Another great trip started off pretty well as the glorious leader, who wasn’t going anyway, fell ill and couldn’t do the shop. While the previous glorious leader dealt with that, three freshers managed to deal with boats. Then people arrived, things happened and we ended up leaving half an hour late anyway. But hey, we tried.
The tall clumsy one, being a pain by nature, needed picking up from Luton, which sucked, but at least we successfully implemented the grab-and-eat-in-bus attitude to food, saving a bit of time. We arrived, tried to create warmth by hoping for it and closing the doors. In the morning, the fresher keen-team and tall-clumsy managed to make breakfast without casualties and we headed fairly early to The Duddon. There were two potential sections to run, respectively 3.5km and 6km in length and the decision was made to do both, increasing the need for reduced faff. Get-on was rather fun, as we lost two people in a car, since some people drive minibuses faster than others drive cars. After a good while of working out what to do, since we had no signal and they had no guide book, we realized that the odd red object directly in front of us could also be used as a phone. In the common tongue, I believe they call it a phone box. Having found humans, sent a shuttle and put correct clothing on, we went to get cold. The river was on low, so not particularly much of anything. Some sections scraped your butt the whole way down, but it did contain 5 or so nice rapids, which saw the capsize of two humans, one of whom ended up with a cracked, duct taped, but nonetheless leaking boat. It suddenly turned out to be a good thing that someone took two boats and we had a spare. Tall-clumsy decided to increase the level of havoc he causes, so threw his paddle gracefully over directly into a tree branch, so we had a minute while he climbed a tree to retrieve them.
As a side note, I confirmed that drysuits are magical and mine is kind enough to work. Being warm almost felt wrong, so maybe its good that my hands were still freezing. I also discovered that I am capable of losing my watch by storing it in my mouth due to lack of pockets, while finding out just how much fun it is to need to pee in a drysuit with no crotch zip of any kind.
We got off the river surprisingly much before dark and the existence of a car-wielding human made changing and leaving wonderfully quick. Chili was chiliful and it was worked out that poorly washed rice tastes much better when shaped in a volcano, because science. By nine, we were done and tired, so beer pong kept us entertained. A small handful of us then stuck around to observe ginger beer getting suspiciously darker and tall-clumsy failing at spinning a coin.
The second day started off with a really long decision making process. Some rivers were too high, one was too low, some were too far and some were too hard for us little ‘uns. On top of that, we had to drive just to obtain signal and once again lost the car. We settled on the last chunk of The Kent from the rapid before the L shaped drop to Force Falls. We took it really slow, so I had the opportunity to confirm that I can roll in a drysuit while waiting. WHOOP. Since we were only running one section, we had the chance to run it twice and the experienced few went again to search for lost paddles. The Kent was a morning mission last Lake District trip, so it was nice to run part if it again on higher, since it almost felt like a different thing entirely but I still had an idea of what was coming.
Also, no throwing up occured, other than once on the way to rivers. Major WHOOP. We were home damn early and I got free store cornflakes. Overall, I obtained a nice feeling of a good Lake District to balance the previously eugh one.
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