Thursday, July 13: Canoeing on the River Clyde
We spent a day canoeing on the River Clyde in South Lanarkshire, Scotland today. The Clyde travels through the city of Glasgow and is the 2nd longest river in Scotland. We met Craig and Caitlin, our guides for the day, at one section of the Clyde, and we ended our paddle further down river, where the bus met us to take us back to the Lodge.
The water was pretty choppy in places, and a few of us fell in during the journey at various points. But we soldiered on and enjoyed the adventure of it all. Sections of the river were also quite shallow, so we would often find our boats colliding with rocks on the river bed, which required us to get out of our canoes in order to free ourselves. Every couple hundred yards strong rips required our full attention, and even though the water level never got much higher than our knees, there were a number of adrenaline packed runs through which our plastic canoes banged and bumped.
The weather looked more than a little threatening on several occasions, but the rain didn’t really start coming down until after we’d exited the boats at the end of the day. We saw blue heron at the water’s edge on our journey—as well as a number of swans, sand martins and oyster catchers. We also caught our first glimpse of a highland cow and encountered more than one herd of sheep and cows crossing the river during our journey down the Clyde. Our take-out, at a 19th century, multi-arched stone bridge required some heroic effort to drag/carry our canoes through a cow pasture, over an electric fence, and onto the verge of the roadway where our bus retrieved us – a little bedraggled and mildly hypothermic, but a bit wilder for the experience.
