![]() ![]() Our second trip began by paddling down to the bottom of the Loch and, by way of the quite small River Leven to the estuary of the River Clyde, at Dumbarton. And they always seemed able to do even more than we ever asked them to. ![]() Regular canvas stretched over the hulls with the help of Campbell’s father who was an artist, two or more coats of oil paint. We built them with marine quality plywood for the frames and mahogany (believe it or not) that we got at a very cheap price from a lumber yard owned by the father of a boy in the Boy Scout troop we belonged to (the First Glasgow “B” Troop), using only brass screws. So it was in these two kayaks that we did all our trips from then on including, of course, the eventual rounding of Cape Wrath. It was a wonderful surprise for me, many years later, when I recognized it as the second kayak seen at the beginning of the film of Hamish and Anne Gow’s amazing 1965 trip to St Kilda - the one that never did make that trip as, sadly, it’s owner turned back after a few miles. Later, after I’d left for the US, I sold it for a few pounds to a new member of the Club, and forgot about it. Mine was the “Scottish kayak” I took with me to Greenland in 1959. When we got home to Glasgow, without even one word of discussion (at least that’s how I remember it), we immediately began building two singles! For these we simply scaled down the PBK design to about 15 feet, sharpened the bow cross section somewhat, and ended up with extremely serviceable single kayaks that did us proud for many years. We were young and argumentative and we spent every mile of every day of the trip arguing about the course chosen by whichever one of us was in the rear and controlling the rudder. It went well enough, and since it was later in the year than we ever went again on that trip we were able to catch more mackerel than we could eat, which was nice, but we immediately found that using a double simply didn’t work for us. One to show how we used the “bogies” - and the kind of rudders that we had back then. Our first real trip was, just the two of us, using our PBK 18, up the Loch to Tarbet and a one and a half mile portage using our “bogies” (folding metal frames with pram wheels, small enough to go inside the kayaks, which we learned about from the SHCC members) to Arrochar, down Loch Long to Loch Goil and the Holy Loch, and back the same way. I don’t remember now when it was that Campbell and I first began to think of rounding the Cape ourselves. Two other members of the Club had by that time (the early 1950s) also been around the Cape - Hamish Gow and Alasdair (if I’ve got his name right). He was quite the hero, of course, as not only was he an Olympic kayak racing competitor but he and Eric Simpson were the first two people to ever kayak around Cape Wrath - the northwest tip of Scotland, renowned and feared for its notorious tide rip. At least once I remember Jack Henderson being with us. That was where we’d done our first kayaking in the Percy Blandford PBK 18 that we had built in Campbell’s family’s garden in the west end of Glasgow, on weekend trips with the Club when we all camped on one or other of the several islands in the Loch. We left from the Scottish Hostelers’ Canoe Club boathouse at Auchendennan Youth Hostel on the west shore of the Loch, near its south end. Updated 28 March 2019 with more photos from our trips, kindly provided by Campbell’s daughter Sally Semple ![]()
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