Canoe, for a change.

My friend Ray has a couple of open canoes so he offered to leand one to me. One is a Charles River which whilst being a really good canoe is 35kg a bit much for one man with a dodgy back. The other is an Old Town Pack which is only 14.5kg, the plastic is a bit thin so I don't know how much ware it would take. Yesterday I took it out for a spin on Loch Chon.


Failing to set the self-timer on my camera.

Tea Break on the banks of Loch Chon.

At the put in already to go.

The Old Town Pack really is a light boat, even lighter than some river kayaks and quite a bit lighter than my sea kayak.

Ray also lent me some of his paddles to try, the one on the left is a Redtail the other three hand made. The two on the right were a bit short for me the other two were better my favourite was the one on the right.

It was quite gusty with winds upto force 3 or 4 at times, I found paddling into the wind quite a struggle. Because you only have one blade you have to use a J-stroke. Where the end of each stroke becomes a ruddering action to counter the tendency of the canoe to turn away from the paddle. This I found tended to slow you down just when you wanted to put the power on to push into the wind. Maybe its just because I not very good at the J-stroke; practice makes perfect I gust. Anyway I had a good half day out.