Tanera Mor

The calm continued and with it the paddling. Today we tried the Grabner Amigo two-up around Tanera Beg island out of Old Dornie. I’d <a class="wp-gallery mceItem" style="color: #000000;" title="Summer Isles Overnighter camped on the island with Jon one time but have never been right round it.
For some reason I assumed better the greater weight of me in the back and half-my-weight Mrs out front. But looking at the seating positions (image below right), back is quite far back and full frontal is only a little more forward than the solo position. So the heavier person out front centres the mass a little better on the boat which must be better for control and response.

We set off me in the back, but suggestions on improving the forward operator’s poor technique and asymmetric delivery led to discord and erratic progress, as the speed recordings below testify. To be fair the g is way out of practice and also hadn’t had two hard days of paddling to tone up. However, claims that her inability to paddle straight was due to my diet and general girthlyness in the stern will have to be settled in due course by BCU lawyers.

Meanwhile, in the narrower back it was a tight squeeze for my (allegedly fat) arse and soon my legs – like my ears – were going numb. I’d initially perched on a spare Gumotex thwart but that felt unstable. It was better sat on the floor, jammed in. In this position my feet were against the back of the gf, so there’s only just enough room for my legs.
As we passed between the two Taneras where a fishing boat was checking pots, I spotted an easy portage over Eilean Fada Mor, an island between the two Taneras. It gave a bit of a short-cut, but more usefully a chance to restore circulation in my legs.

We swapped places here too, although one lean back on my new q/d back strap arrangement (left, a replacement for the alloy Grabner bar which bends too easily) broke the black plastic clip. I fed a spare krab through the seat strap and tied off the other end with some cord so that clip wouldn’t break too. I was expecting such issues and anyway, big karabiners are easier to use when swapping seats (see Grabner Mods). With the force on the Grabner rubber mounting lugs now coming from an unintended angle rather than directly back when using the seat bar, I’m trying to spread and articulate the loads with cord. But with only 3 square inches of contact, even if the lugs were factory glued, I feel I ought to glue on some 4.5-inch ø D-rings instead (as on the Solar; over 15 square inches of contact). Whether it’s just my clumsiness or all this weight I hear about, it’s clear that the strain on seat mounts is greater than I thought, especially with footrests to push back off.
As it was, with no footrests in the full-forward position I couldn’t rest fully against the prototype back strap, but as I noticed before, proper paddling is much easier out front as the boat narrows towards the bow. That’s another thing with big, single sidetube IKs: they’re over wide for good paddling. As it happens, should I want a footrest tube I do have a D-ring glued on the front floor in about the right place.

Back to the story. We were now back in paddling harmony and heading into mare incognita, the southeast corner of Tanera Beg where I’d heard there was an arch. And there it was – a very nice one too that could be paddled right through (this was 90 mins after spring HW). Its exposed position made the roof deeply scalloped by storms and weathering, reminding me of the similarly carved limestone walls of northwest Australia’s Geikie Gorge which we packrafted a year or two back.
Amazingly, out here on the ocean-side of the Summers there was barely a swell or a breeze to disturb our composure. Though an hour’s paddle away, Priest Island looked enticingly near. And from Priest it’s less than 5 miles to Mellon Udrigle beach at the top of Gruinard Bay on the south side of Loch Broom. Or from either Tanera island you can take a 10-mile loop south to Priest and back north via the smaller Eilean Dubh and a few other ‘Outer Summers’. One for the next calm day and a paddling chum for back up.

We felt like we were making good speed across the south side of Tanera Beg, although rarely got over 4mph. At the southeast corner was a huge cave – big enough to break the GPS signal. With a small window at the back this will become another full arch by around AD6565. This whole exposed side of the island has deeply weathered Torridon sandstone cliffs full of interestingly rounded cracks and fissures. Tanera Beg, like the bigger Mor has the same ‘waisted’ kidney shape presumably carved by the icecap along existing fault lines. Like mountain col, the ‘waists’ usually correspond with bays backed with a handy stony beach though flat camping needs a bit more of a walk. Had the Ice Age been a bit longer (or when the polar ice caps are gone) there’ll be a few more Summer Isles to go round.

We then paddled below the 20-m cliffs on the north edge of the island (left). On a stormy day they reflect the brunt of the swells and throw up plumes of white spray over the cliffs themselves which can be visible from the road, miles away. Today, all we had to worry about was the peak of the ebbing spring tide in an hour’s time. Who knows if it mattered, but I’d deliberately circumnavigated Tanera Beg clockwise so as not to be in the inter-island channel where the current ebbing against us might have been more noticeable.

Heading back to Old Dornie the speeds indeed seemed to drop, even though we were going as fast as possible in an effort to catch the weekly fish van down in Achiltibuie. At one point the kayak slowed right down as it passed over some unseen current or eddy thrown out by Isle Ristol. But that soon passed and with a quick turnaround in Old Dornie, it’ll be fresh local halibut for dinner.
So, closely analysing the data in the speed graph it seems that two-up doesn’t make the Amigo much faster than solo after all – perhaps it’s the same with tandems? I suppose the additionally weighted hull can only be pushed through the water so fast and then an IK’s unsophisticated hydrodynamics come against a wall. Instead, two-up enables greater potential duration as the paddling load is shared – and let’s not overlook the companionable element of two in a boat, as long as everyone is sitting in the right place and on form.