Last week I bit the bullet, sold my old Pyranha Burn and bought myself a shiny new Dagger Nomad. The main reasons behind this was safety – I wanted more volume and rocker up front, so the boat resurfaces quicker after drops, and rides up and over obstacles rather than pinning on them.
So later that week Dave and myself headed off for another Welsh mission – after Ross and Nick bailed again with very lame excuses(!).
We started off at Mile End Mill on the Dee for a quick warm up – a very quick warm up, I’d forgotten how boring the venue is, especially in creekboats. Still, we had a little play in the holes, jsut to get used to the new boat.
The week before we’d had a look at Pont Cyffyng and one of the Swallow Falls slides on the Llugwy, but decided with only two of us there, we should really wait ’till we had more safety. This week we decided to just man up and go and do them, but on arrival we found higher water levels than we were expecting, and again deciding discretion is the better part of valour, left them for another day. So off to the Arddu!
On the way, driving along the A5, we past the Ogwen, and decided to have a look. Too low this time, but we ran the weir like drop above Ogwen Bank Falls just for the crack, and contemplated running the main falls, but with the lack of water it wasn’t really worth breaking a (shiny new!) boat over.
On arrival in Llanberris we parked up, shouldered the boats, and set off on the walk in to the upper Arrdu. It took about twenty minutes – there was no point going further up, as there were too many trees in the river, so we put on just below the bridge and paddled down to the top of Llanberris Falls, which took around 5/10 minutes, including my first roll of the Nomad (nice and easy).
Portaging the rather big and scary Llanberris Falls, we jumped on the lower Arddu, which is a great little gem of a river. Running right next to the footpath to the base of Llanberris Falls, you can scout everything as you walk up to the put-on, before bashing down it in around a minute! I managed to time it just right so that a group of tourists were right next to me on the path as I hit the first big drop, and got a rather pleasing, ego-boosting cheer! The next ten foot drop went sweet too, so we jumped back in the car, and headed off for fish’n'chips’n'beer.
I’m really pleased with Nomad, upon landing the ten footer the bow immediately scooped straight up to the surface of the river, and forwards away from the stopper. The rounded hull made sliding off rocks at funny angles easy, whilst still snapping around into eddies quickly. I can’t wait to get it on some Scottish creeks this winter now!
Once more, I stupidly forgot to bring my camera along, so there aren’t any pictures.
