An Arran arrival at Brodick Bay

We crossed the great sweep of Brodick Bay, which is skirted by beautiful reddish sands. Until very recently you would not have chosen to go for a summer swim in this lovely spot due to the dreaded Clyde bananas. However, in 2005 the crude sewage outfall was finally replaced by a new sewage treatment system.


A side effect of the building of this system is that Brodick now has a new public slipway. This is conveniently situated close to the ferry pier. We leaned back and pulled our kayaks up the slip on their trolleys as the snow clouds started to gather again round Arran's rocky ridges.

It had been a long hard paddle and we were both suffering from an unslaked thirst as we turned to take a first look at Brodick....

18/03/2008

Goatfell

In a perilously thirsty state, we proceeded down the east coast of Arran until we entered Brodick Bay. I turned back to view the mountains.


Goatfell is the highest of Arran's mountains. It is 874 m or 2868 feet so is not a Munro but it is a fine view from the top.


Here is another view of Goatfell, from the top of nearby Cir Mhor.

18/03/2008

Kaya-Jet review

Over the last year the staff at seakayakphoto.com have been doing quite a lot of paddling in tidal waters. Robert Burns our National Bard wrote "Nae Man can tether time nor tide..." and he was right.

We have often been frustrated when slow service in a sea kayaking pub has delayed our departure and caused us to miss a tidal window. It's no fun battling through even a short tidal channel against the flow and you certainly don't want to hang around until the tide changes. Another scenario involved an attractive looking pub at the head of a sea loch with a narrow entrance out of which the ebb was pouring. We paddled like fury but got nowhere, we had missed the tide and were just about to miss closing time. What was required was a little lateral thinking.

Have you noticed how the capacity of rechargeable NIMH batteries has been creeping up?


Now imagine ten of these babies in series in a battery box snug in your day hatch. Yes that makes 27amp hours of juice! That's easily enough to kill a herd of elephants!! What would you do with that amount power? Play all 8000 songs on your iPod? Well more lateral thinking is required.


Rule have just released a 12v 5000 gallon per hour bilge pump. That's over 5 litres per second. Or put another way, 300kg of water shifted every minute. A plan was hatching. I took my ideas to Geoff Turner at Kari-Tek...


An intake was drilled in the cockpit floor behind the seat. Geoff made a moulding into which the pump fitted. The outlet hose runs back through the day hatch into a nicely faired tube at the front of a modified Hydro Skeg box. It points back... YES the Kaya-Jet was born!


Tony and I took a Kaya-Jet equipped Nordkapp LV to our favourite tidal playground in the Sound of Luing. At full spring ebb it just wasn't possible to paddle uphill against the tide. Tony tried about 6 times, I tried about 3 and we were both knackered.

Now the real test. Tony pressed the 25amp switch and whoosh, the kayak surged forward, he still paddled as hard as he could of course, but the difference was he was through the channel in less than 45 seconds, all together the pump had only run for just over 90 seconds! Success!


In further trials on the measured mile in the Clyde (note the white transit posts on the hill) we have found that the pump draws about 15 amps average over the mile. That means it will run for nearly 2 hours!

Geoff had also built in a slider into the moulding that the pump intake sits in. If you are out of the boat after a capsize, slide the slider to port. This closes the under hull intake and now the pump sucks from the cockpit. Renter roll and your boat is full of water but now you have the most powerful pump on the planet and it empties in a jiffy at the same time as supplying forward thrust! One caveat for gentlemen, I wouldn't risk firing up in pump mode if you are wearing only loose boxers. There's a lot of suction down there!

I know this is only a prototype and I have to declare a vested interest but, all the same, I award Kaya-Jet, this innovative new design, 10/10.

Already I can hear the howls of protest from the traditionalists, who chew their own catgut to stitch their skin boats together. I do not mind, sea kayaking is a broad church and I am certainly not a traditionalist!

Look out for Kaya-Jet in a kayaking store near you in about 18 months time. If you really can't wait that long, we have another prototype that need testing with a bigger pump and more batteries!

Sammy the Loch Moidart seal pup.

We spotted Sammy, a grey seal pup, through a gap in the skerries in Loch Moidart. Its mother was basking on a nearby rock. We did not speak and moved on silently, leaving them undisturbed.

Hundreds of thousands of other seal pups are not so fortunate. I have no doubt that my ancestors did this sort of thing on a small scale to survive. I also know that some of my ancestors were whalers. Again they did this to survive.

Part of the evolution of human society and the development of our humanity is surely to reach an awareness that the other animals that we share this Earth with should not be abused. We should respect them and if we do not need to slaughter them to survive we shouldn’t. Of course this seal cull is really just the tip of the shitty iceberg of the way in which our species treats this world and everything in it. What a far sighted lot we are.

Fortunately for Sammy, here in Scotland sealing and whaling are not seen as an essential part of our heritage and identity and, as such, there is no call for their continuance on cultural grounds. There is still a small number of hunters who shoot deer and birds for sport but perhaps not so many as in North America. Maybe there is a cultural difference and need in some parts of Canada but most photos of sealers I have seen are of people of European origin, many of them probably of Scottish decent. Does the economic survival of one of the wealthiest countries in the World really depend on this slaughter?

I am no vegan but I try to meat that has come from animals that have been well treated and humanely killed. I avoid 99p chickens!

Rolf has something to say as well.

10/10/2004

Two harbours Corrie, nor any drop to drink.

From Sannox we proceeded south along the east coast of Arran until we came upon the delightful hamlet of Corrie. Despite its diminutive size, Corrie boasts two harbours. We were by now exceedingly parched and Thirsty Tony suggested landing at the Corrie Hotel for a little liquid sustenance.


The landing on the rocky foreshore was not easy, the bay immediately below the hotel sported a large sewage pipe. We did not wish to discover if this was still a source of Clyde bananas so we moved further south.


Thirsty Tony strides purposefully towards the Corrie Hotel.

First impression was encouraging. The hotel is the largest building in the village and is solidly constructed from the local red sandstone. The door to the grand entrance portico squeaked loudly as we pushed it open. To the experienced reviewer, this did not seem like a potral that has recently been well excercised servicing the arrivals and departures of needy travellers. Inside was like the Marie Celeste, a dry, dusty glass stood alone in a corner. The bar looked as if it had been abandoned in a hurry, there were no bodies under the tables. A line from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner came to mind: "nor any drop to drink".

The late winter sun shown down through the windows. Motionless dusty sunbeams hung in the still cold air and nothing stirred to disturb the particles of dust.

"Hello" I croaked (I was thirsty after all).

"Anybody there?" added an equally hoarse Tony.

Somewhere deep in the bowels of the house another door creaked followed by a slight shuffling noise. After what seamed like an age, a delightful old lady appeared in her slippers with a woolen shawl tightly wrapped round her shoulders to ward off the chill. She looked at us expectantly.

"Is it possible to get a drink please?" asked Tony, pointing towards the empty bar.

She didn't seem to understand as she replied "They've all gone."

"Gone where?" I asked, sensing a mystery.

"For the winter." muttered Tony under his breath, which condensed in the cold air.

"Are you boys geologists?" she enquired.

"Actually we are sea kayakers." I replied before apologising for disturbing her afternoon and bidding her farewell.



Our visit was in the week before the Easter weekend, we thought a tourist business would be delighted to see our custom after a long winter. However, we were not seen as the first swallows of spring. We left the premises as dry as we had arrived. This, it has to be said was a first for the staff of seakayakphoto.com. Tony and I are generous in our assessments of sea kayaking hostelries but on this occasion, I am afraid we have to award this establishment 0/10. That's right, nul point.

If you visit in the summer you may well find this to be a welcoming establishment with its taps running free and its glasses overflowing with refreshing liquids but we cannot recommend it for a winter refreshment.

We do however, plan to return...

18/03/2008

The heather on fire in an empty land.

Leaving Garroch Head it was an 11km crossing to Glen Sannox at the north east end of Arran. During the crossing we had the ebb tide running to the SE out of the Sound of Bute and a wind that increased to force 4 from the NW. We had to use quite a high ferry angle to counteract the effects of wind and tide.


At last we approached the bay at the mouth of the glen. We felt dwarfed by the mountains of Cir Mhor and Caisteal Abhail with its serrated ridge, Ceum na Caillich (the old woman's step). Glen Sannox has been populated for thousands of years. There are standing stones and an Iron Age fort but the saddest signs of past habitation are the outlines of once fertile runrigs (small raised fields) and the stones of flattend cottages.


The Vikings called the great sweep of golden sand "Sand-vik" (sandy bay) which was corrupted to the present day Sannox. This was once the most populous part of Arran but in 1832 the Duke of Hamilton cleared the crofters off the land of the Glen. Half a century later, a poet, Mathilde Blind, visited Arran and wrote this:

I stood on the site of such a ruined village. All that remained of the once flourishing community was a solitary old Scotchwoman, who well remembered her banished countrymen. Her simple story had a thrilling pathos, told as it was on the melancholy slopes of the North Glen Sannox, looking across to the wild broken mountain ridges called "The Old Wife's Steps." Here, she said, and as far as one could see, had dwelt the Glen Sannox people, the largest population then collected in any one spot of the island, and evicted by the Duke of Hamilton in the year 1832. The lives of these crofters became an idyll in her mouth. She dwelt proudly on their patient labour, their simple joys, and the kind, helpful ways of them; and her brown eyes filled with tears as she recalled the day of their expulsion, when the people gathered from all parts of the island to see the last of the Glen Sannox folk ere they went on board the brig that was bound for New Brunswick, in Canada. "Ah, it was a sore day that," she sighed, "when the old people cast themselves down on the seashore and wept."

Mathilde Blind went on to write a poem about the Clearances called "The Heather on Fire".

From 1840 to 1862 the Duke ran a baryte (barium sulphate) mine in the glen. It reopened in 1919 and a wooden pier was built on the sands with a light railway connecting it to the mine. The mine closed in 1938 and the pier and the railway were removed in the late 1940s. You can still see the bases of the pier columns in the sands.

18/03/2008

Porpoises of Garroch Head

We drifted in the ebb tide past Garroch Head at the south end of Bute. We were in the lee of the rocks and the water was near glassy.


All of a sudden a school of porpoises appeared, rolling in the current. I have often seen them here and in similar tidal flows off the west coast of Scotland. In the distance you can see Holy Island with Ailsa Craig beyond.