Luncheon on a gravel bed in the River Lochy.

The sea lock of the Caledonian Canal opens to Loch Linnhe beside Corpach pier.

For a little while, the canal follows the shore and we paddled below some fishing boats.

We now crossed the head of loch Linnhe towards...

... Fort William. Unfortunately we turned left instead of right.

The first warning of our mistake was that the kayaks' seam lines were closer to the water, and talking of water, it was decidedly the lo-salt variety.

We had entered the River Lochy, which drains the wettest part of Scotland and so is quite big.

Being in a dryish spell, we paddled below great banks of shingle, which rather restricted our horizons.

It was quite surreal, every so often our eyes rose above the shingle bank and  suddenly the landscape was revealed to us. In this photo I am looking straight up Glen Nevis, where much of the shingle will have come from.

We eddy hopped upstream but eventually the current became too strong. We ferry glided across the main flow to take a break on a shingle bank in the middle of the river. Jim had hoped to get up to the "smelter play wave", where the water exits from the hydro power station that provides the electricity for the aluminium smelter. It opened in 1929. The pipes carry the water for 24 km under the mountains and exit from the slopes of Ben Nevis. The plant produces 40,000 tons of aluminium each year and employs about 174 people.

It was a well earned break for a luncheon on an exposed part of the river bed.

The view up Glen Nevis to Sgurr a' Mhaim (1099m) made this one of the best lunch spots ever. However our sojourn was cut short, the river was rising due to the high tide in Loch Linnhe and our little world steadily shrunk. It was time to go...

Ben Nevis and Corpach Pier.

We had come to photograph Ben Nevis (1344m) and were not optimistic, given the thick cloud that had enveloped the upper slopes of Scotland's highest mountain during our approach. From November to January the mountain's summit is in the clouds for 80% of the time. So we could not believe our luck when a weather window opened and the summit and magnificent northern corrie were revealed.

The great northern corrie of Ben Nevis provides some of the finest rock and ice climbing in Scotland.

Photo from Library of Congress collection.

A weather observatory was built on the summit of  Ben Nevis in 1883 and hourly observations were made until it closed in 1904. It was designed by the lighthouse engineer Thomas Stevenson. He also invented the Stevenson screen to protect meteorological instruments in exposed places.  The observatory had a wooden tower to allow access when the building was buried in snow.

Corpach Pier was constructed between 1804 and 1806 to service the entrance to the Caledonian Canal, which was finally completed in 1822. A ferry connected Corpach to Fort William, which lies at the foot of Ben Nevis.

In the 1850's steamers began to bring tourists from Glasgow and Corpach developed as a tourist resort.