Love is in the North Esk

In an attempt to make up for my pathetic level of singleness on Valentine’s Day I organized a trip to the North Esk, which is a very long way from Glasgow. We left at seven thirty which is a very painful time of day if you have been in the Hilton getting poor until three o clock that morning. We made good time despite the inability of the club to have a trip which does not involve stopping to pick up food on the way and managed to meet up with various parties who were meeting us at the river. Having got on the river we found even more people to paddle with and I still have no idea who they were.

The river starts off fairly shallow and rocky with a few little grade 2/3 things on it and we had relatively few swims, most of which were my fault. On one occasion I got in Suzan’s way and pushed her in and on another I gave the instruction ‘Go right of the rock’ without specifying which rock (seemed pretty obvious to me but Ally’s using it as an excuse for a swim). There were a couple of other swims on this section which were not directly my fault but they’re not really that interesting.




After a while the river flows into a very sexy gorge which is where most of the swims took place. I caused one of these again by getting in Ross’s way and pushing him in, and because he had no air bags in his boat took quite a while to get rescued. After a couple more swims Ross started to look a bit hypothermic so we fed him chocolate and gave him some man hugging which warmed him up a bit. Swims from pretty much everyone else also helped add to the fun of the day. Probably the best rapid in the gorge is Rocks of Solitude/Triple step (depends which guide you read) and is a fairly tricky grade 4 with two small stoppers leading into quite a big stopper. Chris went first and absolutely styled it in a playboat which made me very excited. I don’t think everyone else appreciated just how well he’d run it so looked a little puzzled by my excited wooping. Others were less successful with quite a lot o backloops and quite a lot of swims.








Gregor’s line was noteworthy as it was rubbish, however he got through it the right way up.

Just after Rocks of solitude is a little constriction where everyone felt the need to paddle into a wall so we had five swims here. After this there are a couple more small drops where we had yet more swims before the gorge opens out into a shallow rocky river again with the only real feature being Fish Ladder falls which is one of those rapids which is fine if you get the line but looks pretty painful if you don’t. Chris ran this blind, Euan and I chose to inspect before running it and everyone else decided not to do it, probably put off by the horror stories of Amy swimming down it the last time the club had a trip to the North Esk.

At this point the fading light forced us to give up on paddling and walk back to the bus, an event which is becoming commonplace on club trips it would seem. Upon arrival at the bus we discovered that Aberdeen had written ‘AUCC rule’ on it which is both unimaginative and as we know from SUS untrue. On the way to pick up the cars from the get in, Ally ate my cereal bars, this is unacceptable and he will not be allocated a space on any future trips.


- Chris Bell with his love rock.

I should also note that not all swims are listed here in detail so here is a rough estimate of who swam:
Fraser: 4
Suzan: 2
Ally: 2
Gregor: 1
Harry: 1
Ross: 6
Gregor’s friend Jen: 2
Gregor’s friend Neil: 1
Random old guy in a spud: 8
Random guy with Sweet Rocker: 6