It's behind you, on the Clyde

In Scotland the snow tends to arrive with the Pantomime season.  It was quite cold when Tony, Alan and I arrived at Largs marina on the Firth of Clyde. I didn't dare take the short road over the hills, I took the long way round by Kilmarnock, Irvine and Ardrossan. In the distance, the mountains of Arran rose above Great Cumbrae island.
  

 The "pencil" celebrates the Battle of Largs in 1263. This conflict was between the Vikings and the Scots. The outcome was not clear cut but ultimately led to the withdrawal of the Vikings from Scotland.

We warmed up once on the water. We didn't cross the path of the MV Loch Shira ferry, as it steams back and forth across the channel to Great Cumbrae quite a bit faster than...

...we could paddle. She was built at the Ferguson yard just up the Clyde at Port Glasgow and entered service in 2007. As it was early there were few passengers the ferry had a fast turn around...

...err, Alan, perhaps you should be looking the other way. As they say in all the best pantos, "It's behind you!"

Five fingers and a long way to fish in Loch Linnhe.

 The sun set long before we reached our shuttle car, which we had left just north of the Corran narrows on Loch Linnhe.

Looking back up the loch we got a fantastic view of Ben Nevis. Just below the summit you can see the infamous five finger gully which traps the unwary on their descent of the Ben.

An Irish trawler, W297 Caronia II, registered in Waterford, passed us as she was making her way up the loch. She was heading for Corpach pier where she would tie up and spend the night before entering the Caledonian canal the next day. She was bound for the fishing grounds in the North Sea. At this point she was already 600km from Waterford and still had a long way to go. I hope her long trip was worth it but it makes you wonder, have her home waters been cleaned out of fish? It makes you appreciate where your fish fingers come from.

Night was falling as we approached Corran narrows and its lighthouse. From NE to SW the light flashes green, once every 4 seconds.

Finally, our day on the water was over but we still had a 42 mile round trip to recover the other shuttle car at Loch Eil head. We were well satisfied, we had come to photograph the Ben from the water in winter and had succeeded. Given it spends 80% of the time under cloud, we thought we were very lucky.

Sea kayaking desktop wallpaper calendar, December 2010.

December, resting at Rainbow Rock, Rhins of Galloway, after an exciting trip round the Mull!

The seakayakphoto.com December desktop wallpaper calendar (in a variety of screen resolutions) is available for download here.

We paddled off into the sunset in Loch Linnhe.

The River Lochy discharged us into Loch Linnhe, which stretched away to the SW and the distant Corran Narrows.

We soon came to Fort William, Scotland's outdoor capital. The town is not just a tourist centre it is also an unpretentious working place and so is not, perhaps, one of the most scenic of coastal towns.  It is hemmed in to a narrow ribbon of land by Loch Linnhe on one side and Ben Nevis on the other. The only space to build the town bypass was along the shore, the town shows its "derrière à la mer" as they say further south. To be fair, when they built the bypass, they did not demolish a curving street of "but and bens", nestling round a silver strand with peat smoke curling into the still highland air from their lums. Rather the bypass was built where the railway used to run! Neither is the town pier a tourist attraction. There was no funfair at the end of this long pier, only some heavy barges.

We left Fort William and set off down Loch Linnhe...

...it was a glorious winter evening as we...

...paddled off into the sunset.

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.

Better days in Corpach.

Arriving in Loch Linnhe we almost immediately came to a large pier that runs for nearly 500m out to the deep water channel. It was built to service a large wood pulp mill which operated her from the 1960's until it closed in 1980. At its peak 900 people worked there. There is still a paper mill and a saw mill on the site.

Fort William and Corpach have reinvented themselves as the UK's outdoor capital and each year more people are drawn to the area for its skiing, snowboarding, winter and rock climbing, white water and sea kayaking, mountain biking, sailing etc. However it is not just adventure seekers, cruise ships now come and tie up at Corpach pier. This year, 16th May, the cruise liner MV Spirit of Adventure was given a little assistance to manoeuvre to the pier...

..by the diminutive but shipshape local tug, the Fiona.

Other boats were less shipshape, though there was hope for this old fishing boat as she was tied up at the local boat yard pier.

Sadly this old barge had seen better days. Her rusting plates seemed to blend into the russets of the landscape and the sea weed.