Hurray a weekend!
We really should have stayed home today, cleaned the house, sorted the garden and other similar chores sadly overdue. But the weather forecast was hopeful, and the tides were right, so we abandoned our dusty house and overgrown garden and ran away in the canoe instead.
Still haven't quite got this tide thing down. We set off up the Tamar on a rising tide, but it turned before we would ideally have liked, and we ended up paddling very slowly upriver, against the current, the wind and the tide starting to go out again.
I saw a kingfisher, we saw a lot of ducks, a grey heron, and we also saw a cormorant. I feel a bit guilty about the cormorant, because as he saw us approaching, he took a good look at us, then regurgitated a HUGE silver fish, and flew away. I thought probably the fish was so monstrous he felt unable to fly with it inside him.
Of course it might be that the fish had protested so emphatically about being eaten that it would have got regurgitated anyway, even if we hadn't been there. It really did look quite improbable that a bird that size could possibly contain so huge a fish.
Once we turned around, we whizzed back down the river on the falling tide, with the wind behind us, the river carrying us and the tide whooshing us along. We barely had to paddle. And everything was sparkly under the autumn sun, and there were no sounds except the sound of water under the canoe chuckling and the wind rustling in the reeds.
One of the really good things about canoeing from Calstock is when you get back there, there is a really good ice cream shop.
Still haven't quite got this tide thing down. We set off up the Tamar on a rising tide, but it turned before we would ideally have liked, and we ended up paddling very slowly upriver, against the current, the wind and the tide starting to go out again.
I saw a kingfisher, we saw a lot of ducks, a grey heron, and we also saw a cormorant. I feel a bit guilty about the cormorant, because as he saw us approaching, he took a good look at us, then regurgitated a HUGE silver fish, and flew away. I thought probably the fish was so monstrous he felt unable to fly with it inside him.
Of course it might be that the fish had protested so emphatically about being eaten that it would have got regurgitated anyway, even if we hadn't been there. It really did look quite improbable that a bird that size could possibly contain so huge a fish.
Once we turned around, we whizzed back down the river on the falling tide, with the wind behind us, the river carrying us and the tide whooshing us along. We barely had to paddle. And everything was sparkly under the autumn sun, and there were no sounds except the sound of water under the canoe chuckling and the wind rustling in the reeds.
One of the really good things about canoeing from Calstock is when you get back there, there is a really good ice cream shop.
