Dart trip 2008 Day 1

It started off on a cold Friday afternoon. The car was loaded, the kit packed. We were ready to go. A quick trip down to Bath to pick up Stu from his Uni flat and headed towards Taunton fish and ship shop: Smiley's Plaice. Here we ate and discussed the weekend's paddling. We soon set off and about 2 hours later arrived at the cottage to meet up with the other guys and have a few beers. We sorted our kit out and found a bed ready to be up and awake at 8 in the next morning.
8 o’clock came and a routine of who can get to the bathroom first and who has the breakfast ready. Whilst Stu made the breakfast, Jezz made the sandwiches and Cliff waited for breakfast. Now after a nice healthy breakfast consisting of bacon, sausage, eggs and beans we were ready to set off to our first paddle of the weekend. The "Dart Loop". This is a friendly grade 1-2 with a few features along the way such as the 'Washing Machine' (can be a nasty stopper at higher levels - this is what we were paddling through on the first part of the video), 'Lovers Leap' (a series of rapids with a nasty flat rock right at the end), 'Triple Falls' (as the name suggests three increasingly harder water falls) and the 'Spin Drier' (another nasty stopper at higher levels). All this done and with no dramas. After we completed this we headed back to the car park via the shuttle bus where we stopped for a spot of lunch and prepared ourselves to tackle the last few waterfalls of the "Upper Dart". These we did. On the first drop there was only one swimmer and that was Les (also on the video) this was quite a simple drop into a slot, following the current round. The next fall was a simple slot drop but had to be taken at the right angle and shown perfectly how not to do it by Geoff who took the wrong line and went down backwards. And then the last drop a simple boof off the top and paddle into the eddy. We then proceeded onto the Loop again and only had one swimmer (Les) on 'Lovers Leap'. We then caught the shuttle back. Packed up our things and headed back to the cottages.



After all that hard work paddling we decided to order a takeaway from the local Indian in Ashbourton. We ate this and then proceeded to the Gene-17 open evening where paddlers from across the UK join up to watch videos of some awesome kayaking from the last year socialise with people they haven’t seen for a while and have a few beers. After watching a few videos (when I say watching I mean craning our necks to look around the really really tall guy sat on the bar at the front) we then decided to head back for more beers and then up to bed for the next day.