Ok, so last Thursday I finally managed to get on the water with four other guys from Belfast Kayak Club.
WooHoo! 😉
It was an absolutely beautiful morning and I met JC at the war memorial car park in Jordanstown. Due to completely overestimating the quantity of traffic on the Bangor/Belfast road I managed to arrive 45 minutes early but this just meant I could take advantage of the conditions to try to take some arty photos of the shoreline at low tide. I will save you the horror of these by not posting them 😉
A short car journey later and we arrived in Islandmagee where we launched from the sheltered slipway. For this trip I was using completely borrowed kayak equipment courtesy of JC and the BKC. I was also trying out a couple of gadgets that I’d picked up, specifically the iDry iPhone case (http://www.idryworld.com/) and the Canon Powershot D10 waterproof camera.
The iDry case claims to keep your phone dry while allowing you to use it on the move. As I wanted to combine this with the Runkeeper iPhone app (http://runkeeper.com/home) to track our journey this would be a baptism of fire.
I now need to refer you back to my first post where I said I hadn’t paddled for 25-ish years. After that length of time my muscle memory has developed Alzheimer’s and I have regressed to the most basic of novices. Combine that with the notorious tippiness of sea kayaks and it’s hardly surprising that if you follow the Runkeeper map (http://runkeeper.com/user/NIViking/activity/30899208) you will see that the track ends on the opposite side of the lough from where we started after only 16 minutes. This would be because that’s where I capsized, apparently the iPhone loses its GPS signal when submerged! Subsequently I was more concerned with staying upright and the electronics testing got ignored. Having said that, the iDry did keep the phone perfectly dry and I was able to use it so first impressions are good.
Anyway, after a smooth deep water rescue we turned south and headed up Larne Lough. We stopped for lunch on the opposite shore to the Magheramourne quarry and then paddled back. I managed to get some photos both on the water on the way out, at lunch and then going past the power station on the way home which I’ve added below. The shots were taken with a Canon PowerShot D10 (http://www.canon.co.uk/For_Home/Product_Finder/Cameras/Digital_Camera/PowerShot/PowerShot_D10/). This is a supposedly rugged, waterproof camera with a 12.1mp CCD. It spent the trip clipped to the front deck of the boat in its neoprene case and performed very well. The smearing in some of the shots was due to my not cleaning the lens and not any fault on the camera’s part.
So to sum up a good trip out with some good company on a beautiful day and the kit stood up well. Now I just need my boat to turn up so that I can really get started.
NIViking 
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