The Regional Secretary for the new Midlands Ditchcrawlers group is Alistair Wasey. ​You can contact him by sending an email to    Regional Secretaries. This is his introduction to the new region:

​My philosophy in suggesting this new group is that if one is to define dinghy cruising as "being on the water in something dinghy-esque but not actively engaged in a race" (which is how I define it) then there's quite a lot of it that happens on relatively long, straight, usually flat bits of water a long way from the sea.  In that spirit, there is quite a lot of eminently cruisable waterway across the English Midlands (very, very, very loosely defined).  I live in Gloucester and around here the not-very-tidal Severn above Gloucester is cruisable by oar and sail beyond Worcester and by the Avon to Stratford-upon-Avon. 

Gloucester-Sharpness Canal

The brave souls down at Lydney Yacht Club seem to have a rich vein in dinghy cruising around the Severn estuary including the allegedly very dodgy bit around Sharpness (although I welcome views on whether this still counts as dodgy if one has some water craft, allows for nine knot tidal flows and frequently strong winds and has a boat capable of punching through the occasional standing wave) and do something called the "Gloucester round" that as I understand it involves going upriver on a spring tide, over the weir at Gloucester, back down the Gloucester-Sharpness canal and presumably back to Lydney on the falling tide while there's still sufficient water, but the logistics must be quite impressive as I have no idea how or if it can be done on a single tide cycle with restrictions on dock opening at Sharpness. ​

I envisage rally and trip reports from the region that say nothing about tides, quoting wind speeds at best in miles per hour, and at worst as "flukey", "non-existent" or "blowing a bit, but never as much as you really want it to", and water conditions as anything from "flat" to "a bit bouncy", setting no hearts racing and troubling no emergency services but absolutely celebrating a form of dinghy cruising on the doorstep of much of the population and with, in my view, a great deal of potential.

Watch this space for the 2024 rally programme!