600 mile drive for a game of Polo!!!???

Trips away to compete in Scottish Canoe polo division 1 can be quite an epic journey. It is possible to leave on the early ferry Sunday morning and do the 300 mile trip arriving for the 4.30 start. This is asuming there is no delay on the way!

Personaly Iam not a fan of tight scheduals so we tend to leave a day or two early and use the time for some more fun!!

Me and Adam left Saturday morning in Bananavan with 5 Polo boats on the roof and two play boats (and a drum kit) in the back destined to arrive in Stirling at night with running a river on the way.

Steve Mackinnon was meeting us in the small town of Alness just of the A9 with a couple of his friends, when I pulled up and saw that these 3 experianced river runners all had creek boats I felt the butterflies flutter a wee bit!

Alness is only paddleable in spate conditions and as Steve put it 'we must have sacrafised somone in Orkney to the apese the Snow melt god!!' she was running at a good level and was a lovely fast bouncy grade 2-3+ with a few river wide stoppers and pour overs..

Despite this only being Adams second river he nailed it with only one little mishap.. Not his fault though...

That was done and dusted in 45 minutes and we hit the road again not even 2 hours after we had pulled over.

sexy new blades!

The next day saw a trip to Brookbank so I could 'Look at' a sea paddle that I had been eyeing up on the Mitchell Blades website for a wee while now. After a painfull half hour of wanting it badly but knowing that the money would be bettter spent on boring things like bills ....I ended up buying it!

Polo was another hard graft and a couple of big defeats by two far stronger and better teams, followed by what was probably a fair 4-4 draw against the Scarlet ladys.

We then drove for 90 minutes to Pitlochry arriving just in time to catch the chipshop.

A loaded Bananavan

Monday morning and there was talks of surfing at Thurso before the ferry at night but we had 200 miles and boats to pick up from Glenmore lodge. By the time we had put 5 Polo boats, 3 river boats, 2 Open boats (one belonging to Mary S ) and a sea kayak on the the van roof we had run out of time for paddling! All in all we had a full weekend as it was.