This last section seemed to go on and on, with no end in sight, (but a couple more hallucinations, seeing trees reaching out to me from the banking). Then 200m further on I saw the next bridge and asked Allistair how many arches there were in this one. I asked him which arch, as I could see 2. A few miles into this Allistair told me to line up with the middle of the arch in the bridge ahead of me. We had our 5 th and final portage of the day.įrom here it was about 7 miles along the canal to the end. (It took me 20 minutes to work out that this was just tiredness.)Īs we reached the end of Lochy the light was getting dim, and I was struggling to see anything. It was probably just as well that we had that break, as I had already had my first hallucinations, (seeing lights flashing where there weren’t any), and I had been trying to battle my way through this weird dizzy spell. We did this for the next 2 and half hours, until daylight broke and we pulled in to Foyers to stretch our legs and take on some fuel. Everyone had some sort of lighting on their boards, and for the next 4 hours I tried to follow Allistair’s red tail lights.Īfter an hour of paddling in these very lumpy and windy conditions, we decided it would be safer to kneel down and paddle. In the pitch black, the only thing we could see was the bright lights of Dores off in the distance to our left. We had to go under a very low bridge, which forced us to lie flat on our boards, (which I remember), and just before hitting the loch we had our first portage, (which I don’t remember).Īs we entered Ness, the water started to get very lumpy. Tom Wakeford, a local SUPer, set up a dedicated Facebook page, and others also got involved to make it a real team effort.įor the next hour and a half we paddled along the canal towards Loch Ness. After some chat on social media, it was decided that the paddle would still go ahead, and Joanne Hamilton Vale, (one of the UK’s top race and ultra-long distance paddlers), and her husband Pete Vale, (both from UK SUP), picked up the reigns. There was a small group of stand-up paddle-boarders, including me, who had entered the race and were very sad to hear it had been cancelled. The “ UK SUP Great Glen Paddle Challenge” took place on the 15 th of October 2016, and was put together after the organisers of the Great Glen Paddle pulled the plug a month before it was due to take place, due to lack of numbers. Little did I know then that I would be back 2 years later, (almost to the day), and I’d be doing it in the opposite direction, non-stop. We did the paddle over 3 days in almost perfect conditions, no rain and the wind right behind us. In the October I took on my first big trip, paddling 57 miles, (92km), along the Caledonian Canal from Fort William to Inverness, with my great mate Carl Sawyer, who introduced me to SUP, and his brother Jason. I bought my first stand-up paddle-board in April 2014.
SUP – Great Glen Paddle Challenge – 2016 Inverness to Fort William, Scotland.
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