Weather and Weddings

2010 was a great year, but not for our kayaking. In May we headed down to Malta for a family wedding. It was a brilliant wedding, even though the strength of the winds meant that we hired bikes instead of a kayak to explore the amazing Gozo coastline before the wedding.

We'd planned to hire a kayak from Malta Outdoors, who seemed OK as far as we could tell, tho the kayak would have been a sit-on which would have been quite hard work in comparison to what we're used to.

Tech Notes

Here's some notes on gear & techniques that helped make this trip a pleasure:

Turbo Barbie
A home-made wood-burning camping stove with a battery-powered fan, giving contollable, intense heat, with easy fire-starting. A 5V, 60mm fan is powered by 4x AA NiMh cells, which last for many days of intensive cooking & heating washing water. Switching in a resistor reduces fan-speed for simmer.
The picture shows a 12V fan powered from 2x AA cells via prototype electronics.

The inner fire-chamber is stainless steel to resist the heat, with holes angled to swirl the air from the fan. The outer is aluminium with pan-rests attached.


Turbo-barbie's use has been evolving for about 20 years:
Fire-starting: put small dry wood or charcoal (see below) in the chamber, near the fan, filling up with fairly dry wood. Meths, wax, etc make starting easier. Ignite with full fan. Use blowing tube if damp fuel won't catch. Once it's going, damper wood can be used. Can also use charcoal, coal, peat or dung. A folding pruning saw helps.

When finished, covering the embers with a light aluminium disc makes charcoal for fire-starting next time.

Using on a bag of fire-blanket material, containing sand or vegetation stops it scorching the ground. Or put it on a flat stone.

There's increasing concern about seriously poisonous dioxins produced when salty wood is burnt. DEFRA quotes studies showing releases "20 to 90 times higher than from normal wood" http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/chemicals/pdf/dioxinsdomestic-final0605.pdf I suggest minimising salty driftwood use and seriously avoiding breathing its smoke. I favour wood that's not been in the sea or from high up the beach, where it's likely to have been rinsed by rain, but I don't know how much this helps. At least stoves like turbo-barbie use much less wood than open fires.

Cooking
Most evening meals were pasta, rice, couscous or potatoes with a delicious "sauce" from real ingredients.
We'd bring the carbohydrate to the boil, carefully seal its pan in a plastic bag and thoroughly nest it in a sleeping bag. It's normally ready to eat when the cordon-bleu sauce is done. Rather than plates, we use stackable 2-pint mixing bowls with lids - much better at keeping food hot while you eat. Also for nesting hot food in a sleeping bag.

Basha
We've 3 sizes of these shelters, made from lightweight sil-nylon. For this trip we made one with split paddles for poles and anti-midge net-curtains, that can be furled when not needed. Sometimes we sleep under it, with lightweight bivi-bags made from pertex aqua-block, but retired to the tent to sleep in bad weather or extreme midges.

Why would one want a basha as well as a tent?
* A place to cook & hang-out, enjoying the view, protected from wind, rain & midges.
* You feel more connected with your surroundings.
* It's spacious compared to our tent. Good for cooking & fire-wood storage
* under 1kg, including pegs & guys.

The disadvantages are:
* vulnerable to a strong wind from the opposite direction when you pitched it. We pull out the poles & peg it flat at night: very quick to re-erect.
* Less shelter than a tent - but suprisingly good!

If you're persuaded, try NRS-99 Sil-nylon & MM34-09 Midge Mesh from www.profabrics.co.uk This basha used a 1.9m long fabric rectangle with 45° wings. Also see www.cleats.co.uk for cleats & dymeena string.

Stuff Bags
Invaluable for containing & organising. Pertex makes strong, breathable, soft bags. Sil-nylon good for "sealed" bags for dirty clothes. Same supplier. Instructions:
http://thru-hiker.com/projects/silnylon_stuffsacks.php

Dymeena String
exceedingly strong string: great for guys & washing lines. Same suppliers.

Wine Bag
Remove the cardboard from a wine box & put the bladder in a pertex bag. It always seems to squeeze in somewhere in a kayak!


Snow Pegs
Terra Nova's extra large alloy Snow Pegs are great for tethering kayaks, as tent pegs in sand or, importantly, for digging those holes for a poo with a view.
http://needlesports.com/acatalog/Mail_Order_Tent_Pegs__Poles___Anchors_73.html

Feathercraft K2
A sea-worthy kayak-in-a-bag. We usually swear at some time during assembly, but then it's a delight. Beautifully designed. Expensive, but what double kayak can you keep in your attic or take on a bus? http://www.feathercraft.com/kayaks/traditional/k2/index.php

On the busses

Today was spent either on busses, or waiting for busses, as we lugged our 4 large bags back to our car

We zigzagged across scotland .. from Ullapool to Inverness to Fort William, to Tarbet (a junction and hotel beside Loch Lomond) finally arriving at a tiny busstop at the entrance to the Point Sands Campsite at Taylinloan: our starting point a month ago. All in, it took nearly 12 hours. Not bad

The scottish bus network is surprisingly effective. Even tiny places seem to be connected, although it may well be by the postman's van (which sometimes also serves as a rural bus) or a "dial a bus" service which can be booked the evening before to travel on certain rural roads.

Even though the regulations said that passengers could only have one piece of luggage, we found all the staff very helpful and interested in what we'd done. Some even helped us load the bags!

For those tempted to follow in our footsteps, the Traveline Scotland website is great for route planning

Celtic Fringe is also a useful community run website with a wide range of public transport options in Westerross (the area south of Ullapool)

The busses seem busier than we're used to down south, so although its possible to by the tickets on the bus, its more relaxing if you buy them in advance (even by an hour guarentees you a seat) We were relieved we'd booked the tickets for the remainer of the journey as we passed through Inverness Bus Station.

As the sun finally set over the paps of Jura, we were sitting beside a campfire on the white sand of the beach, chatting with a a couple of other campers and finishing the contents of our wine box.

What a trip.

The disappearing kayak

After a wonderful month, we arrive in Ullapool. We check in to the lovely Arch Inn (5m from the sea, 300m from the busstop) and start the preparation for the return journey.

Most kayakers would be faced with the prospect of recovering their car,then driving it all the way back to load the kayak on the roof rack, before returning home. But this is where folding kayaks like the K2 come into their own.

We just take it apart, fold it up and load it and all our stuff into 4 (very large) bags, ready to go on the bus.

Priest Island

After 2 days in Poolewe the wind died & let us out on the sea again, rounding Greenstone Point. Conditions remained good so we crossed to Priest Island, the most remote of the Summer Islands, once occupied by hermit clerics, but now owned by RSPB - with good reason. The sea cliffs abound with nest sites for fulmars, razor bills. Artic Skuas patrol, ready to attack if you get too near their moorland nests. It was a fitting finale to our trip to be on a wild Summer isle for the shortest night, although we celebrated without my suggested midnight paddle.

Having been determed to avoid goals & challenges, we did secretly aspire to paddle from Gigha to Ullapool, and it's been a classic. This journey has a rounded completeness, with a great variety of scenery & paddling. We've been lucky with mostly clear weather, although on 7 days we stayed ashore because of strong winds. We lived it up on 9 nights in hotels or B&Bs, 3 with friends, 3 on campsites & 17 wild camping. All our wild beach meals were cooked on driftwood with our home-made "Turbo-Barbie" (details to follow in a techie-post). Hoping our fellow bus passengers, going back to the car, manage with our kippered smell!

Thanks to everyone who's supported us, made it possible and shown an interest.

Safety at Sea.. or not

For a second day, we're happily installed in Lilly's B&B in Poolewe (Riversdale B&B 01445 781227) , waiting for the Force 6/7 winds to calm down. It looks like we'll be able to get out to sea again on Saturday

On days like this one of our more unusual pieces of Kayaking safety gear comes into play: walking boots! These make it a pleasure to explore the surroundings on land when its not safe to be at sea. As a result, hopefully, our distress flares and other bits of more conventional nautical safety equipment can remain unused.

There's not much room in a kayak, so Kayakers often have nothing more than blister-inducing Wellies as footware on land, so boredom must make it tempting to set out to sea when really it would be safer not to. We get round the space problem by taking walking shoes, held tightly together with strap and kept in a waterproof 3 litre Lomo bag. (This keeps the sea water out, and the festering smell of damp socks in!) http://www.ewetsuits.com/acatalog/Dry-Boxes-dry-bags-uk.html

Rubha Reidh

Rubha Reidh (say: "Roo Ray") is a wild, rocky headland on the mainland, North of Skye, that catches any swell & tide. You wouldn't want to be kayaking there in the wrong conditions. For us it was just pleasantly exciting, with stunning scenery. We managed to get into the tiny Port An Amaill, where massive quantities of cocaine was landed after being dropped off in creels, resulting in the UK's largest drugs bust. East of the point we enjoyed threading through a playground of beautiful stacks & cliffs.
We decided to land on Camas Mor a wild, sandy beach, surrounded by cliffs - trickier than expected because the sand shown on OS maps has been washed away, exposing more rocks. Fortunately there wasn't too much surf'. There was great camping! The "ruins" above include a delightful bothy, Camas Trollvaig, from where we could see to Cape Wrath, with Suilven & the Assynt mountains beautifully arrayed. Gorgeous.

We left at high tide next afternoon, because stronger winds were forecast later, and shot round into the shelter of Loch Ewe.