip is simple, the logistics are anything but. Point-to-point routes always present the challenge of retrieving the car or returning to the start. After a day of pondering and research, I narrowed down my options:
Option A: Bus or train
Option B: Hitch a ride with a kayak rental company
Option C: Taxi
Option D: Cycle
Option A was ruled out quickly. There were no buses running along the Wye that I could find, and while there is a train station at Builth Road and another at Hereford, the 2.5-hour indirect route didn’t appeal to me. Plus, the kayaking distance from Builth Road to Hereford is around 75 miles!
Option B was also no good. I rang a couple of local Wye kayak rental companies, but the response was that their insurance doesn’t cover giving lifts to non-customers. I.e., they are not insured to be a taxi service.
Option C turned out to be too expensive. A taxi from Preston to Glasbury would cost £45—hard to justify for a solo paddler.
That left Option D, working out a way to get where I needed to go by cycling. Typically, this is the hardest option, as I then have a bicycle to worry about as well. I considered locking it at either the start or end or going full adventure mode and attempting my first bikerafting trip—strapping the bike to the front of the packraft. I decided to prepare for this but hoped for a better solution once I got there. Testing it at home filled me with dread but seemed like it would work; I purchased some additional straps last minute and hoped I would find an alternative.
I slept Friday night at Preston campsite and spoke to the farmer who said it was fine to leave my car there for the weekend and that people do it regularly. And then around 6pm, the taxi company rang me to say they had two other passengers lined up wanting roughly the same trip. Problem solved!
It turned out that they only wanted to go to Hay-on-Wye and kindly paid £35, and I stayed in the taxi and paid the final £10 to get me to Glasbury. All in all, it worked out well! I waited for the taxi outside the campsite with the total of my possessions for the weekend set out before me: a buoyancy aid and bag of food for lunch, the packraft in a Mountain Equipment sports bag, and a bivvy bag, sleeping bag, sleeping mat, and Jetboil all in a dry sack.
From Glasbury, I walked up the river for about 20 minutes until I got to a large gravel beach with a footpath running along the bank. The river bank is littered with signs saying ‘private land – no launching’ so I hid behind a willow tree and scrubby bank of Rosebay Willowherb, my senses bombarded by the pungent smell and my ears listening for the tell-tale sound a car and impending angry farmer. My heart raced when I heard footsteps nearby – someone was walking along the footpath. I crouched behind my willow tree and waited for them to pass but instead they stopped. She had obviously heard something and was peering through the branches. I turned and looked straight at her, eliciting a startled “oh! Sorry!” before hurrying off, visibly flustered.
I quickly finished loading the packraft and carried it over to the river and the start of some very small rapids. Two people came paddleboarding up the river so I stood waiting for them to struggle against the current and give me a clear run of the faster section. Rapids and fast is a bit of an exaggeration on a river like the Wye, a more accurate description would simply be a section that is visibly flowing.
One of the challenges I had packrafting the Wye in mid-summer was the river level. A previous year I had come here with a group of 8 friends, three of us in our own boats and the rest renting from Wye Valley Kayaks. It had been a week of torrential rain and when we arrived at the kayak centre they had told us the river was too high to kayak, we tried to insist but they were adamant. In their defence, it was a turbulent maelstrom of brown water flowing incredibly fast. They put us on the Monmouth Canal instead, so we kept the brown water but switched out the speed for a languid paddle. It was the opposite problem this summer, I frequently bottomed out on the faster flowing sections and had to distribute my weight to get it over the stones. Fortunately, the packraft is made of incredibly tough material and so smooth river rocks don’t damage it. I had to get out three times to lift it over particularly bad places.
I camped at Locksters Pool, I had booked before hand but nobody welcomed me when I wearily paddled up to the bank. I decided to have a quick nap and made a comfortable pillow out of my lifejacket. After about an hour I got up and chatted to a Scottish chap who was amazed that I had arrived by river, “you swept in over the river like James Bond did you”, struggling to find a suitable reply to that I puffed my chest a little and nodded.
Eventually I managed to get a hold of the campsite owner who was busy having her birthday party. She said there was a reserved pitch with my name on which I went and looked at. It was a relatively small patch with a huge caravan on one side and a big bell tent on the other and very open. Not ideal when I only have a bivvy bag! I asked for somewhere a bit less open and after some prompting she told me I could use a small patch of grass down a windy path at the end of the campsite. My very own hideaway! I deployed my packraft in bivvy form (upside down to make a basic groundsheet) and got settled in, my senses once again getting battered by Rosebay Willowherb.
The showers appeared to be an odd combination of paid only and communal so I went for a swim in the river instead. It was a refreshing change going from sitting on the river to being in it. I spent the rest of the evening stretching my legs and relaxing.
The following day, I woke to a misty morning and decided to get on the river as quickly as I could. Misty mornings tend to herald the start of a hot day, the mist quickly burning up to reveal a searing hot sun. Despite my best efforts, I only got onto the river at 9am and could already see the sun starting to peak through. I had weighed everything before leaving to make sure I knew how to evenly distribute it when packing the dry sacks. An imbalance would make it harder to steer on the water and I would start drifting in circle
The second day was pretty uneventful, I saw plenty of Kingfishers, White Throated Dipper and Sand Martins that live in holes in the river banks. They would zip overhead as I paddled by, landing on the steep banks to feed their young before taking off again.
There was a stretch where the river narrowed into some rapids, and a hand painted warning sign read “WARNING PADDLERS BEWARE OF TREES KEEP TO THE LEFT!!!”, unfortunately the current strongly disagreed and most people ended up going right, straight into a couple of toppled tree trunks. I met two guys paddling a homebuilt raft as a test run for the Monmouth Raft Race. They also ran aground, but that wasn’t too surprising given their raft was somehow elegant and cumbersome at the same time.
I was getting pretty exhausted by lunchtime and steadily paddled through the remaining couple of miles, getting back to Preston campsite at about 4pm and more than willing to call it a day.
Map of the Wye
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