Hastings coroners court as told on Wednesday that Trevor Turnbull, 36, who lived in a caravan on Romney Sands before moving to a pitch near the canal at Playden, had been drinking cider and rum on the day of his death.

His friend Dean Norris told the inquest that after a lunch out on January 6, they had found the canoes, and make-shift paddles near the canal while walking his dog, and decided to go out on them.

He said: "We saw some canoes and thought, lets have a go. I didn't get into the canoe.

"Trevor didn't seem drunk at all. He was just normal Trevor. He didn't say he couldn't swim. There were no lifejackets."

Mr Norris and his girlfriend Charlotte Ralph watched in horror as Mr Turnbull's canoe capsized.

Miss Ralph said: "He was splashing around everywhere. He shouted that the current was strong."

Mr Turnbull then bobbed in the water before going out of site, the court heard, and Miss Ralph called an ambulance immediately.

"It was more of a prank that went wrong," Miss Ralph said.

In a statement read out in court, police diver Sgt Lorna Dennison, said she discovered Mr Turnbull's body at around 1.50pm on January 7. It was later identified by Mr Norris.

Coroner's officer Robert Greenall told the court that the canoe was found to have a one inch hole it, and that Mr Turnbull was wearing steel toe-capped motorcycling boots that weighed around five kilos when he died, which may have contributed to him being pulled under the water.

A postmortem carried out on Mr Turnbull the day after his death found sludge and grit in his lungs, and he had almost twice the drink-drive limit of alcohol in his blood. The ultimate cause of death was given as drowning.

Recording a verdict of misadventure, coroner Alan Craze said: "Taking a canoe out as he did at that time of year, that he'd just found, with no life-jacket, even though he couldn't swim certainly carried with it some element of misadventure."