Well, Scotland is still as wet as ever. Me and Paul were planning on doing Tower Ridge on Ben Nevis. We’d planned to camp by the CIC Hut as neither of us belong to a secret cult recognised by the SMC. Gear was arranged. Vast quantities of gear - in fact so much we could have gone big wall climbing in America! A vague weather report found which indicated we’d either get wet or be alright.

I was planning on visiting Angus after, so Paul went in his car, and me in mine. My car makes weird noises, and after this trip it made a few new ones. It needs a service and the MOT is due next month. I’m pretty sure it shouldn’t moo going down hills.

The day dragged on and on, doing ever boring and mildly pointless sitework. There really is no need to mow the grass every week, it doesn’t need to look like a bowling green! The weather didn’t look too bad, and the cars were packed.

Five o’clock arrived eventually and I arranged to meet Paul at the King’s Arms Hotel at the start of Glen Coe. The way to Glasgow is rather simple, I’ve done it countless times before. The road going out of Glasgow is equally simple. There’s one and you drive along it until you hit the end or drive into the sea, whichever comes first. It’s just the whole of Glasgow which is confusing.

I now know that I should have gone down the M8 which would have taken me over the Erskine Bridge, or around the side. I didn’t know this and driving down the motorway isn’t the place to look at your map. Eventually I ran out of motorway and arrived in Glasgow itself in the nice little area of Govan.

Fantastic. I was in the middle of town, and all the sign posts had vanished. Oh well, time to look around for the large overpass that goes through the middle of town. It’s up on stilts and fairly obvious. I did find it eventually - it passed over me as I went down a road. Had I wanted to leave Glasgow and go back the way I’d just come, I could have done a dodgy U-turn and gone onto it. This bit of town didn’t have a way to get on to go my way. I drove around some more.

I drove around some more, chopped and changed lanes, hopped white lines and shot off around little bypasses. In other words I drove like most of the locals seem to do so perhaps they are all lost too!

Finally I spied a sign saying “A82 / Clyde Tunnel” on it and I followed it religiously until at last! The Great Western! Aha! No more being lost! Nobody gets lost on the A82, just drive up it!

All this had consumed half an hour so I thought it best to text Paul and let him know I’d be late. I shortly received a text saying he’d done the same thing!

Knowing of the way the local police like to trap speedy drivers down the side of Loch Lomond, I drove carefully to Tarbet, resisting the urge to jam my foot down on the long, empty straight bits of road. Tarbet approached and to remain on the A82 I turned off it and went right. This small manoeuvre always confuses people and lead many an unsuspecting soul to turn up at the Goil asking how to get to Fort William.

This road is both awful and great fun. It’s just wide enough for two cars, has a white line to separate the two streams of cars. Unfortunately, it also has real streams running down it and pools of water. One side mostly consists of small crags where the road was blasted out, with the other side consisting of the cold, dark waters of Loch Lomond. It was dark, so I could see any oncoming cars and by straddling the white lines I avoided the nasty water and made up lots of time. Arriving at the King’s Arms about ten minutes behind Paul.

Rannoch Moor was as depressing as ever, quite how we convinced people to build a road through a swamp I have no idea. The mist and rain was blowing sideways across the road giving it a desolate look and feel. We were both hungry and a bit tired from four hours of driving in the dark. Plan ‘A’ was aborted and we decided to camp in Glen Coe and do plan ‘B’ - the Aonach Eagach Ridge.

The bored, chatty man in the Red Squirrel Campsite extracted five of our English Pounds each and we set up our tent, made some food and went to sleep. In the morning we woke up to the sound of rain drumming off the tent and mist swirling around the valleys. Plan B was aborted, and plans C through Y skipped.

Emergency Plan Z was initiated involving a trip to Fort William to sit in the Nevis Sport Cafe followed by Paul going home. In Fort William the weather wasn’t too bad, we’d have probably been alright although everywhere was rather damp and wet so the climbing wouldn’t have been fun.

I made my way to visit Helen at Helensburgh, going via Glen Orchy to see the waterfalls in full spate. Lots of water churning through small gaps. Most impressive. What’s more impressive is that my car does 350 miles on a full tank of fuel, and coincidentally that was around the same number of miles to Helensburgh as I arrived low on fuel. Helen doesn’t actually live in Helensburgh, she lives across the water from Faslane on the little sticky-out bit of land. It’s a one-road affair with no petrol stations at the end.

I stayed the night, and awoke to see gales and rain beating down. Definately not a day to go outside. I’d arranged to meet Angus at the Glasgow Cotswold store, and had a rather confusing text off him with some directions in. After borrowing some of Helen’s fuel (it’s handy knowing people high enough up food chains to get some fuel) I trundled through the small river the road had turned into, refuelled properly and rocketed off to get lost in Glasgow again.

And how I got lost! At some points I was driving around places I’d been the day before! Had I been able to see in the future I’d have realised just how close to the A82 I was at times. Sometimes it was just off the side of the road I was on! It’s damn irritating getting lost in the dark. After nearly going through the Clyde Tunnel I found Angus’ shop and went to have a chat.

Originally I was planning to spend some time in Glasgow shopping, but on the way out I noticed the time and just carried on back to the Lakes. The rain was lashing down, turning the motorway into a river of spray and mist. At one point I saw a rather confused looking driver get out of his car on the grass at the other side of the central reservation. He was looking confused because his car was pointing the wrong way and had managed to get itself up a 45 degree grass slope.

Lots of cars parked on the side of the motorway too. They must have got too wet and conked out. My car decided it’d be fun to join in that game and lit its engine management warning light for me. Naturally this alarmed me somewhat, but seeing how the car didn’t seem to be doing anything unusual at the time, I waited to see if it went out. It did, so figuring that so long as the engine continued running all would be well, I proceeded to get home as quickly as was safe.

The Lakes weren’t much drier, the road down to here having some very large puddles. My car, now thoroughly soaked was acting weird, making mooing noises going down hill as the fanbelt slipped. Brakes were a bit unresponsive too.

We’ve just done a test-capsize of one of our Drascombe sailing boats. Now, a Drascombe is the same as any other sailing boat we have, it’s just a bit bigger. Due to their size they don’t tip over that often - the last one being about 10 years ago at this Centre which means they build up a reputation of being “uncapsizeable”. This means we don’t do capsize drills using them the same as we do with the single-handers and Wayfarers so, naturally, when one does tip over everyone gets a bit concerned since they’ve never seen it happen and have heard all sorts of stories. According to who you ask they either sink, invert, go on their sides then pop upright, don’t capsize at all, capsize and fill up with water through their centreboard casings, blah blah.

So we did a test capsize to see what really happened.

Once water is spilling over the gunwales the boat is going to capsize if you don’t do something about it. They then sit on their sides like other dinghies do, and they sit there for a few minutes, long enough to swim around the other side and pull on things to right it.

If it goes upside down several things happen. Firstly the centreboard slams shut back into its housing, then anything not tied down falls out. The rudder seems to spin around and stay where it is and the mizzen mast stays in its hole. From the air that spurts out when the boat is being re-righted there is probably an air pocket under the boat. This couldn’t be confirmed since nobody wanted to go diving into the unknown to find out.

Once upright again they float just above the water’s surface and it takes a lot of bailing to empty them. Water didn’t seem to be spilling in through the centreboard casing though.

So now we know.

It’s amazing what you can do if you put your mind to it. This place is aparrently undergoing major restructuring and management changes. We, the trainees of this place had our little say, jiggled the place up a bit with what we said and caused a bit of a fuss. This place has all the fun politics of a big company at times.

I also managed to build a fire out of soggy cardboard, wet and rotten wood and a firelighter. If you turn a cardboard box over, light the firelighter inside it, then put some wood on the top it’ll light. The gale ripping across the field helped draw the fire nicely and after feeding it with more cardboard it was blazing hot enough to melt glass. Quite bizarre watching a fire burn in a torrential downpour, it just shouldn’t work. I also spent a fun 20 minutes ripping chairs apart and putting them in the skip.

I’ve finished coding most of the guts of Shooty. It’s got title screens, menus, and a complete game structure involving lives. The ship has a working control system. I originally had the ship just shooting upwards from the bottom, but that felt too restricted. I tried a four-way control system, but not being able to shoot diagonally got irritating, plus the gameplay in Sinistar on the GBA is good with its 8-way controls. I couldn’t get a convincing 8-way rotating control system like Sinistar working though, so it’s now got a Robotron-style 8-way control. You can lock the firing direction by holding down the right-hand flipper button for the situations where you need to run away while killing things.

I’m trying to make it less like Robotron though, but if you take a bottom-up shooter and let the ship move around in 8 directions it becomes hard to not make it similar.

Drawing the sprites isn’t that difficult either. Despite my lack of artistic ability, making abstract coloured shapes to shoot at is easy. I have five baddie types and their behaviours designed (you’ll learn to hate type 3 baddies…) which should provide enough hassle for the player. A small particle system is wired up so you get pretty explosions when things die. The explosions don’t kill the framerate either which is nice.

Can’t wait until I’ve finished the game and I’m designing levels and tweaking gameplay.

The text-printing routines need changing too, they’re crap and have a few nasty hard-wired limitations. The code could probably do with a bit of a going over to find silly things and remove junk code. I’m sure I can squeeze some more frames out of the game by reshuffling code - but before we optimise, we code the game and get it working no matter how slow it is.

An in-game level designer might be an idea, it’d let me take my GBA places and create levels without my computer. I guess the players might find it fun too.

Once I’ve finished Shooty I’ll begin something else. I’m quite into the whole retro gaming at the moment, plus coding versions of old games is a good way to learn how to write games.

SPA Re-Assessment on Wednesday. Not gonna bugger it up this time!

Today I finished doing my RYA Day Sailing course. It’s rather easy… All you have to do is sail and navigate. The sailing part I can already do, the navigation part is the same as when I go hillwalking so I can already do that too Only difference is that sailing charts aren’t the same as OS maps, their gridlines don’t point to the same North. This caused me a lot of confusion since the magnetic deviation for an OS map is around 3 degrees. The magnetic deviation for a chart is around 6 degrees. Of course, when you’re taking a bearing off something half a mile away on the beach using a non sighting compass the amount of error you introduce cancels out any deviation so it doesn’t really matter.

We got to sail out the bottom of the loch Into the horrendous wind of Loch Long. It’s awful, the wind comes down our loch, meets wind coming both ways up and down Loch Long. The wind has a little party, swirls around and you go nowhere fast. Randomly a huge gust comes which almost flattens you, but at least means you can sail in a direction.

The new trainees were out in single-handers learning to sail. They had the funny “I’m scared and think I’m going to die” look we all get the first time

Today was fun Ever since I’ve been at the centre, and while I was being collected from the airport on my first day people have been telling me about ‘The Awe’ and how it’s a great place to go paddling. Not having much of an inclination to jam myself into a kayak, or have the desire to sit on the bank watching other loonies drown I never went. I then learnt to open canoe and realised they’re quite stable and pretty hard to tip upside down. Occasionally I had ideas that it’d be fun to visit this Awe place and play in a canoe, but there being nobody at the Centre to look after me, I never went.

Until this year… There’s now some canoeists of a capable nature to balance out the rather nasty kayak infestation we have here - that’s all it was last year, people going To The Awe to play in their kayaks.

So off I went. Loch Awe is past Inveraray and has Ben Cruachan (the big hydroelectric powerplant at the bottom, the mountain having lots of tunnels in it) overlooking it. If you go down the road past the powerstation you come to the Awe Barrage. This is where paddlers go. Because of the way the barrage is built, it has a peramanent standing wave you can play and surf on.

I took my 16ft monster and plopped it in the water (which was circulating in a slightly alarming way towards the wave, then ripping off down the river) and jumped in. It was then suggested I should practice ferry-gliding across the current - ferry gliding being a strange phenomenon where if you point a boat into the current at around 45 degrees or more it’ll glide sideways if you paddle forwards a bit, you don’t get dragged down the current backwards. It’s an easy way of crossing fast flowing water… it also works with wind and is probably related to the same way aeroplanes fly and boats sail upwind. I gave it a go and got washed downwards more than across, but made the other side in one piece still in my boat, still the right way up. I tried again in the quickly moving, but relatively calm water down from the wave and worked out what was going on.

The wave looked quite daunting from the side of it. The kayakers were surfing across it, occasionally capsizing and headbutting the rocks under the water… hmm, I thought I’d leave that for a while and just play in the water that wasn’t so white and fierce. I slowly edged my way up the flow towards a smaller wave, slowly working out what moving water did, and managed to glide across that quite well. The wave didn’t seem so bad after all…

… which was good, since the next time some wonky steering saw me getting sucked right onto the wave …

… my boat went from pointing directly into the current to pointing straight across the flow - a rather nasty way to be in a boat …

… I said a few naughty words and waited to be washed off the wave, ready to paddle to the shore. Only I didn’t get washed off. The boat stayed where it was and all the people around me were shouting to paddle up the current. I was surfing it! in a large green open canoe that according to its design shouldn’t surf… It was really cool and very very mad. I could stick the paddle in and get pulled across the wave, take it out and stay where I was.

Then I got washed off and paddled to the side.

After a bit more playing and some resting of my knees we set off down the river. First up, a small section of grade 3 rapids. Nice. Into an eddy we hopped and up the bank we went to look at the water. There was a mixture of large boulders you definitely didn’t want to hit, some submerged ones that would be a problem when stuck under your boat, and some waves. A line was picked and we got back in our boats.

The river looks different when your viewpoint is a metre off the water. Those rocks you made a mental note to avoid vanish, and the small lumps of water look so much bigger. Oh well, down we go, left or something, into the middle and wait in an eddy. And down I went, the nasty looking boulders just slurping past the side of my boat, the occasional one grinding under me. The canoe completely ignoring any form of wave or rough water. Maybe these river things aren’t so bad if you can see where you’re going…

Later sections of the river had big waves that the kayakers bounced over. All I did was smash straight through them, the nose of the canoe going right into the waves and out the other side. A great way of getting wet, but very stable and not even the slightest hint of a capsize anywhere.

Of course, the kayakers did their best to get in the way, but four or five metres of green plastic shooting at their little Tupperware boxes soon made them move (often without their effort as I shot particularly quickly into an eddy I definitely didn’t want to miss, sideswiping three at once :-). One kayaker also thought getting pinned against a rock would be a fun trick to try. He got properly pinned - boat, body and paddle wedged tight against a large boulder in the main flow of the river. Eventually he extracted himself from his quickly evolving watery tomb and popped off down the river to the bank. Someone went in and set his boat free and, after a certain amount of fiddling, his paddle appeared. Beyond that not a lot happened.

I also had 30 seconds of fun in a small play-canoe. God, it was tippy… Being only two metres long my body sticking out the top made it quite unstable. I could manage to sit still in it and that was all. Any attempt at paddling caused some nasty wobbles to happen. Trying it for the first time in a river containing waves and rocks probably wasn’t a recipe for staying dry. It got returned to its owner. I want one though, and would need to learn how to control it on flat water first. It has footplates and big foamy cups to lock your knees in - everything else is taken up with two large airbags so that when you roll it there’s not too much water in the boat.

The raft race was funny. The “official” rules are that you have to make a raft out of anything, and you can’t use premade hulls (so no strapping some beer kegs around a boat hull), and the thing has to be paddled across the loch.

Well, we had one boat made from the roof of a transit van with a small outboard engine attached to it, several kayaks tied together, a surfboard and a blow-up dinghy. The raft done by the police was the best, it was a load of beer kegs tied to two pallets and some wood. The village police woman was sat on it along with some other coppers. Deciding paddling was too hard they got a tow off a huge motorboat.

The towing was going well until the motorboat accelerated…

… At which point the raft was torn apart, ejecting half its quite drunken crew and their drink into the sea. We whizzed over to help them and to find out if they’d actually got any form of bouyancy aid attached to them. They did, and were more concerned about their cans of beer and bottle of cider going astray than the fact they’d just fallen in the water behind the biggest powerboat in the loch. We deposited the remains of half their raft at the start and whizzed the slightly damp crew to the finish so they could continue with the drinking and falling over. After that we followed the last “raft” to the shore then, getting bored with sitting in a powerboat on my day off, I gave the boat to Graham - who quite likes powerboats - so he could go and “practice” driving.

It’s the annual village raft race this afternoon. In a slight fit of insanity I agreed to run half of the safety cover for it. Of course, that means the day is now hot and sunny, perfect climbing weather - I even have a place to go climbing that has 26 short climbs that I want to do. It’s really funny reading descriptions for six metre climbs when you’re used to climbing 60-70m multipitch routes. Reading things like “the climb starts out on hard ground, getting progressively easier towards the top” makes sense on a long climb. On a short climb I can probably reach over the ‘hard’ bits. I’m trying to contact Angus, which isn’t so simple since the bugger keeps turning his phone off. If I can ever get through to him I’ll try and go climbing tomorrow.

Anyway, the raft race could be funny. Drunken people on home-made rafts… I’ll get lots of practice at pulling people out the water anyway. I’m taking my camera.

Well Angus has gone. Not quite sure why, I think he’s just a bit tired of being in this place all the time. It would have made more sense if he’d stayed to the end of the year, but there you go.

I now have a room to myself (until someone arrives and gets stuffed in here, along with any other random people that turn up) which is kind of nice for a change. I’ve moved the other bed around, put my computer near the window, thrown out three bags of random rubbish that’d collected over the year and washed the floor. I could do with another rug or bit of carpet since plain floors attract so much dirt and crap, at least with a carpet its hidden ;-)

Think it’s time to go online and upload this stuff.

I’ve done four loads of washing, thrown everything off the floor onto the beds of the people who’ve appeared in my room, and I hid until after dinnertime just to make sure I didn’t have to work :)

Things are now either dry or drying, my computer has its DVDROM drive back now I’ve got an IDE cable for it, and I’ve got an application form for my Mountain Leader assessment. All I need to do for that is do three more wild camps. For my SPA I need to do 8 or so more climbs. It’d be nice to get to a small crag with 10m climbs on it and race up them. Finding such a crag that isn’t gritstone and is in Scotland is mighty tricky. Can’t wait until I’ve finished my SPA assessment so I can go off multipitch climbing again.

2004/07/28 21:00
Weirdness
Writing CDs on my PC seems to make things go a little mental. I guess my PC can’t really handle a 56x CD writer, even typing this text is lagged. Earlier my PC shut itself down and turned off!

My PC wasn’t on its battery! All that’d happened was it couldn’t cope with reading the serial port and writing a CD at the same time. For some reason my PC must have received mangled UPS info and turned itself off.

Bit of a pisser considering I was writing a CD at the time!

…legs don’t work…
We were going to go up Ben Cruichan - a mountain with many tunnels through it - but after seeing the claggy mist and fog a change of plan was decided on. According to my dad’s Munro book there were several interesting walks we could do near The Drover’s Inn on the A82, a short drive from Crianlarich. After finding a map that actually had the whole hill on it - the hills there being on the corner of four OS maps, and just on the corner of a Harvey’s map - we set off to go up Beinn Chabhair from Beinglas Farm.

It was so hot, still and humid. The worst weather to go walking in. People think rain, snow or howling gales are bad walking weather and that a nice sunny day with no nasty cold wind blowing is a nice day outside. It’s actually the opposite. It’s so much easier to keep yourself warm than to keep yourself cool - keeping warm just requires moving around and covering yourself with warm things. Keeping cool involves taking things off, only there’s a limit to how much you can remove before you’re either arrested for indecent exposure or you get sunburnt and bitten by anything and everything. Combine the heat with my inability to walk faster than a one-legged donkey and we were all set for a loooong day.

A looong day that turned into a shorter one since we turned around half way between Ben Glas Falls and Lochan Beinn Chabhair, then came back, going for a look at the very steep waterfall and some goats that were climbing around the waterfall trying to eat it.

It would appear, after a call from Angus, that the Looney Bin think I’m working tomorrow - despite me telling them I won’t be there, and the message they wrote in the Magic Blue Book obviously not being read by the right people. Heaven forbid the people in the office talk to each other :-/