Big Trip

For a couple of months end 2019, we had our "BigTrip" down under to see Tom's brother, Bill in Tasmania.

 Bill lent us his little van and a couple of bikes, so we did a wonderful circuit of Tasmania (dodging wild weather) camping out much of the time. Australian style wild camping is a bit more organised than we're used to, but still very nice!

 We managed to hire a sit-on kayak to explore some of the Pieman River on the edge of the Tarkine wilderness area of NW Tasmania. 

  Much of this beautiful wilderness area is being destroyed by open cast mining and logging.

 Save the Tarkine are campaining to get it world heritage protection and deserve supporting

Menai Straits

We were able to keep the Cambridge Canoe Club kayaks for a few more days. There were Force 5 winds out in the bay by Puffin Island.....

 but it was beautifully sheltered in the Menai Straits ...

A sea kayaking course

23 of us from Cambridge Canoe Club came over to Anglesey for a 3 day course with Phil and his team from Anglesey Adventures.  We stayed at the very pleasant kayak friendly campsite Anglesey Outdoors

This was very useful for helping us get used to single kayaks

 Lots of opportunity to practice cutting into tide races...

..handling surf and swells in force 4 winds......

    and rescue skills!...

  On the way back to the campsite, the kayak gortex came in handy..

More Pennywort

Pennywort eradication going well.  We had funding from the local water company, landowners and the Environment agency to prune back the trees that were trapping the pennywort on the upper Cam and making it impossible to remove.

You can just see the team of 3, working from 2 giant punts and half hidden in the trees. They're working from right (upstream) to left. The green patch on the left is floating pennywort


And we've a growing team of kayakers and others that are helping remove the little strands that emerge, before they have a chance to grow into monster mats

More details about  eradicating Floating Pennywort here

Culbin, Affric and Skye

Now in cycling mode, Culbin forest, near Findhorn is a nice place to explore.

We then headed back west to Glen Affric, and then Skye, picking up various bits of our lost property on the way before returning home

Shipwrecked!

Going down the Spey rapids (grade 2 in places) was 'exciting' in a double sea kayak! Turning tight corners isn't our strength, and as its a folding feathercraft, we were nervous about damaging the skin or the frame.

Luckily the roughest bit was a straight run.

The main problem was lack of water .... we were continually having to get out and pull the kayak over gravel banks that were too shallow to paddle over.

Then as we were approaching Charlestown of Aberlour, we realised we had a leak....Maybe there had been a sharp rock or some glass in one of the gravel banks that had cut the skin.  We could have done an emergency repair and continued for the last day down to the sea, but decided to wait and do it properly at home

I got us installed in a B&B while Tom hitched back to Aviemore to retreive the car and the bikes....

River Spey

The long forecast storm arrived, so we decided to head over to the East and paddle down the River Spey. This had been in our sights for a while, but a double sea kayak is an unusual thing to use!

We started at Kingussie, where there's a nice launch spot under the B970 bridge. We camped out a few miles downstream, then, with heavy rain on the way spent a couple of nights in the nice Old Bridge Inn bunkhouse at Aviemore. Easy kayak launching immediately outside.

Downstream of Aviemore, the Salmon fishing intrastructure gets ever more prominent, and it became quite hard to find somewhere to  wildcamp.  We were prospecting a rather scraggy spot when a kind fisherman showed us an idillic secret spot on one of the islands in the middle of the river.

Not saying where it is..... You'll just have to find it for yourselves!