Stoke Gabriel slipway

Stoke Gabriel's slipway looks onto a short tidal creek that branches off the main River Dart, about halfway between Totnes and Dartmouth. The creek dries out on every tide to stony and muddy foreshore, so paddleable water is present only for a window around high water; at low water it retreats to the main channel and a low-water pontoon at Mill Point, reached from the village by a 400-metre walk along the foreshore. A stone weir right beside the quay holds back the separate, freshwater Mill Pool, used for crabbing rather than launching and not the water this slipway serves.

East of the creek mouth the main Dart opens out: upstream the channel winds around four miles to Totnes, where a weir marks the head of navigation, and downstream it passes Dittisham and Greenway before reaching Dartmouth and the sea. The marked channel off Stoke Gabriel hugs the eastern shore and carries excursion and passenger vessels, while much of the creek and the inner reaches are shallow, mud-floored, and bordered by mudbanks that dry on a falling tide.

The whole reach lies inside the Dart Estuary Marine Conservation Zone, designated in 2019 to protect coastal saltmarshes, saline reedbeds and intertidal mudflats that shelter wading birds, and within the South Devon National Landscape (formerly the South Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty). Both of the UK's seahorse species, the spiny seahorse and the short-snouted seahorse, have been recorded in the Dart. Paddlers on this stretch commonly report seals, herons, egrets and kingfishers.