29th April 2021 #3 Skyfall and rainfall in Loch Hourn.

 

As we paddled east along the south shore of Loch Hourn the mountains closed round us.

Loch Hourn is a flooded U shaped glaciated valley and in some places the mountains fall straight into the sea as here at Creag an t-Sagairt (roughly translates as pulpit rock).

On the north side of the loch, Arnisdale House was dwarfed by the foothills of Beinn Sgritheall. This was the inspiration for James Bond's ancestral home "Skyfall". It was built by Valentine Fleming, the father of Ian Fleming who wrote the James Bond books. Valentine's father was Robert Fleming who founded the eponymous investment bank. The family were not short of an odd bob (or odd job) or two.

All was deceptively quiet as we passed Eilean a' Phiobaire (Piper's Isle) but a storm was gathering. 

Within seconds the sky started to fall round our heads. The temperature plummeted as violent squalls of wind, rain, hail and sleet swept down from the high corries. We were in for a pasting.

28th April 2021 #2 Sunshine and sleet on the Sound of Sleat.

It has been a cold start to the year and the NE wind brought a series of Arctic squalls to the Sound of Sleat. These brought a bonus of dramatic lighting conditions though trying to erect our tents on the exposed reef took a bit of care in the accompanying wind.

Fortunately the worst of the squalls seemed to pass and we got our camp in order.

As the tide was still low...

...we wasted no time in gathering driftwood for a fire on the sands. We kept our kayaking gear on as the sun did not look like it would last long.

Then the skies darkened with the approach of yet another squall. We rushed to our tents and were deafened by alternate lashings of rain and sleet on the thin tent walls.

As the storm passed, on its way into Loch Hourn, we emerged from our tents into the watery evening sunlight.

Graceful rainbows arched over the still dark mountains, which had a dusting of fresh snow  on their summits.

Hardy primroses seemed undeterred by the weather and neither were we.

We set to and got the fire going as we swapped yarns and...

...finished our meal.

A watery sunset slipped away on the far side of the Sound of Sleat before another squall put an end to our evening by the fire.

The approaching storm...

The N wind had dropped completely by the time I arrived at the seaward side of Ardwall Isle. Looking back into Fleet Bay...

 ...dark storm clouds were gathering above the Galloway Hills.

Out on the reefs on the SW side of Barlocco Isle the sun was still shining but a SW wind was picking up...

 ...as I rounded the isle and caught sight of Ringdoo Point.

The storm clouds were now rapidly moving across the sky.

I was now in the lee of Barlocco, so I hoisted my sail and got ready for a fast ride...

Clyde built: tough ships, tough people.

From Dumbarton we set off on the final leg of our Clyde paddle to Port Glasgow in a snow storm. At times the snow was falling so heavily that there was near zero visibility and we lost sight of the channel markers, even though they were only 600m apart. We were rather anxious not to be run over by a ship in the night, so we navigated by keeping to the north of the channel markers, then crossed the channel at right angles, before continuing well to the south of the channel markers.

As we approached Port Glasgow, we passed row after row of black stakes sticking up out of the mud flats. You can just see them along the snowy beach behind Phil. These were the "timber ponds", which stored green timber until it was seasoned for the ship building trade. They were constructed in the early 18th century as timber began to be imported from Europe and North America. The ponds reached their peak, importing 28,000 tons per year in the 1830's but began to decline with the import of pre-seasoned timber and increasing use of steel in shipbuilding. Use of the ponds finally ceased by the outbreak of WW1 in 1914.

As darkness fell, we were nearly back at Port Glasgow. The Ferguson shipyard crane above Newark castle acted as our guide. Just to the left of the green navigation light, through the gathering gloom, you can just make out the last of the Clyde's four surviving Titan cranes. It stands 3.5km to our west at Greenock's James Watt dock. It was built by Sir William Arrol in 1917. The dock is named after a Greenock man, James Watt 1736-1819, who made the steam engine practical and economic by inventing a separate condenser. This meant that the cylinder did not need to be wastefully heated and cooled with each piston stroke.

Either an eddy or an early flood tide was sweeping through the pillars of Lamont's pier at Newark. Jim went through first but crossbeams were just under the surface and he was caught fast, rocking on his Sea King's V bottom. Much bracing and reversing saw him extricated from the pier.

We landed beneath the walls of Newark castle. Parts date from 1458 and were built by George Maxwell. The castle was built here to control the highest point of navigation on the Clyde. Prior to the river being dredged, all goods bound for Glasgow needed to be off loaded here. Until recently the castle was hidden away between two shipyards, Ferguson's to the west, which is still there and another huge yard, Lamont's, to the east. When I first visited Newark Castle in 1972, we had to walk down a long, narrow close between two high ship yard sheds. The joke at the time was "only in Port Glasgow could they build a castle in such a well hidden spot"! Lamont's built several CalMac ferries, including the MV Jupiter in 1973. She plies the nearby Gourock/Dunoon route to this day. Lamont's built their final ship in 1978. The yard was then cleared in the 1980's and east half of the castle reemerged into a post industrial dawn.

We emerged from the kayaks in a frozen state, our dry suits were stiff as boards. We had landed on the old slipway of the Lamont's shipyard. In the distance, behind the castle, the crane and lights mark Ferguson's shipyard, which is the last surviving yard on the lower Clyde. Most of the current CalMac fleet (even the larger ships such as MV Isle of Lewis 101m, 1995 and MV Hebrides 99m, 2000) were built at Ferguson's). The "tower block" to the right of the castle is actually Ferguson's most recent construction, a huge barge, the ASV Pioneer, which is an accommodation and service vessel for the oil industry.

The steel hulled sailing vessel Glenlee, which we saw higher up the Clyde, was also built in Port Glasgow, in 1896 at the the Anderson Rodger and Co Yard.

In 1812 Henry Bell chose to have his paddle steamer Comet built in Port Glagow, at the yard of John Wood in Shore Street (a little to the west of Ferguson's Yard). Comet was a wooden steam paddle passenger steamer. She served on the Clyde and on the Glasgow/Fort William runs. In 1820 she was shipwrecked after being caaught in the Dorus Mor tiderace and dashed onto the rocks of Craignish Point. Wood's yard later became Lithgow's East yard, which closed in 1972. In 1962 the apprentices at Lithgow's built a full sized replica of the Comet, which is on permanent display in the centre of Port Glasgow. The site of Wood's/Lithgow's yard is now a Tesco supermarket, which says a great deal about the British economy.

Lamont's slipway has seen countless ships trundle  down into the sea to commence their voyaging. This night it was treacherously slippy as we ended our voyage and I was very grateful for Phil and Jim's help to get my kayak up to the cars.

It was so cold we could hardly feel our fingers doing up the straps on the roof racks.

It was strange to reflect upon how much I had discovered about my home city by sea kayak! We passed within 10km of my house, within 300m of my workplace and within 1.3km of Jim's house and right by several yards where Jim has worked!

On the other hand, the river had made Glasgow and allowed her to develop as a maritime trading city and centre for ship building. Perhaps then, a sea kayak is the very best way to discover a city like Glasgow! We were passing through the Clyde in a period of post industrial change. Yes there were still areas of industrial wasteland but these were outnumbered by those areas of regeneration with new financial, media, educational, hospital, retail, recreational and residential buildings. It was nice to see the preservation of some of the industrial machinery such as the Clydebank Titan crane and I am sure the new Transport Museum will be superb. I sincerely hope the three surviving shipyards are enough to remind a post industrial city of shoppers that their city was once a cradle of the Industrial Revolution and of the significance of the words "Clyde built".

As a postscript, many friends have asked "what about the water quality"? Well the water was fine. We found seals, herons and cormorants right in the heart of Glasgow. In the whole length of the Clyde, we only saw a few pieces of plastic rubbish. I have seen much more on a single small beach on Skye. We didn't even have a brown ring round our hulls, which you can still get in some apparently remote highland lochs where the villages have inadequate sewage treatment.

The last few photos were taken handheld long after sunset and in freezing conditions, they are included just to portray the atmosphere of a cold night on the Clyde, they are a bit shakey!

Of time and tide at the Falls of Lora

We drifted under the bridge at the the Connel Narrows on Loch Etive at 5km/hr.


It was 16:13, two hours before the start of the ebb.


It was a neap tide and despite the current, it was like a millpond over the shelf of the Falls of Lora.


At a spring tide on the flood we might have expected some decent standing waves here. On the ebb on a spring tide, the Falls can be very spectacular as Loch Etive drains into the sea over a rock shelf.


We were now being carried into the inner part of Loch Etive and the horizon ahead became closed in by the mountains.


Watching the bridge, we drifted backwards in the current for some way...


...until the bridge became obscured by a bend in the loch.


I am not the only member of my family to have enjoyed this view from a small boat. This photo was taken in July 1927 by my great grandfather, who explored many of the west coast lochs and islands by rowing boat. The view has hardly changed at all, despite the passage of 83 years.


This photo shows the Falls of Lora on the ebb tide, 2 days after springs at 12:08, when the best waves were predicted to form between 11:09 and 12:56.


Photo copyright Simon Willis www.seakayakroutes.com

This photo, by my friend Simon, was taken from a platform under the bridge at the 2006 Storm Gathering. It is one day before springs, on the ebb and shows the Falls in an altogether different light.

Its amazing the difference a few hours can make, if not 83 years!

The amusing story of the novelist and the lost cave of Knockbrex

I paddled across Fleet Bay and took a break at the sandy cove of Knockbrex. Not far from the beach is a fine large mansion which was built by a Manchester businessman Mr James Brown in 1895. It was built on the site of an older mansion, which was part of the Selkirk estate but Knockbrex dates back to at least the 1650's when it belonged to the Gordon family.


The Scottish novelist, Lucy Bethia Walford (1845-1919), lived here for three years when her father took a tenancy from the Selkirks. She described Knockbrex (which was one of the the finest mansions in these parts): "though unpretending, was very much the kind of house we liked. Every window had a view : on the one hand, of a wild and storm-beaten district, wooded after a fashion on the hillsides, with the hills rising into mountains beyond ; while on the other was the famed Solway Firth, across which we could at times distinguish on the far horizon the faint outlines of the Isle of Man."


She and her brothers had "arrived at Knockbrex full of the wonders of a sea cave containing fossil remains said to be of great antiquity, of which he had heard as being in the neighbourhood." Despite much searching, she never discovered it. In her book, Recollections of a Scottish Novelist (1910), she recounts an amusing (though a century has not been kind to the humour) story of how she attempted to find it.


She and her family were all dressed in their finery on their way to a gala when they heard they were passing the house of the elderly man who owned the cave and looked after the fossils. There was a large number of carriages outside the man's house and they thought the fossil museum must be very popular. The house was crowded with men in black clothes and she thought they must be a gathering of ministers, though some looked very young. She became annoyed when her requests to be taken to the owner of the cave were ignored. Finally a young man ushered her in to a darkened room and said "This is the owner of the cave!"

The man was dressed in his Sunday best but was clearly well past his own best as he lay quite dead in his coffin. She recounts "We fled indignantly and precipitately ; nor did we once give way to mirth till far away and out of sight. But we never saw the cave, then or thereafter."

Well Lucy sounds very much like the kind of gal that describes a mansion as "unpretending"!

I have been visiting the Knockbrex shore regularly over the last 40 years and I have never found the cave either. It was a quite lovely afternoon so I decided to take another look for the wondrous cave....

09/06/2009

Storm clouds lift over Portuairk, Ardnamurchan

After the apparent calm of the open crossing it was good to be paddling along a shore again but it was surprising how much swell there actually was.


Soon we entered the long channel to the sheltered anchorage of Portuairk. Dark clouds were gathering overhead.


We waited for a downpour as we made our way through the moored fishing boats.


We arrived just after high water so there was not too much of a carry. I limped up to the grass and cracked open a Guinness as I watched the ground support team carry the boats up to the road. The storm clouds lifted and the sun came out giving a marvelous view of Muck, Rum and distant Canna. We enjoyed a leisurely lunch and felt very satisfied at the completion of a fantastic trip despite the problems caused by injury.

15/06/2009

Stornoway lifeboat is in good hands.

Murdo (Murdy) Campbell is not only a member of Stornoway Canoe Club, renowned for his unsupported open crossings to Hebridean outliers such as Sula Sgeir and North Rona, he is also cox of the Stornoway lifeboat. He and his stalwart crew brave some of the most extreme conditions in UK waters to rescue mariners in distress.


At the Stornoway Storm Gathering it was an honour to paddle with Murdy and a pleasure to watch him calmly manoeuvre his Nordkapp HM through the gnarliest white stuff, laced with rock, at the mouth of Loch Roag.


He has a modest, unassuming manner which belies his achievements but which inspires great confidence in those around him. His reputation has even spread to distant seas.


If I needed to be rescued I cannot think of a more welcome sight than to see the likes of Murdy and his crew. As a seafaring group, we sea kayakers should be grateful for and support the charitable work of the RNLI. (Photo by Clark Fenton.)