Dusting off my Orange bike I decided that since I remember it is all downhill to my archery night at Kirknewton and that Kim will pick me up later I shall go for a spin. Well it turned out remembering hills in a car and actually doing them on a bike are two very different things. The Lempitlaw hill is brilliant for cycling down – 31 miles per hour and a wee bit of braking before the junction and I was ready to cross the English border and hit my first bit of uphill getting into the right gear and peddling and puffing up it. My iphone Cyclemeter app was monitoring my progress as I decided to take a short detour and ended up more bloody hills as it was the wrong road, almost ran down a red squirrel, had a hawk swoop down for my bright yellow hat and a combine harvester taking all of the width of the C class road left me in the ditch. It was also getting worryingly dark – worrying as I wasn’t in Kirknewton and I didn’t have any lights whatsoever other than my bright yellow hat but finally cycled into Kirknewton towards the end of twilight to have bats flying around me.
This was all in training, as well as the nightly rowing machine, for the Fife Sea Kayak Club annual outing on Loch Lomond at night racing to find markers. Since I was going all the way over there I thought I would cross the loch from east to west at its widest point in the afternoon as a warm up. I set off with kayak strapped to roof and interiors filled with IKEA (International Kayak Expedition Association) blue bags full of food, camping equipment and kayaking apparel, to find a car tyre on my lane on the M8 swerved to avoid it and fortunately didn’t watching other cars do the same in my mirror – the problem of being in the slow lane of a motorway for once. Hopefully that was going to be my near miss for the day. Arrived in Drymen after a tortuous route without a satnav and into the Clachan Inn for Cod and Chips and Irn Bru – I would fart myself across the loch at least. Launched from Balmaha harbour onto a completely calm Loch and headed out following the island chain with a blue sky and a blinding sun ahead.
It turned out the tyre was not going to be my only near miss after all as two motorboats racing each other headed towards me, I paddled briskly out of their way and surfed the wake waves they generously gave out to find myself on a collision course with some tourist boat along the west bank. A bit of back paddling and not paddling and it was racing ahead and I carried on to the golf course on the loch, back paddling in the small surf waves to head back across the loch and to the campsite. I arrived around half past 5 and spent an hour carrying stuff form the kayak to my personal bit of Scotland where my tent was erected and filled with the contents of the boat. We then waited by the shore to watch paddlers arrive, for the night race, in the orange sunset. A Glaswegian family arrived on a motor launch had a fire on the beach then proceeded to set off a chinese lantern (crepe paper hot air balloon powered by an incendiary device) which is pretty for the first minute as it ascends and then is very worrying as it rocks from side to side hitting unstable air above a dry forest. We decided not to use it as a navigational aid at night.
We were allocated into teams – two of us having not night paddled before were led by Ian and Trish who had paddled in from their caravan at Milarrochy Bay and who had obviously done this sort of thing before. We attached our glow sticks (instructions were take from pack, break and shake, take an E tab and start dancing), donned head torches, marked up maps with the coordinates and launched into the darkness. My night sight was reasonable and there was a half moon peeking out from the clouds and our different colour glowsticks identified us.
