On this kayaking trip, I felt the fear and did it anyway … twice.

Years ago I did a sailing course with Glennans down in Bere island in Cork. The first thing we did on our first morning was capsize the boat and deal with it.

I was conscious that I’d never capsized in a kayak. Okay I wouldn’t dream of going kayaking on my own. I wouldn’t dream of going out unless with another very experienced kayaker. I wouldn’t dream of going out in bad weather conditions. Yet for safety, I felt I should make sure that I could comfortably deal with a capsize on my own … just in case.

I hate being under water. Whilst I’m a strong swimmer, I won’t/can’t dive into water! I also hate deep water. The water is murky, when we’re kayaking so that I can’t see how deep it is. Just as well!

After work one evening I went out to the activities centre on Lough Derg to get a lesson. I have to say it’s a horrible feeling, sitting in a kayak and then have to actively lean out to one side and go under. Horrible. I tried to convince myself that I was going for a swim!

Even I’m not that convincing!

When kayaking one wears a spraydeck – a covering that prevents water coming in. This in effect is a ’skirt’ one wears which is then tightly attached to the boat. In addition, ones knees are out to the edges of the kayak. When you capsize, while upside-down under water, you have to disengage the spraydeck and get your knees together and then out of the boat. Fast. The first night I took a lesson, I didn’t manage to get out without being helped.

I was really disappointed. Because I hadn’t managed to get out unaided, I wasn’t happy to go kayaking again until I had mastered this. Next day I went for another lesson. Basically I spent an afternoon practising capsizing and getting out on my own. Stubborn unreal!

- Lean over, capsize
- As one is going under, immediately lean forward, hands on sides of spraydeck, working forward to the front where the loop of the spraydeck is
- Pull on loop of spraydeck, get knees together
- Hands on side of boat behind you, climb out
- Get to surface and then swim to end of boat and hold on

I practised it a few times and was so happy when I was able to do it un-aided.

To get back into boat requires the other person’s help.

- Other person takes my boat and puts it sideways and upside-down over their boat and tips to to get rid of water
- Get my boat lined up in opposite direction to other boat
- Swim between two boats, lie back and gingerly climb back into my boat, legs first.
By comparison with getting out of the capsized boat, getting back in was easy.

I took the capsizing lessons between parts 1 and 2 of our kayaking trip.

My second ‘feel the fear’ moment was going through one of the locks.

I’d been through a few locks when we went through the lock at Battles Bridge on the Upper Shannon near Leitrim. At this lock we were going from water at a lower level to water at a higher level. We had to rise nine feet.

Our two kayaks went in, gate shut and then the water … thundered in. Imagine sitting in a large jacuzzi in a small boat – that’s what it was like. I stayed calm in my little boat, in the big noisy ‘jacuzzi’, talking calm talk to myself. There are chains hanging down to hold onto. I could hear Noel behind me saying to me not to hold on to the chain too hard. I held on as gently as fear would allow me. I focussed on the water level slowly rising along the wall. I rationalised with myself, the lock-keeper/Noel would never have let kayaks in unless it was really safe.

That’s at least what I hoped.

The whatever number of minutes of feeling the fear was over and we exited the lock onto a glassy canal. I was so relieved. It took kayaking the next 8km of glassy canal to feel normal again.

We still have one day left to do to complete the river. Wind last weekend prevented us from completing it. Sons home from the US/visitors next weekend will prevent me …

The champagne will wait. Tiocfaidh ár lá.

Companies send employees on courses involving physical pursuits for team building. I’ve learnt a lot of self-management skills while kayaking the Shannon. After this, I’m ready for anything!

Noel and I are doing this trip together but in truth we are really doing two separate trips! Noel, as he says himself, is mooching up the river in one direction. I’m working very hard kayaking! At the same time, we’re both having a great time!

The first week we did South of Athlone using Limerick as a base and last week for north of Athlone, we used Sligo, where Noel lives, as a base.

The surprising thing about this trip is that though this being August, wind has been a problem. The wind has meant that we have had to leave the lakes out as the weather neither weekend allowed us to safely go on the lakes. I am not competent enough to kayak with wind. I’ve worked out that my limit on the rivers is roughly 20km/hour. To kayak against the wind is hard work. But with a strong wind behind us, I found it difficult to control the kayak in the swell.

Give me water like a mirror any day!

Whilst the general direction of the river is south, it isn’t in a hurry – it meanders south, sometimes heading west, sometimes heading east, you get the drift!

Noel mooching. The river meandering. God they’re all laid back!

Anyway I’ll count last Friday as Day 5 where we started out from Lanesborough but had to abandon after 6km, due to wind.

Day 6, Saturday, we picked up where we left off on Friday and kayaked to Dromod. Again we had to give up there because of wind.

Day 7, Sunday yet again because of wind, we started out at Carrick on Shannon and finished at Drumshanbo.

We have one more day to go to finish the river. We’ve two stretches to do, Dromod to Carrick on Shannon and then north of Lough Allen to Dowra. That will be the whole river done. Hopefully we get Day 8 done this coming weekend. Due to other commitments we will now leave the lakes until next year.

The trip has been very sociable – kayaking by day and relaxing over dinner at night with Noel and Denis and with Tommy or Margaret, Noel’s wife. Sometimes we also met up with friends. Thanks to Margaret who looked after us so well in Sligo last week. This catering manager for the trip, got off very lightly with her catering duties last week!

Photographs are few enough as cameras and water don’t mix. Denis has taken some for us.

Calm waters!

Self-portrait!

I’ll write further on having to conquer fear twice on this trip! And hopefully of our last day. I’ll also include a map of the section north of Athlone in my next post.

Two friends of ours kayaked the whole of the Shannon, lakes included nine years ago. While doing the lower part, they came to stay with us. That challenge really appealed to me … and I said to Noel, ’some day I’d love to do that trip with you’!

Fast forward nine years and you know where this is leading.

I’m not sure why I thought I could really do it. I had done some kayaking over the years in France. I’m reasonably fit and have done endurance events like marathons/triathlons. Neither of our two friends were true ‘canoeists’ so to speak so I thought if they could easily do it, maybe I could attempt the challenge.

We set a date in July but then I got that tooth/mouth infection so had to abandon ship. Last Sunday I rang Noel and asked him if he was free this Thursday to Sunday, I was game to go. That suited Noel perfectly.

Wednesday evening, Noel arrived and we had dinner and started planning our trip. Noel was Planning Manager, I was Sandwich etc Manager and Denis was Logistics Manager i.e., he dropped us at one spot and collected at another spot, all going well hopefully a good distance away from the earlier spot.

On his previous trip, Noel had kayaked North to South. Give that the prevailing winds are South-West, he was very interested in doing this trip South to North, anticipating that the benefit of the wind would out-weigh that of going with the flow of the river.

What do you know – Thursday as we set out the wind was coming from the north. Suffice it to say, Thursday was a bad day. We kayaked some but didn’t make much progress. We did some of Lough Derg that day.

Change of plan. Given that a northerly wind was still forecasted for Friday and Saturday …

We decided to make it as easy as possible and go with the wind. We had earlier decided that we would do it in sections that suited us, rather than necessarily in order. By the end of trip we would though hopefully have every kilometre covered. Fingers crossed.

Day 2 to 4 were great days.

Day 2 Athlone to Shannonbridge

Arriving at Shannonbridge

Day 3 Shannonbridge to almost Portumna

Setting off from Shannonbridge

Two boys waiting on the bank near Portumna. Was I glad to see them!

Day 4 Killaloe to Limerick.

Day 5 Back to the day job.

Noel is a great leader on a trip like this, endlessly patient and helpful. He also has a wonderful knowledge of plantlife, birds, insects, you name it. This week I was concentrating on keeping the boat moving in a straight line. Next week hopefully I’ll be able to take more in of the amazing natural life we are seeing from the water.

Tommy’s map is below showing where we’re at -

We will try to get rivers and lakes North of Athlone done over an extra long weekend next weekend, weather permitting. After that we just have to finish off Lough Derg.

They say madness is hereditary … another thing I’ve inherited from my children!

We built our current house in 2006. This being our fourth house since we were married, we had accumulated ideas of what we liked and didn’t like in houses.

When building this house, better half had strong ideas on windows. We looked at various types eventually settling on Marvin Windows whose headquarters in Ireland are in Wicklow. These windows come from the US, so choosing them caused a delay in house construction by a number of weeks. Natural wood on the inside, aluminium clad on the outside, these windows are beautiful. Originally we had planned on a different design, but were shocked at the price. On further research we found that sash windows which are very common in the US, were one of the more affordable windows with Marvin. Thus we settled on sash windows.

(At this stage you could give out to me about carbon footprint. You would be well justified).

Months later the windows arrived. From start to finish we were very impressed by this company. The standard of craftmanship of the windows was very high. The wood is chosen such that no piece has a knot. I felt guilty that Marvin had people checking each piece of wood for knots and here we were putting window boards with knots beside them. Anyway the windows became the feature of the house.

Four years passed.

We noticed that one strip of wood in one of the windows in our bedroom had blackened. A patio door handle was also causing problems. I called Marvin, they said they would send someone to look. (The windows/doors come with a ten year warranty). Denis met the person, he looked and said yes that window and door needed changing. What surprised us was that he then went and looked at all the remaining windows and said he wasn’t happy with some others and wanted to replace those he regarded as not up to standard now i.e., after four years. Because these doors/windows come in from the States, obviously that would take time. That wasn’t an issue.

Fast forward a few months. I got a call from Marvin head office to say that the replacements were in, and they wanted to come to fit them this Wednesday. No problem. Better half would be away, I would be at work but middle son was home from US, so he would be at home to let them in. Great.

Wednesday morning I was in CompuB in Limerick with my laptop whose hard drive was caput. I run a dual system, Apple at home, Windows at work. Unfortunately it had been a while since I’d run backup. Because of ongoing problems with my old laptop, I decided to buy a new laptop. Kieran at CompuB was checking could he wake up a dead hard drive and transfer all my unbacked up work to the new machine. Fingers crossed, prayers said.

While in CompuB, I got a call from the other Windows guy, the Marvin windows guy, to say they are near the house. they had directions, I said fine, John’s there and he’ll let you in. I gave them John’s mobile number.

Half an hour later, I got a call again, John’s not answering his phone, they’re at the gate and can’t get in, no matter how hard they pressed the bell. I said I should have given you the gate code earlier, here it is, John’s room is the one on the right and do what you like to wake him up. Ring the door bell, hoot the horn, throw stones at his window. (Thought this was a safe one, given who they were!) Confidently I said, he’ll hear you.

Half an hour later I get another call. No matter what they tried, no one appeared. At this stage I was on way back to the office so swung around by home to let two, in my mind, very patient Windows people into the house. They walked around with me looking at the various windows/doors they were to change. I brought them into John’s room saying I wanted to prove to them that there was a body in there. In we go and John sits up cheerily in the bed and says ‘Hi’!

I apologised for my sleeping teenager, they said no problem. I offered them coffee and something to eat but they declined. I wondered would I have been as patient if I were in their shoes and thought definitely not.

Maybe though I’m not too old to learn some niceness from the Windows people.

On Tuesday the Windows in our house were fixed. By Thursday all the information from the faulty hard drive had been transferred to the Windows and Mac systems on my new laptop. By Sunday John tells me he will have a as he says a proper backup system working for me. All problems fixed, thankfully.

You spend the first decade trying to get your children to sleep. You spend the second decade trying to get your teenagers to wake up. In a few days, John will no longer be a teenager. Maybe the Marvin guys came just a few days too early with the windows!

Here’s a quick tour of the new-look …

It is now an all-weather market with a fantastic new roof.

Country Choice from Nenagh run by Peter and Mary Ward have a great new stall at the market, as have Ponaire Coffee, Sallymills Artisan Cakes & Desserts and Fleur de Sel Crêperie.

Better half buys the fish

Later a stop for coffee and to listen to some music at Mari’s Cheese Shop

Back to work

Later these new potatoes with salt, pepper and butter … nyom nyom

Here is a full list of shops and stalls and opening times.

I’m trying to move as much as possible from food shopping in the supermarket to food shopping in the super market.

Well worth a regular visit.

The laptops are sold to governments with the goal of distributing one laptop per child. The laptops are given to students, similar to school uniforms and ultimately remain the property of the child. The operating system and software is localised to the languages of the participating countries.

The project originally aimed for a price of $100 but the price achieved was somewhere between that and around $200.

At the 2006 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the United Nations Development Program announced it would back the laptop, saying they would work with OLPC to deliver technology and resources to targeted schools in the least developed countries

In 2007, Uruguay placed an order for 100,000 laptops, making Uruguay the first country to purchase a full order of laptops. Since then, 200,000 more laptops have been ordered to cover all public school children between 6 and 12 years old.

Other countries which have participated in this project include: Peru, Mexico, Columbia, Ghana, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Gaza, Colombia, Haiti and Argentina.
(Information source Wikipedia)

The list of countries above sounds like World Cup teams!

My particular interest in this project stemmed from the application of an iPhone App, excuse the pun. Eldest son developed an iPhone App called Encyclopedia to download Wikipedia onto a device for use in situations where there is no internet connectivity. This App is now available in 83 languages. It came about because he had a new iPhone and hated not being able to read Wikipedia on it when he wasn’t online. He was in Sapporo in Japan – closer to Siberia than Tokyo, for two weeks in December 2007, staying with a friend from UL who was doing his co-op in Sapporo. The weather outside was terrible so he ended up doing a good bit of programming while there. He finished the App on his way home for Christmas that year, the final touches being put to it, sitting on the floor at Stansted airport waiting for his flight to Shannon.

This Encyclopedia App has now been adopted by the OLPC project. The OLPC laptops going to Peru are now for free, pre-loaded with the Spanish version of Wikipedia.

Chris Ball from the OLPC project wrote: Around 200,000 laptops in Peru have the Spanish Encyclopedia snapshot installed. It’s particularly useful in Peru, unlike some of our other deployments, because most of our laptops in Peru have zero access to the Internet. Some of the villages take weeks to get to, because there are no roads to them.

Have a look of this video filmed in the jungle in Peru. It’s just under eight minutes but it gives beautiful footage of a family, (mother Dionissia, father Victor and daughter Lidia), and the difference their laptop has made in their life. I love the children’s explanation of how they learn how to do things on the computer, from each other. And Lidia explains why she uses Wikipedia.

The power of technology!

This post is about Irish Colleges, but it’s about the centres of education for Irish Catholic clergy and lay people opened in Europe in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Tonight on a very short visit to Belgium, we are staying at what was formerly the Irish College in Leuven at 1 Janseniusstraat.

After we came back from dinner, I spent much time reading the many framed pieces on the walls about our ancestors who walked these very corridors.

Here are some notes I made from my reading:

Increasing English influence in Ireland during the early 17th century resulted in the escalation of the protestant reformation and supression of Catholic educational institutions. The establishment of Trinity College Dublin nourished a Protestant intellectual elite whilst Catholic contempories looked to the Continent for their education. Irish Colleges sprang up in strategic locations – counties where powerful sponsors were based, university towns where Irish academics and scholars were already located or where other ties existed.

The first Irish College was founded in 1592 in Salamanca. At its height, there were more than thirty. The Irish college in Leuven was founded in 1607 by the Irish Franciscan Florence Conry.

Many of the colleges were administered by religious orders, such as the Franciscans, Jesuits and Dominicans. Both clerical and lay students were educated in diverse subjects, with philosophy and theology being the most important. Each of the colleges had its own particular ethos – the college in Leuven was renowned for exceptional scholarship, networking, its significant political influence and its impact on cultural identity.

The role of the Irish College as a focal point of Irish and European affairs was demonstrated in the winter of 1607 when Florence Conry brought Hugh O’Neill and his retinue to Leuven following their departure from Ireland.