And this one's delayed by a few weeks!
The latter half of the summer has been manic, with back to back weeks away for Wilderness Scotland sea kayak guiding and coaching (more on that to come). But i did manage to squeeze in some fun!
Every year hundreds of kayakers head to Scotland for the "Wet West Paddlefest" based around the Fort William area.
Bob had come up for this weekend and although i wasn't going to be around i did manage to meet up with him and Scott Robinson, who has been working back in Scotland this summer on a hiatus from his usual gig at the white nile.
The rain forecast hadn't brought up our planned river, the Nevis, up yet. So we headed to the steeper lower volume options of the Etive and it's tribs.
We weren't disappointed!
A chunky level was waiting for us, and as we approached we passed many cars heading in the opposite direction full of kayakers who didn't fancy the "local's low" level.
I couldn't blame them, many of the usually friendly drops become sticky holes at this level and even the ones that are still friendly don't look or sound it!
But we were excited and after a few runs of the triple step we headed on down stream. We were followed by a couple of photographers (yet to receive the shots) who although there to photograph the falls, seized the opportunity to practice their sport photography and used us as their subjects all day.
I had some good lines, and some bad lines but none disastrous.
A highlight was definitely the slides, which signal the nearing of the end of the main rapids. These had transformed in the higher volume to a huge rapid, with some kicking waves, more akin to the himalaya than Scotland!
The main Event of the Etive is "right angle falls", a twenty something footer which has been known to dish out its fair share of beatings in higher levels. When we reached this Scott was psyched to go first and i wanted to get a shot from an angle i'd spotted a while back, so he fired it up with a great late boof.
I went next, and my hand slipped off the paddle right on the lip resulting in a minor beatdown at the bottom, but a succesful roll up. I hopped out and went for round two.
"Go big or go home i thought"and went for a big lean boof. Boofing slightly too early I landed in the pile and once again had some minor punishment.
"Go bigger or go home then!" I thought, and signalled that my third run i was going for a complete head dip.
This time it went well and i was psyched to land flat coming away from the falls clean.
After our fill on right angle, we hiked up the Allt a' Chaorainn, a tributary of the Etive that has a series of long, linked slides.
The extra volume had made this run an exhilarating ride that's for sure!
After finishing, we headed down to the Dalness falls section to scope it out. We'd seen a shot of Nick Bennett running this section in high level before and wanted to scope it out.
After much scouting and deliberating, we decided that it was higher, and that although we were fairly confident, with our limited safety team and high consequence, we were better off leaving it for another day.
All in all a cracking day with some good mates!
Cheers to Scott for pressing the trigger on the shots of me.
Here's some GoPro video:
"Local Low" Kayaking the Etive and Allt a' Charoain In Scotland from Luke partridge on Vimeo.
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