A little otter

Tuesday 21st June 2011

I'm actually writing this a day late. Tuesday 21st June was such a long day that by the time I had a chance to do a blog I was too tired.

We woke up in a tent like an oven and got out at about 8.30am to find the sun blazing. There were a few clouds lurking but it looked like a nice day. We even put sun block on first thing, and I wore a vest top!

By the time we'd had breakfast and packed all our gear up, the clouds were looking a lot more threatening, so much so that we decided to put our waterproofs on as a precaution.

We had a look round the burial ground island, on which stood a creepy skeleton tomb, and a modest memorial to no other than Ronald Macdonald. We had some junk food in the form of a bag of crisps and a Rocky bar as our way of showing our respects, then went on our way.

It started raining soon after that. Not quite as badly as at Loch Lomond but when you're in an open boat in the middle of a loch it seems pretty wet.
The one thing I do like about the rain is that all the wildlife that lives nearby seems to come out. You get loads of swallows and martins swooping around catching flies and sometimes something even more exciting. More on this shortly.

We made it down to the bottom of the loch where the river starts. It was belting down with rain, just in time for lunch. We stopped under Shiel bridge, which was the only shelter for miles around, and had macaroni cheese and some sort of long life indestructible sausage thing. There was a cute fluffy grey bird which kept scuttling around but the lunch spot didn't seem to have a lot else going for it.
Just as we were about to leave, Claire spotted something splashing about in the water just downstream. It turned out to be an otter frolicking! I did think it was an anaconda for a moment but that was when I'd only seen the tail. We couldn't get any closer for fear of scaring it away and after a while it swam off.

We paddled back up the loch towards Glenfinnan, as per yesterday's agreed route. The rain was still bad, and we were now paddling into the wind which introduced a whole new level of wetness.
The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful, apart from running aground right in the middle of the loch. We had to use our paddles to push off the bottom, which almost ended in disaster when I let go of mine and it was left stuck in the mud, gradually sinking into the lake. We just about managed to retrieve it before it disappeared.

The last leg of the paddle was very tough going. As we rounded the corner after the burial island, the wind seemed to double in strength and we struggled to make any progress. I was quite scared.
We finally made it to land, and camped the same place as the previous night.
We were both exhausted, grumpy and somewhat tetchy. And of course cold and damp where the water had sneaked in around our sleeves and collars.
We managed to get The Tarp up, made more difficult by the fact that we ripped it and had to tape it up with duck tape. Claire pitched the tent and as she seemed slightly more wet and grumpy, I sent her inside the tent to make it all cosy while I stayed outside and sorted all our kit out.
The midges were like flying devils but our geeky head net hats worked a treat.

Two cups of tea, a Flake, and a tuna and pasta concoction later, we were feeling a lot better, inside the tent in our sleeping bags, listening to the wind and rain outside.


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Location:Loch Shiel