A Couple of Days at the Lemon

We spent a couple of days this week down on the lower section of the river staying on an island in the middle of the river called the Hairy Lemon. It's a lovely relaxing spot just a short paddle from the Nile Special rapid which has the world reknowned Nile Special playwave as well as some less well known but equaly good features. We were doing two paddling sessions a day up there. In the morning we'd hit the club wave just after breakfast for a few hours, break for lunch and then wait in the shade while the midday heat passed and the water levels came up to make Nile Special work.

Getting onto the Special is something of a black art in itself, unless the water levels are quite high you have to be towed onto the wave using a rope and getting the knack of towing on while paddling with one hand and staying upright on such a big bouncy wave is quite tricky. That said once you're on there it's worth the effort. The wave is incredibly fast, and equally big. The end result being a lot of airtime as your boat planes and starts to bounce, a LOT. It was a really good couple of days for me up there and while I fell off the rope and had to battle the wave train more times than I can count, I managed to pull off a few blunts on Special and land a loop on the Club wave. It just goes to show, with the right feature, even I can manage some of these moves.

We're back at the NRE again now, it's a better place to pick up a gang to go running the river with instead of just hitting up the play spots. I ran the Brickyard rapid with a French guy called Ollie the evening before we left for the Lemon. It's a great little run, but difficult to get a look at without getting very close. So having run one of the back channels the plan for the next couple of days is to get a few more done as well as trying to run Silverback clean before we leave (I was counted at 6 rolls on my last run down it). This afternoon's project is to run Kalagala, which is a very visually impressive drop with a really nasty hole on one side. But the line itself is wide and clean so technically it's not very demanding, there's only one move to make, you just have to make it.

Paddling Update

We've managed to run the whole of the main whitewater sections of the White Nile over the last few days. Yesterday we took out above Itanda to meet our shuttle and scout the rapid. It's massive, but the line is definitely possible. But I'm going to wait a while before I consider running it. We did a run from the campsite down to Silverback this morning which could have gone better. Enda had a swim just above Bujagali Falls and despite my best efforts to get him or some of his gear to an eddy he ended up swimming right over the centre line nearly taking me with him. I managed to get myself over to run a different line (so as not to drop in on top of him) and we met up in the pool below. He's got a few bumps and scrapes but I think his confidence is more damaged than the rest of him is at the moment. He lost his paddle somewhere in one of the holes that he was stuck in. So he's been talking to the locals offering a reward for its return.

Enda walked off the run at that point and the rest of us went on. The run went fine for me with nothing more than the usual surprises, a whirpool opening up underneath me in the middle of a rapid, and then getting thrown completely airborne on Silverback itself. I'd heard stories of the waves doing that but it's difficult to imagine it happening until it happens to you. I was only sorry i didn't have the helmet camera on for that. So while Enda was being looked over by our new friend Pierre, who's a trauma surgeon from London paddling here for a few weeks, I set to work mounting the camera on my lid and securing it with a mess of cable ties. So now I'm off to round up a gang to go run that section again and get some footage.

Hello Mzungu!

I tried to post this 2 days ago but the internet connection here is so slow and so sporadic that I couldn't.

So I've arrived safely and have had a couple of days on the river already.
Things didn't quite go to plan today when our lunches for the trip didn't
arrive till it was too late to do the run. This is how things work out here
it seems. The internet connection avaiable is sporadic at best, and
sometimes there's just no power.

We're staying at NRE for now while we're getting our bearings. It's a bit of
a dump at first but the place grows on you. The atmosphere is great, very
friendly and very relaxed. We'll probably move down to the Hairy Lemon next
week for a while.

On the water things have been going great. The water is incredibly high
volume out here, unlike nothing I've ever seen. It's really made me adjust
theway I paddle. Eddies are not somewhere you want to be on this river,
they're surging and boiling and will throw you about almost as much as the
rapid itself, and because there's so much water in them it's very difficult
to get out of them and back into the flow. So the end result is that you
just have to keep paddling hard and keep dodging the holes. the holes have
to be seen to be believed though. We were given a line to run yesterday
where we had to "dodge right of a bit of a hole" at one point. I was
wondering going into the rapid would it be easy to spot, and true enough it
was. As I was cresting the wave upstream of it all I could see was a hole
about the size of a minibus munching away after the nest wave. It was an
easy move to make to miss it but I'm wondering what a big hole looks like
out here if that was just a bit of one.

Off the water the locals are really great. They're very friendly and
everywhere you go there are kids waving at you shouting "hello mzungu!" (the
only English most of them have) and holding their hand out looking for some
money. Mzungu is the Swahili word for a white man I've learned, and the
locals insist that it is no way derogarory. It really is amazing how little
these people have, and how much they do with what they have got. They're
very resourceful and if they don't have anything they'll promise you the
world they can get it for you if you can throw them a few shillings.

Helmet camera has arrived and packing started

To my relief I arrived into work this morning to an email from the post room telling me a parcel had arrived for me. As expected it was my helmet mounted video camera. Many thanks to Doug Low, the eBay seller who rushed my camera to the post office so it would get to me in time.

A quick dunk in the sink has proved that the headcam *is* in fact waterproof, but the internal memory will only record for just under a minute so I'll have to wait till tomorrow when I get memory cards to give it a full test.

There are plenty of mounting options for me to play with, none of which I'd describe as perfect. But they're certainly functional.


Here we see the camera mounted on my Shred Ready FMJ which is my main lid. The mounting here is just a rubber strap. Which is a bit fiddley to get on, but grips surprisingly well given that it doesn't pass through anything fixed to the helmet.

However, I've been told by those that know that the power of the water in the Nile is quite incredible compared to what I'm used to. So, on Ronan's advice I'm bringing a sieved helmet that'll spill water when I'm getting washed around.

So I tried mounting the camera on my Pro Tec lid. The drainage holes allow me to strap the mounting bracket on more easily and also to put the camera on the top of my head which makes it better balanced and so I'm less conscious of it being there.

I started getting everything ready to pack up and go on Wednesday evening. My paddling gear is nice and dry, the tent is in good nick, and I think I've everything else ready to go. Big Enda is coming to Dublin tomorrow and we'll run through our final checklists, do a panic buy of whatever we've forgotton and then retire to the pub before flying out on Sunday.

Things are coming together

I've got the photo album thing sorted, now all I need is some pictures to put in there. For now I have some pictures of Pauline doing her slalom thing in Bratislava in the slideshow. These pictures were kindly donated by the DCU Canoe Club.

Three weeks ago I ordered a nice helmet camera for the Uganda trip but I found out yesterday morning that the guys I ordered from had none in stock and so it hadn't been shipped to me. so I canceled my order and found a guy in England on eBay who said he could have the same model camera to me in 3 days. It's cutting it tight but hopefully I'll be able to have paddler's eye view footage of some of the runs we'll be hitting in Uganda as well as whatever pictures we take.

First Post - I'm setting things up

I'm setting this up mainly as a means to track my paddling trip to Uganda. But also to start pulling things together for the Faff Team website whenever that gets going. For now I'm trying to set things like the gallery and the slideshow (which is doing some mad stuff at the moment) up so that I can post pictures as well. This is all a very hastily done work in progress, so I apologise for the rough edges.