A birthday paddle down the Endrick

I find my birthdays weirdly stressful. I still get a childlike buildup in the days leading, and it all comes crashing down when I then focus on how old I’ve become, how little I feel I’ve achieved in the past year, and how fast time seems to be flying by. Obviously, all super unhealthy! So last year, I decided to distract myself with a packraft mission. Float down the river that I grew up next to.

It would be cool to start all the way up at my childhood village, but the Endrick doesn’t have a huge amount of flow up there, and I don’t fancy plummeting down the Pots of Gartness. So I got dropped off at the Drymen bridge and inflated the “Floaty Boat”.

From the bridge to where it meets Loch Lomond, the Endrick passes through a very level floodplain, which all reports described as “boring” and “only worth paddling if you live locally”. This sounded perfect for my level of paddling! As soon as I got in, though, the current of the river whisked me round the first large meander. It would’ve been a short day if the whole river had ended up like that!

Very soon after the first bend, the river levelled off and it felt more like paddling on flat water. The great thing about travelling slow through that area, though was all the time I got to look at nature. Plenty of birding opportunities, plants having a chance to grow before the giant hogweed took over for another year, and I even saw signs of beaver where they’d worked up the river from the nature reserve.

My wife and my dad converged on the old truss bridge after following my tracker to give me a wave and some encouragement. I was very excited to tell them all about the cool stuff I’d seen, even though I was pretty tired by then.

The last section of the river is a straight into the loch, and the wind was blowing down the loch and into the straight, carrying waves upstream. Paddling this section was hard work, especially in a boat with a large cross-section, and any time I let up, I was pushed backwards. Eventually, I made it to the loch, but the waves were now lapping over the bow and runnels of the boat. I didn’t feel safe in these conditions.

The great thing about a packraft is you can jump onto a lochside basically anywhere, pack the boat away, and walk the rest. So that’s what I did, boat in the backpack, waterproof trousers rolled up to cross the marshland, and on I headed to Balmaha.

Met Nicola in the village for coffee, cake, and the chance to warm up again. A good birthday adventure!