Our happy place | Calshot, Hampshire
Calshot | New Forrest | Hampshire | Kayak Review
Calshot is our happy place! Not because it’s super beautiful, it doesn’t even have a sandy beach. My brother Jakub discovered it first. I remember visiting nearby Lepe Country Park back in 2017 when Ziggy was only 4 months old, on the way home we stopped at Calshot, place suggested by my brother. It didn’t really make me go wow. It was nice, cool beach huts, tiny Castle on the sea front. Not very busy with tourists... that last point raised my eyebrows, I liked that!
On this occasion we stopped at New Forest National Park on our way to Calshot. We left on Saturday evening, before Ziggy’s. We love this form of travel with a small kid. He falls asleep quickly and traffic is almost non-existent. We decided to use Park4night app, found few locations that allowed overnight parking and we headed there! I am not going to share the coordinates, as I believe overnight stay is no longer allowed at this location, nothing to do with us I promise! We arrived after dark so didn’t really see much. To our delight, we woken up in the middle of New Forest, surrounded by wild horses and beautiful countryside. Ziggy couldn’t believe to see horses right next to our van! The day was perfect for the beach so we made our way to Calshot to reserve the best parking spot by the lagoon!
Calshot beach car park SO45 1BS
Calshot beach is located just on the edge of New Forrest National Park. The beach in mostly shingle with some sand. It is backed by beach huts and offers views over the Solent to Isle of Wight. Location is pretty awesome, you have a beach on one side and lagoon on the other, so during high tide, the lagoon becomes a great sheltered calm water, great for beginner paddle boarders or other water sports amateurs like me.
We started visiting this place on every possible occasion, as it’s only 2-3h drive for us (from Houghton Regis) with no traffic. It quickly became our favourite place to go for a quick sunny day out. Especially that my brother lives nearby. We always bring our paddle boards/kayaks/inflatables and during low tide you can spot a lot of sea creatures in the. Ziggy absolutely loves it there!
You are not allowed to stay overnight and it’s a pay & display parking during the day. There are toilets on site, no other facilities, apart from an ice cream van. I think there is a cafe on somewhere on site but we always bring our own kettle so never even found where it is…. Here are some photos from our trips to Calshot in 2021 and I also dag ouit some pics from 2020 - it was a perfect fathers day right after the first lockdown and we really needed to get out somewhere. We decided that trip in our van with our own facilities will be the best thing to do, and it was!
Our kayak…
We finally managed to test our new inflatable Itiwit 2/3 persons Kayak. We decided to buy this kayak simply because it doesn’t take up so much space in our garage. It has three separate inflatable inserts so in case if something goes wrong and we start losing air, at least we won’t go down too quickly. It takes literally few minutes to inflate. Bear in mind, it doesn’t come with a pump or paddles so you have to buy those separately. We decided to go for the cheapest manual pump and honestly the first time I was inflating it at home it took me no longer than 10 minutes to have it fully inflated. Now we have an electric pump kindly donated to me by my brother and I think it takes a similar amount of time to inflate. Although I don’t mind a bit a bit of a work out before paddling so manual pump is always getting used ...
I really recommend this kayak, it’s perfect for our 2+1 family, very steady and pretty quick if we put ourselves to it. I’ve done a lot of research before buying it so i guess you don’t have to...We used to have an old school one persons fibre kayak and it was hard work to navigate it in a straight line and was taking so much space in our garden at the time. We also had to carry it on our van’s roof racks. My brother’s blue Pelican™ Mission 10ft (305 cm) one persons kayak is a different story, it’s amazing! very easy to navigate. He bought it from Costco and I belive they are still available online.
You can buy one of these kayaks on Decathlon website or via my affiliate link to Amazon (which means I’ll get a small commission if you decided to buy it this way, you won’t be charged more for that). We have a 2/3 persons version but there is also a 1/2 person option available.
Always remember to use life jackets, we bought ours from a charity shop ages ago but there’s so much choice on amazon and ebay these days.
Affiliate Links
Itiwit 2/3 persons inflatable kayak
Itiwit 1/2 persons inflatable kayak
Standard Paddle
Manual Hand Pump
Electric Pump
