Sunday, May 27, 2012

Slalom in the sunshine

Today was one of the final canoe club trips of the academic year. But, unlike most club trips this one was happening on a gloriously hot and sunny day rather than the standard weather of cold, wet and windy.

Seven of us headed up to Grandtully to go on the section of the Tay there. We travelled quite a scenic route to get there at the behest of our SatNav (via Crief and Aberfeldy), but still got there with plenty of time to paddle. At this section of the Tay the Scottish Canoe Association has it's national slalom site, so there were easy parking facilities there. This river section has a short series of rapids (with slalom gates set up) followed by a long flat section, so we just stayed at the rapids and ran down them several times interspersed with a lunch break. There wasn't a huge amount of water, so the rapid weren't particularly big, but we were able to practice getting into eddies and play about a bit. We didn't attempt making the slalom gates though, although there were quite a lot of other paddlers on the river, so of who were slalom-ers. There was also a  group of rafts heading down the river.

It was nice to get off the river and be able to get changed in the sun and get kit mostly dried before packing it. We took a more direct route back home with a brief stop at a service station outside of Perth for an ice lolly.

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