Paddling his own canoe
We'd been vaguely thinking of acquiring a canoe for years, and since Pp's Shop on the Borderlands has had a good few months, he decided that this was the moment. He has named her Queen Emma (after the wife of King Canute. (Because obviously a boat should be feminine, and a canoe is almost a Canute.... :-D )
Yesterday evening we took her out for its first test on the river. We knew it was going to be a good trip when we saw a kingfisher almost straight away, although no photos of that because I wasn't keen to risk my camera on our first outing, and also because my camera is not fixed yet (although I have ordered the broken bit, so have fingers crossed I manage to fit it OK). Here are a couple more phonesnaps:
Coming up to Calstock viaduct at almost high tide.
It was such a lovely evening that we ended up going upriver a bit further than intended. There were huge clouds of swallows swirling over the river when we were past Calstock, just as the sun was going down. We turned with the tide, at 8:40pm, and so as we were about an hour upstream (it's not a very fast canoe, and we aren't all that practiced with it yet!) it was a bit dark by the time we got back to the quay.
Possibly, getting the canoe back on top of the car would have been easier in daylight, and so would our first-ever landing! But we managed it in the end without falling in, and with no obvious bits having got knocked off either car or canoe, so in the end it was all right.