Thanks for the emails from the people who were concerned that I hadn’t made it back from our epic across Scotland Canoe Trip! I’ve been trying to create a Scrapblog of the trip, but I can’t seem to get he photos to up-load to the Scrapblog site. I guess I’ll need to ask Stuart or one of the other Scrapblog experts about this.
Anyway, we has a really good trip and in the end it took us
6 days to get from Kinlochleven to Perth.
The total journey was about 152 km and during this time we carried the canoes,
dragged the canoes, paddled the canoes, sailed the canoes, poled the canoes,
tracked the canoes and lined the canoes over some pretty challenging terrain. The
highlight for me was the canoe sailing using our improvised rigs on some of the
big lochs including Loch Tummel – where the wind was at about the edge of our
comfort zone.
The trip was a major expedition and anyone interested in repeating the journey should get in touch.
I have imported some of my photos into splashr above. If you use Flickr and you have not had a play around with splashr yet, its well worth a look.
UPDATE: Stuart Meldrum has produced a nice tutoral on how to use scrapblog!
Glad you like it!
Posted by: Stuart Meldrum | April 21, 2007 at 02:30 PM
Some nice pictures. :) But dragging those canoes looks like too much work for me! That's why I stick to packrafts and lightweight gear... Of course for others to learn from our lightweight approach, I should get around to putting things in metric units. Just realizing my whole page is in our backwards American pounds and ounces...
-Erin
Posted by: Erin McKittrick | April 22, 2007 at 08:30 PM
Hi Erin, I could certainly learn a lot from your light weight approach. I loved the way that you turned your ther-a-rests into life vests! OB
Posted by: OllieBray | April 23, 2007 at 07:40 PM
Like the info you've produced Ollie. Planning to do this trip as a first dip into the open boating scene, to see if I'm capable any more!!! Long time since I've done the wild thing.
Posted by: Ray Cassidy | April 04, 2009 at 12:21 AM
Good luck Ray - I wouldn't try this particular trip for your first re-visit to the open boating scene! Email me if you need any more info. OB
Posted by: OllieBray | April 04, 2009 at 10:48 AM
Just turned up the comment I posted so long ago ...
We did the trip but only got as far as Pitlochry in the 4 days that we ended up with. Brow beaten by time issues and a sickness bug.
We had exceptionally low water, so a lot of the river part was arctic sledge hauling. The lower gorge of the Tummel was a bit of an eye opener. We managed to paddle quite a bit of the gorge, but obviously enough not the big drop offs.
It would be fair to say it's the physically hardest thing I've ever done. A bit more water would have made a huge difference.
The bonus for me is that I now know the difference between goon and J. A bit of final day revelation when I was getting totally exhausted. And the difference between basic and a good stiff quality paddle was amazing.
I even got round to posting half the account on one of my websites http://www.stanwix.info/110-Back-From-the-Crossing-of-Scotland.html . See main link for the blog post.
Posted by: Ray Cassidy | September 01, 2009 at 12:00 AM
Hi Reay, Great to hear from you and at least I know now that you got back alive! It is a very hard trip.
We did another variation the year after: http://olliebray.typepad.com/olliebraycom/2008/02/across-scotland.html
Happy paddleing!
OB
Posted by: OllieBray | September 01, 2009 at 08:20 AM