Lakes 1996

Lake District, Cumbria, 1-3 March 1996

At last we finally made it to the Lakes! Our first attempt a few weeks earlier had to be aborted at a late stage as the weather turned for the worst… Jack was spotted on the telly getting stuck in the snow, and this kind of put us off! I’m told by the few who braved the drifts that the rivers were storming that weekend.

Here’s some advice for anyone planning to paddle in the Lakes in March… DON’T GO!! It appears that the worthiness of the rivers is inversely proportional to the quality of the weather. We had almost blazing sunshine on Saturday, so you can probably work out from GCSE Maths what the Duddon was like. Scrapescrapescrape was the general situation until we arrived at the pseudo-big drop under the bridge (sorry, the name escapes me!) where Rachael pinned her Invader between two big pointy rocks and capsized upstream. At least three swimmers ensued. More scraping of expensive plastic took us to the get out. The best thing about this river is how you get to it from Ambleside… Wrynose Pass runs straight through some of the most stunning landscapes I’ve seen for, oh, at least since Scotland last year. And SUCC of course found ample excuse for an impromptu snowball fight at the top!

I’m not even going to mention the Cr*ke. It’ll bore you too much!!!