My first Blogg. Haven’t made many trips recently so trip down to the Garry was very welcome. So an early start was planned for Wednesday morning www.wheresthewater.com told me a release was planned. So typically on the Saturday before the car wiper blades packed in. A trip to the garage revealed that it would be at least Wednesday before they could get a new bit. Bugger!! A phone call to the garage in Inverness revealed they had parts in stock and would keep one for us on Wednesday. I managed to bodge a temporary repair with one wiper blade clearing most of the screen until then. Phew that’s means I can still get wet on Wednesday. Then on Tuesday night the brakes stuck on the car and boiled the fluid giving me a scary moment, again somethings trying to stop me getting wet on Wednesday. So on Tuesday evening both front calipers were stripped and cleaned lubricated and reassembled. Black hands and skinned knuckles reminded me of why I normally pay garages for this type of work!

Still the paddling was back on again. I had arranged to meet my paddling buddies just before the Dingwall round-about and leave the wife and kids to go to Inverness to pick up the wiper parts and go shopping for the day whilst we cut cross country to get to the river. What else can go wrong? Well nothing I hoped but our supposed short cut through Dingwall was a mistake as we got stuck at a roundabout for about half an hour due to road works.  At the river we changed quickly and walked up to the get in. Paddled to the play hole and Gavin went to have a play in the top hole. In he went and caught an edge straight away. A badly placed upstream high brace had him over and when he rolled up he was still in the hole with a missing blade that had just dropped off the end of his shaft. Over he went again not noticing the missing blade and rolled up again to see the blade float off downstream at this point he fell back over and popped his deck and swam. Its one of those days 5 minutes on the water and disaster struck! No spare paddle! So we decided to take turns running the river with one person left on the bank.

So after all that Mathew and Myself headed on down whilst Gavin waited on shore. We had a fairly quick run down the river that saw me vertically pinned between two rocks. What a day!!!!! Anyway after much pushing and shoving I was free and on we went. The drops appeared different from last time I had paddled here and it turns out that this was a small release. The stoppers were bouncy-er and the waves steeper which did not make it so friendly as it had been last year on the Andy Jackson memorial weekend. Luckily we manged a few more runs down without event well apart from me fluffing a roll and swimming out of the bottom hole.  A swim is quite normal for me and I must really work hard on my roll this year but a lack of time makes things quite hard. Any way fun was had and an eventful day was concluded so it was back to the sneck to meet my wife where I fitted a new wiper motor and mechanism in the Eastgate car park for the way home. Why is it when one plastic bush is knackered you have to spend £85 on the whole gubbins to fix it.