Tripping Skills : tales of a guinea-pig.

Had I really been doing this for the last 15 minutes, or was it really an hour? I was back-ferrying hard and the eddy I was headed to across the width of the chute was only coming closer very slowly. I couldn’t set any further across as the boat was fully laden and I’d just lose it downstream. And as I didn’t yet know what was round the bend the eddy was the place to go, but where was my bow paddler?? I eased back into the eddy some years later and stopped, gasping. A cheer broke out and I managed to look round. A group of people, the only folk we were to see that day, were perched on the far side. They’d been watching my obviously absolutely tremendous efforts. I hoped that they hadn’t been looking for me to take a spill and lose it, as that would have been uncharitable of them and seriously not nice for me and the folks with me. So I gave them a little regal bow and got a happy wave back.

This was a ‘tripping skills’ course, we were on the River Eden, and we were well into our third day. Add to that the fact that it was a beautiful river, the weather was perfect and the company excellent, and you’ll understand that we were having lots of fun!

Like a bunch of others, the previous autumn I’d been entrained as a guinea-pig in the pilot ‘tripping skills’ syllabus. This syllabus has been worked up within the OCA but with the BCU looking on. The intention is to complement the normal technical Star Awards syllabus, at 3 Star, 4 Star and 5 Star, with a package of training aimed specifically at the needs of long distance tripping in open canoes. Some of this is fairly obvious stuff and we’ve all been exposed to some of it, but not to the same degree: paddling skills on open and moving water in differing conditions of wind and grade, sailing, poling, snubbing, lining and tracking. But also elements of leadership, strategies for open and moving water, communications, expedition planning, navigation, and campcraft. I know what I want out of it: I want to be able to take my young family safely and enjoyably through wild places - and this is giving me the means to do so. I could have picked these sorts of skills up elsewhere I know, but in a less structured way and certainly at a much greater cost in terms of time and error.

Various folks have been involved in tutoring us ‘tripping skills’ but all have one thing in common and that is a lot of serious tripping experience, from the Nahanni and Back (Great Fish) Rivers in North America to the trips that are possible around the UK. We’ve been taught how to light fires with damp wood and very little kit, all the way through to running grade 2 and 3 white water with fully laden boats. Some of us found that we had to spend a bit more time trying to get ourselves sorted out with unladen boats on white water but it was well worth it. And one surprise was discovering that a fully laden boat could punch through things that would flick an unladen boat aside! If you want to build confidence in going out there and staying out there this is certainly a good way to do it.

But to return to the Eden trip:

We had started at Ullswater at the edge of the Lake Disrtict, and at first it hadn’t started so well. A few of us had agreed to spend some time playing on the lake getting used to open water. I got there at about 9 in the evening. It was pitch black, the rain was coming in sidewise and like like stair-rods; it was blowing a full gale. I didn’t know it at the time but on the way in I passed a couple of canoe laden cars huddling behind a pub in the village - and seeing me pass they thought they’d better join me. I’d have stayed in that pub too if I’d seen them! Hard men, the lot of us.

We got to the campiste and, I kid you not, breakers were coming across the shore onto the site itself. The flat area of the site was awash with standing water and the waves coming ashore were a bit too close, so we formed our cars in a line across the bottom of a small rise and set to making camp on the slope. I’d brought a big tunnel tent with me but I’d never put it up in conditions like that. Despite being Berghaused from head to toe I was completely sopping wet long before I got the thing up. Once inside it was a rough night - not so much because of the waves breaking, wind and relentless piling rain outside but because I hadn’t yet gotten the measure of the tent. By morning it had proved to be absolutely rock solid but that didn’t stop me worrying over it as the night went on - I ‘d asked of myself time after time “has that peg come out the ground a little or not?”

Morning dawned bright with an innocently clear sky, moderate breeze, and wonderful view up the full ength of the lake. The contrast with the night before was staggering. After rediscovering each other and actually working out who we’d been stumbling around with the previous night, we had a very liesurely breakfast and thought about the lake in front of us. It took a while to get going but eventually we went off to play, going backwards and forwards across and around the lake in an increasingly stiff breeze. Later in the day we were doing slightly daft things like tying a kite off to the bow of one canoe and trying to use tarps to get some shelter for the evening ahead: this didn’t work very well!

That evening the rest of the party turned up. Serious eating before a very much better nights sleep, but not before a little discussion as, although most of us were almost completely ignorant of the river ahead, we knew it was now running quite high.

The following morning we trotted down to the exit from the lake, the mouth of the River Eamon, to see what it was like. It was high and moving like a steam-train but, we thought, not in any way problematic so long as we watched out for any trees that might have come down over the last day or so. A red squirrel disappeared from one end of the bridge just as another appeared at t’other - quite special.

So we loaded up our canoes with all of our kit. Some of us weren’t packing as light as others and I wasn’t the only one to do a comprehensive rethink before we left. The canoes were by now largely outfitted with tag lines and bungee cord threading through a line under the length of the gun’ls added to the bouyancy bags, throw bags and so on - and we all had hard hats. Everything was packed in drums or waterproof sacks and stowed - we hoped correctly! One of the things that we’d already learned was that the answer to most problems we had were “trim!”, “trim!”, “trim!”, or “slow it down!” At first that morning, trying to get up any speed at all was the hard bit. Eventually we got ourselves to the mouth of the river, agreed how to travel down it, and off we went. The ‘steam train’ bit was right enough and the river stayed this way, with a fairly even flow, for the rest of the day. There was the occasional grade 2 or 3 section or strainer to keep busy. We had one particularly evil Horseshoe wier to portage around but that was all. Everybody ganged up to do this and we got round the hazard quickly.

The odd thing about this River Eamon on this stretch is that its one of those which seems to run an almost unnatural line across the landscape, all of it downhill. You can be paddling along looking at a steady and very real slope downstream ahead of you, but then look off to one side where the land appears to be falling off very much more steeply. Why doesn’t the river go down that-a-way instead? It felt like being in a high speed canal - but there were no obvious signs of the river being engineered - its just the way it went.

We joined the Eden - a quite different river. For a while it meandered across a wide valley bound by steep cliffs which it had obviously cut. The boats behaved wierdly catching lateral undercurrents on the bends that wouldn’t have been noticed if unladen. We eventually arrived at our chosen campsite and sorted ourselves out. It was a crystal clear night with no moon and we spotted both polar and equitorial satellites, a few metors, and a really spectacular display when something suddenly rushed across a bit of the sky with a bow-like wave in front and a comet-like tail behind. It was time to go to bed.

The last day of the trip found us running down through the classic white water sections of the Eden. The gorge itself was delightful, running through a well managed estate with curious
riverside follies and carvings. There were a good number of biggish rapids, one being portaged by several of us, who gave cover to those running through. It was impressive to see how these laded boats carved their way through rough stuff - it was also far less hard work than carting all our stuff along the bank.

We got to the take-out and sorted out cars. For many of us it had been the first time ever we’d taken fully laden boats down a stretch of river like that - so we were tired but well pleased.

Colin Taylor