Lobster creeling and the Atlantic rowing boat

A wild and windy day at Ardmore

It has been a wild, blustery and showery day in the far north west today! Today the teams boarded Argo and Victoria, our two workboats, and crossed Loch A Chadh-Fi to Ardmore to see the Atlantic rowing boat that Rebecca’s father, John, used in 1966. It really is just a small wooden rowing boat, originally designed for fishing close to a much larger ‘mother ship’ and never intended to cross an ocean. The pupils also saw the sea kayak that Rebecca used to become the first woman to sea kayak around Cape Horn.

It was wild enough today in sheltered Loch A Chadh-Fi, for sheets of sea spray to splash the decks, which led to whoops of excitement from the pupils. Imagine what it would have been like for John many days into his crossing of the North Atlantic or for Rebecca off Cape Horn in the weather that we had here today.

There were lots of questions from the Year 7 teams, always a good sign, as they undertake some adventures of their own this week.

On their return from seeing the rowing boat we picked up lobster creels and looked at the catch. Lots of the usual shore crabs, velvet swimming crabs and brown crabs, along with three shark-like dogfish, some urchins and two small lobsters. The catch was looked at, recorded, handled and returned to the sea with great excitement.

The Red and Blue teams also spent some time with maritime charts and handheld radios undertaking a communication exercise that will help them on the island, and a few team tasks in the bad weather that will also help them.

Weather forecast looks good for the mountain day tomorrow and we hope to tackle Arkle, a new mountain for the Kingshott team, with previous teams (albeit Year 6’s) having tackled the slightly smaller Ben Stack.