Rain at last

In the last week or 2 we have finally had decent rain in Ireland. Last weekend I was up north getting some paddling in. I had never paddled the annacloy before and decided to tag along to a UUJCC trip down it. It's nothing spectacular being a grade 2 run with a single grade 3 section but was perfect for the group we brought down it with some less experienced paddlers in the group. Due to the high water levels anything else would have been pretty dangerous. The river still has some nasty enough wiers. In particular the new one built last year seems to have been designed to kill kayakers! It consists of a double horseshoe wier with the towback from the first horseshoe reaching the 2nd wier. Unfortunately I did'nt manage to get any photos of it but I would not reccommend paddling it under any circumstances. Our test football did not manage to beat the stopper and only got out of the wier after several minutes due to it being forced so deep it came several feet out of the water and flew over the top of the stopper!
The face of the wier itself also has rocks embedded in it for some unknown reason. I really don't know what they were thinking when this wier was built but surely it could have been made so much safer.
On the Sunday a small group of us went to paddle the Roe. It seems it hadn't rained as hard over in Derry as the river was running at a medium level but it was still a good run down. We ran the lower section a couple of times, getting off the river in the dark.

There has been about 60mm of rain in the last 48 hours with more on the way and everything flooded out. Hopefully there will be some excitement this weekend also.