The Barrow Locks

The three amigoes (Joe Pat, Steve) had an early start. Met on the Ross Rd at 8:15 to head to St Mullins and on to Ballytiglea bridge past Borris. We put in about 10:30 and the current was about 3kn. Good flow helped us along the way. We decided to do the trip on the East side thus avoiding all the weirs. It did mean that we had lots of portage with the boats which was a pain after the first few locks. We did shot the weir at Ballingrane Lock which was the smallest. The flow on the weir side was very strong and not really suitable for sea kayaks so we opted to give the rest a miss and play safe. The St. Mullins Lock was very awkward to get the boats back in the water. The only place we could find was a small cutaway on the 'island' between the Lock and weir side. We lost about half an hour figuring that one out. A tiring day and I never carried the boats so much - I'm looking forward to the next sea trip!

Cappoquin to Youghal Paddle

We decided to revisit this trip this time in sea kayaks only and see how things would turn out. High tide in Cappoquin was 8:00 so we arranged to meet on Cork Rd at 7:00 and hopefully be on the be on water around 9:00. Only myself and Pat could make the trip since Joe had the 'flu and none of the sit-on-toppers stepped up to the mantle to take up the offer of the spare boat!
We were on the water in Cappoquin at 9:30 and came ashore in Youghal at 12:30. Total time on the water was about 2.5hrs as we stopped along the way for a cuppa. What surprised me about this trip was a spring tide (high tide Youghal at 6:45 and low tide at 13:00) and I reckoned we'd whizz along down the river. This certainly wasn't the case and the current was pretty slack all the way. Probably to take advantage of the outgoing tide you needed to be further downstream around 10:00 (hour three in rule of twelfths) but this would mean paddling against the incoming tide in Cappoquin given the offset of an hour. Anyway it was nice to reach Youghal and take our time going under the bridge without any currents to worry about.
The trip itself was a mixture of frost, mist and sunshine in that order as the day progressed and check out the pics in the web album. This was a nice trip to get in between the weekly rolling sessions and Pat (aka Pat the 1st roller) was dead chuffed to complete the trip and next time maybe we'll have a bigger group.
On another note I needed to get some windscreen wipers in Deevys and made an impulse purchase of the admiralty chart of Waterford Harbour. I'm trying to remember all the detail Mick O'Meara told us but first thing I did was look at the tidal diamond in the estuary. On an outgoing spring tide the max flow is just under 1.5kts (normally 0.5kts) in hours +3 and +4 so while its not something you want to paddle against it still won't be like a jet stream. This chart might come in handy over the summer evenings for some trips over to the Wexford side.