Bulloch Harbour, September 15th

The last Wednesday evening trip of the year 😐 It was a very nice trip though; beautifully flat and quiet, in warm air. We went straight out to The Muglins from the harbour, which is unusual, then to the south end of Dalkey Island and finally down to Sorrento before returning via Dalkey Sound.

I used the Greenland paddle again. This evening I was not tracking very well. At first I thought it might be because I moved the footpegs further away (after watching some Paulo Ouellet videos), but even after moving them back it didn’t correct fully. It might also have been because I was trying to think more about the stroke tonight, as I had done some more research since the last trip.

Apparently there were three porpoises out with us off Killiney Beach, but I did not see them. Otherwise there isn’t much else to report regarding the trip itself other than that it was very pleasant and easy-going 🙂

I got some nice photos on this trip. The atmosphere was great in the calm and warmth, and there was even some fog off Bray, which can be seen in some of them. I definitely would like to have a better camera. The following gallery contains my favourites.

A very nice touch was that Michael and Helen from the Kilcullen group brought coffee, tea and cake because of it being the last evening trip, and Hazel also brought cake. That was a lovely surprise and it was nice to hang around afterwards chatting.

One interesting thing was that both Aidan and Roger talked about building Cape Falcon kayaks. Aidan turns out to be the person from Dublin on the CFK website who built one with his son (which I read about during the week), and Roger is planning on building one with a view to subsequently doing a course for people to build one. Hopefully this bodes well for getting the timber and other materials I will need for my own, once I get set up.

The following gallery contains the rest of the photos that were good or ok. A couple of things I should try to remember:

• When photographing other paddlers at a distance, if I don’t raise the camera their heads will all be above the horizon, making them potentially hard to distinguish against the land. Aesthetically these types of photos would be much better if the paddlers were fully outlined against the water.
• A corollary of that is: if the camera is lowered, closer to the water, having paddlers more fully outlined against the horizon is a subtly more interesting angle.