And gurly grew the sea

Back in March, we had set off to Arran via the island of Bute. Despite a forecast of a force 5 westerly, we left Bute in a flat calm and a thick fog. Gradually the fog began to lift and we could see our destination, which lies 11km away across the Sound of Bute.


Despite the lack of wind, the sea had an uneasy oiliness. Suddenly, out of nowhere the wind hit. It was just as well we were expecting it. A force 5 wind against a full spring ebb on the Garroch Head tide race makes for interesting conditions. So interesting in fact that the next photo, taken just as the wind hit us, was the last until we got into the lee of the Cock of Arran.


They had not sailed a league, a league,
A league but barely three,
When the lift grew dark, and the wind blew loud,
And gurly grew the sea.

The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens

21/03/2009

A cloud on the horizon...

From Glencallum Bay on Bute we set off across the Firth of Clyde for the Tan, the body of water which separates Great and Little Cumbrae islands.


Conditions were perfect for our crossing.


The quality of light lifted our spirits.


All to soon, we were approaching Little Cumbrae with its Stevenson lighthouse. In the distance a yacht sailed in front of the dark outline of Holy Island. On the horizon, clouds gathered. A front was approaching. It would be raining again the following day.

15/02/2009

Rain storms on the roof of Scotland.

We landed on an inlet on the west side of Eilean Balnagowan in Loch Linnhe to take advantage of a break in the rain. After an excellent luncheon, we set off to explore the island. A great deal of the hillside was covered by dense growths of brambles, which we thought would puncture our dry suits.


It was easy enough to cross the little isthmus that joins the two halves of the island. We emerged on a grassy bank behind the east beach. It Seems that the east beach belongs to the geese and the west to the gulls. The two species seemed to respect a line of demarcation that ran through the spine of the island. We saw no border disputes.

I have searched the Internet and a library of books but there is little mention of Balnagowan. Even the usually reliable Hamish Haswell-Smith dismisses it with a single mention in a sentence about a view to Ben Nevis. The only sign of antiquity was a low circle of moss and grass covered stones. It seem that poor wee Balnagowan was one of the few Scottish islands not to have been blessed by the presence of a resident Saint. Still, the staff of seakayakphoto.com have now enjoyed an excellent luncheon there!


With a following wind and gentle seas we made speedy progress across the mouth of Cuil Bay and up the coast of Appin.


Rounding a low point near Back Settlement, we gazed across the Loch to the shore side settlement of Onich and the mountains of Lochaber behind. In the distance the foothills of the Mamores were streaked with snow and disappeared into the clouds. Above their summits, lay the unseen roof of Scotland, Ben Nevis 1343m.


All the while our course was gradually bearing eastwards and as we approached Rubha nam Moine (Point of the Morass) more heavy rain showers came our way.


We were well past Rhuba Moine before the skies cleared again. I always think it is worth bringing a camera, even in bad weather. Clouds are very photogenic.

28/09/2009

The lonely sea and the Skye

On Saturday which was the first day of the 9th Scottish Sea Kayaking Symposium on Skye, Jim Weir and I took of group of really nice folk out onto Loch Eishort on the north west of Skye's Sleat peninsula. At first the wind was a gusty force 4 southerly but the arrival of torrential rain soon killed the wind. The outline of Bla Bheinn, an outlier of the Cuillin ridge, can just be seen behind Nigel.


We launched at Ord and made our way east up the loch...


...past the delightful coral sands of Eilean Gaineamhach an Arda.


We were lucky enough to spot a pair of white tailed sea eagles. One of them had at least one faded orange or red wing tag.


The hills were running with torrents of water...


which poured over the beaches and into the loch.


I don't think anywhere does rain as well as Skye!

23/05/2009

Luncheon in the banqueting hall of Little Cumbrae Castle followed by force 6 in The Tan!

Yesterday was cold, pouring wet and windy. The coastal forecast for the Upper Clyde was Force 4 SW increasing to WNW 6 by afternoon, with gusts to 37 knots. Max air temp was 6 degrees Celsius but with windchill was only -1C.

It was just the sort of day to go sea kayaking! Phil has been paddling a double for the last 4 months but has only paddled a single kayak for 3 weeks. It seemed like a good opportunity to extend his comfort zone. We assembled a little late at Fairlie on the Clyde coast, a gust of wind on the Irvine bypass had nearly caused Phil's new Quest to part company with his roof rack. Our plan was to take luncheon in the great banqueting hall of Little Cumbrae Castle!


Soon our little band was making slow but steady progress down the Fairlie Roads, into the teeth of the wind and rain.


An ebb tide against a force 4 SW wind gave some good conditions for the paddle over to Little Cumbrae.


All was calm in the lee of the island as we made our way...


...into the little bay to the north of the castle.


The castle provided fitting shelter to the cold, hungry staff of seakayakphoto.com.


We worked our way down the east of the island as we thought we had better take a look round Gull Point at the South end. Phil got his head down for the slog into the wind.


As we cleared the point, we met some interesting conditions. These impressed Phil so much that he managed to turn his kayak without falling in.


Looking back, even the high hills of Arran were obscured by great lumps of water, which were bearing rapidly down on us.


It was time for a sharp exit and we slid down the waves at high speed.


In the lee of Gull point again, Tony came over so we could check each other's GPS scores. Rats! He whopped me with his maximum speed of 16.8 Km/hr.


After a breather in the lee of Little Cumbrae we had to cross The Tan, a narrow body of water, which separates it from its greater neighbour. The west wind was whistling through the gap.


We crossed at a high ferry angle of 350 degrees. Look at the map and see how far we got blown downwind. Note the kinks in our track as the squalls hit us.


Phil made steady progress and learned how to adjust his skeg to prevent weather cocking.


Soon we were in the shelter of Millport Bay and we stopped to replenish depleted body fat reserves on the Eileans.


At first the crossing back to Fairlie was calm as we were in the lee of Great Cumbrae.


By the time we were in mid channel the wind had swung round to the NW against the now flooding tide. Again conditions were quite interesting. Unfortunately, when nearly back at Fairlie, Phil took just a tiny little swim but he held onto his paddle and we had him back in his boat in a jiffy. It was just as well a wave did it because Tony and I were going to throw him in anyway (just for educational purposes, you understand).

What an excellent day out and didn't Phil do well?! He joins a distinguished band of seakayakphoto.com staffers who have gone for a little dip off the Cumbraes...D____d, D____d, C___k and A__n!



04/04/2009

Red sky at night does not always promise...

The swell in Fleet Bay was much bigger than a force 5 wind would suggest.


I decided to paddle out to the mouth of the bay and go round the Garvellan rocks at its entrance.


As the spring ebb tide was assisting me, I made good progress, despite the head wind. There is a good little tide race off the Garvellan rocks and in the wind against tide conditions I found the it quite exciting. The low brace proved to be most useful.


The evening sky turned blood red as the sun sank below the western horizon.

18/10/2008


The red sky had not foretold a fine day. The wind was averaging 34 knots and gusting to 55 knots. Not a day for sea kayaking but ideal for windsurfing! At least I now knew where the previous day's swell had come from! This photo shows the flood tide. Later on when the spring ebb started the swell steepened up in a most satisfactory way!


Sadly that was our last weekend on the Solway until next spring.

19/10/2008

Pocket Surfer 2 review

Photo by JLW

Sea kayaking in remote places is very weather dependent. The weather forecast is therefore vital in safe route planning. On the wild parts of the west coast of Scotland you are lucky sometimes to get AM or sometimes even FM radio reception but the times of the main shipping forecasts are at the unholy hours of 0048 and 0520 hours. A marine VHF transceiver will pick up the coastguard MSI broadcasts every 4 hours, if you are in range (and if as at present the coastguard are not on industrial action and therefore not making the broadcasts). I invariably find I remember the weather forecast time just as it finishes!

Imagine, were ever you were, if you had full Internet access, even to feature rich graphical web sites such as XC weather? If you are a gadget freak like me, you will have tried WAP on a 2G phone and decided that it is hopeless. You will also know that there is no 3G coverage on almost all of the west coast of Scotland.


Pocket Surfer 2 has full Internet access in this remote spot.

Let me now introduce to you the Pocket Surfer 2 from the Canadian Datawind company. I have been using it since December 2007 with great success. Pocket Surfer 2 connects to the Internet using the 2G GPRS network via a built in SIM and antenna. This is not the WAP version of the Internet but the full version. Even complex web pages with hi res photos will download in less than 30 secs and text rich pages will often download in a few seconds. This is done by connecting to the Internet via Datawind's servers which compress the page before transmitting it to the Pocket Surfer over the GPRS network. This does mean that the photos are very grainy and that videos will not download but other multimedia such as Flash and Java do work. As you are accessing the Internet through Canada, you get the Canadian version of Google by default but this is a minor quibble.

Features and functions
It is a slim, clam shell gadget which when open reveals a 640x240 pixel colour screen and a full qwerty keyboard which is easy to operate with two thumbs. The keyboard is illuminated so the device is usable in the dark. The "mouse" pointer is navigated by a group of four direction keys. Sometimes you might loose sight of the "mouse" pointer but if you direct it to a corner of the screen, it is easy to find again. It is a surprisingly practical solution to navigating web pages on a compact, hand held device. The only type of web site I have had difficulty with is where a drop down menu has a long list of options, which extend below the bottom of the screen. The device will not let you drag a scroll bar down by left clicking and dragging the bar. An example is MagicSeaweed's surf locations. I have got round this by creating a web page with multiple hyperlinks direct to the each of the surf location pages I regularly access.

The device has a built in LION battery (with a mini USB charge socket) which lasts about 4 hours per charge. It comes with a mains to mini USB charger but you can also charge it from a computer USB socket with a USB cable. I have also charged in the wild with a wind up mobile phone charger with a mini USB socket. It is a dedicated Internet browsing device and so cannot make phone calls or be connected to a computer for USB data transfer. By concentrating on this function it does so in such an efficient manner that it will download web pages even quicker than a G3 iPhone in the city! Actually it has another function. There is a built in GPS receiver which shows your current position on Google maps. You can then click for information on a variety of local attractions!

It is also easy to access your email including attachments such as word docs, access online storage, remotely access your work computer etc. but I do not! You can use https sites for banking. Datawind claim that the link over GPRS is encrypted but I have not trusted my bank details yet. Maybe in an emergency I might and my data would probably be less likely to be hacked than in an Internet cafe. It will not work with video or audio or online games because of the compression used before a web page is sent over the GPRS network. What it does do it does very well indeed. It allows you mobile access to Internet information in places with no WIFI or 3G and it accesses it faster than any other GPRS or 3G device I have seen.

Where does it work?
For outdoors people who need Internet access for weather forecasts, the Pocket Surfer 2 has no competition. It has worked on islands off the west coast of Lewis and Harris. The Monach Islands, half way to St Kilda, Skye, Arisaig, Scarba, the remote SE coast of Islay, Sanda and the Solway. Sometimes you might need to climb a small hillock to get a signal, other times it will work at sea level. On our recent trip to St Kilda on MV Cuma, the skipper Murdani, who has a lifetime experience of working these waters, was delighted to be able to access his favourite weather web pages. We were waiting on the Monach Islands for a break in the weather to get out to St Kilda. He said "In all my years I have seen nothing like it, who would have thought it? The Internet on the Monachs!" I have also used it while waiting at airports and railway stations. On a moving train it works great until you go into a tunnel!

Cost
Now the catch, what about the cost? I bought mine for £180 and it is now £160. Well, now the really good news: this also includes 20 hours per month browsing. In subsequent years you get 20 hours a month browsing for £40 per year.

Support
What about after sales support? After 9 months, mine developed a minor fault with the screen that made it difficult to read the menu bar. An email to the UK support site was answered within 5 minutes. They said it was a known fault with some of the early models and replaced it under warranty. What more can you ask for?

Conclusion
I cannot begin to tell you how much I appreciate such easy access to the Internet in wild places. I know some purists will say they go to the wilderness to escape from all that but accurate weather forecasts are a great contribution to safety and I am a cautious sea kayaker.

The Pocket Surfer 2 is a unique device. It may not be perfect but nothing else comes close for full Internet access in wild places, so I am afraid I will need to award it 12/10!

Amazingly the wind dropped.

Tour de Rozel, Jersey, Channel Islands.

We left St Catherine's in the NE of Jersey with the wind gusting to force 7 but it was veering rapidly from NE to SE. The water rounding Le Coupe Point was quite rough but once round we had calm seas and were shelteed from the winds all the way to Greve de Lecq. Amazingly Jersey canoe club had managed to lay on another great day despite the winds.

The last day barbecue was held in torrential rains and the local roads were like red rivers. The soil from the recently lifted potato fields was carried towards the sea.

Logistics of sea kayaking to Ailsa Craig

It has to be said that the staff of seakayakphoto.com are not the greatest exponents of open crossings. This is not wholly due to our well developed senses of self preservation. Out on the open briny there is not a great deal to photograph, which kind of defeats being a seakayakphoto.comer.

Ailsa Craig is worth the effort to get to. It is one of the World's great sea stacks. Like a sentinel of the sea, its great monolith rises at the entrance to the Firth of Clyde. Unlike many sea stacks, which are hidden away in remote places, Ailsa Craig is visible to anyone who visits the populous Ayrshire coast. Its dramatic outline rises to 338m and, for much of its 3.7km circumference, the first 100 meters rise sheer out of the sea. Despite its arresting appearance, the current island is but a shadow of its former self. Some 61.5 million years ago it was a giant volcano 3.5km high! Then, during the Ice Ages, the huge glaciers that swept south from the Scottish Highlands carved out the softer rocks of the Firth of Clyde basin and carried away the volcano’s ash cone. It left only the hard micro-granite rock of its volcanic plug. Fragments of this were carried by the ice as far south as Wales, where they can be found today, as erratic boulders.

Ailsa Craig lies 14km off the Ayrshire coast and the spring tide rate is only about 0.6kn so it just requires some repetitive paddling movements to get there and then, hopefully, about the same number to get back.

However, the weather round these parts tends to change quite quickly so there is a degree of commitment in making this trip. 24 hours before this photo was taken, there was a force 6 SE wind.

The BBC coastal forecast was for:

2008-05-05 0600 - 1159Pressure - 1025 mB RTemp max/min - 16/7 degrees CWind speed - F1-3 becoming F0-3Wind direction - EMax gust in knots - 17 becoming 18Sea state - Wavelets Visibility - Moderate becoming Good
Sig weather -

2008-05-05 1200 - 1759Pressure - 1027 mB RTemp max/min - 19/7 degrees CWind speed - F1-3 becoming F0-3Wind direction - SMax gust in knots - 18 becoming 18Sea state - Wavelets Visibility - Good

Fortunately the forecast was pretty accurate.....

Thanks to Steve (Ceegee) for help with the right age of Ailsa.

05/05/2008

Misty Maidens morning

A cold thick mist lay low over the Ayrshire coastline on Sunday morning. As we arrived at Maidens the sun began to break through.


By the time we were on the water, the mist had all but dispersed and we were in for another glorious day.



27/04/2008