Paddling with the Dark Side
This was mainly a Strathclyde Uni trip but Paul Walker and I were allowed to tag along for a paddle and Louise and Alison were recruited as wielders of photographic equiptment. We set off for the Moriston in the Walker mobile and the drive was long, fortunately I discovered The Pigeon Detectives on Louise’s ipod and it turns out that they are awesome. Our car arrived about half an hour before everyone else due to our superior ffaff busting abilities which gave us a chance to check out the river and for me to become progressively more terrified. By the time we finally got on the river I was whimpering like a little girl and had lost pretty much all man points.
The top drop is usually pretty eventful and so it proved for us. I had a roll at the bottom after a fairly unimpressive line, Gordon remodeled the nose of his burn, Chris had a swim for which I think he could fairly claim a deck pop as a contributing factor if he wanted and I think someone else had a swim? Paul Walker however took arguably the line of the day, grinding perfectly down the left hand slab. The near beating he had at the bottom detracted somewhat but all in all a top notch piece of paddling.
After this there are a few rapidy things before the next main drop. As long as you get some sort of boof off this drop you’re fine, apparently if you do not you spend quite a long time in the bottom of it. Everyone was fine on it, maybe a roll or two but nothing major. Form here the next rapid has two options, go left of go right. Some went left, others went right, all were fine. The river then flows through a narrow bouncy channel and it is here that Gordon swam again and broke his very shiny, very expensive helmet. The top section ends with a pretty big ramp down into a wave/hole and out into flat water, it was good.
Paul decided he’d had enough at this point but the rest of us walked back up for another run. I can’t really be arsed to write out the whole run again, but by far the most noteworthy event came on the second drop. Steve decided to drop off it doing a Demshitz style bear claw with his hand. This caused him to capsize and swim and his boat to get very pinned on a rock. We sent Steve out to get a line on his boat, which looked painful but then again it was his fault. After a bit of a play around with prusik loops and a Z pulley we got the boat free. This was all captured on film, which I imagine would be quite embarrassing.
After finishing the run we drove down to run the lower section of the river. I was not going to get on until Dave Martin told me to man up, which I’m very glad he did. The top drop has a very manly left hand line or alternatively an easier set of little drops down the right. Most of the group took the right, I chickened out and got on below (I’m really not sure why because it really isn’t a very difficult run but there we are). After this is a rapid called the gutter which is quite frankly brilliant, it’s a really long steep rock slide with a hole half way down which flushes through nicely. I ran the second half of it backwards and Haydn had a bit of a gimpy swim at the bottom but otherwise all was well. The last two rapids are a bit more continuous than the others on the river but pretty straight forward as long as you have enough speed hitting the holes which are at the bottom of both.
After walking back up to the cars and loading boats we got The Pigeon Detectives back on the iPod and headed for Glasgow. We arrived back at about one o clock in the morning feeling absolutely buggered.
Photos and possible video to follow.
