

We paddled through several canal sections, including one slightly wider section called Loch Oich. Our goal for the day was to paddle from Gairlochy to Dores, 50km away, on the shore of Loch Ness.Īfter a delayed start, due to the foul weather, we set off at 9.30am, making our way towards Loch Ness. That night the two Daves found a wee hostel to stay in and Carl, Jason and I spent the night in Carl’s van, munching down on our Walkers Shortbread, listening to the rain lashing down, with the wind rocking us to sleep.ĭay 2 was going to be the biggest day of the trip. We had paddled 31km and I was just happy to be dry. 4½ hours after we left Fort William, Day 1 was complete with our arrival at Gairlochy. Landing on my back and front, somehow I never actually went over the edge.

The waves were not that big, but combined with the wind I was thrown around many times. As I was getting blown around, Jason and Carl tried to get me to alter my stance from square to surf but this was no time to start trying new things. This was the strongest wind I had ever SUPed in.

As we left the shelter of the canal and entered Lochy, the tailwind picked up from a steady 5-8 knots to an average speed of 17 knots with gusts exceeding 36. We paddled the first few kilometres through the canals before hitting our first bit of big water at Loch Lochy. We started the trip at lunchtime on Thursday October 2 at Fort William. There wasn’t going to be much sunshine, but a lot of wind. There was going to be a bit of rain and some wind. The forecast for the trip was looking tricky. (Dave Robson is currently editing the footage and hopes to get the film out soon.) Jason, who is an extreme sportsman, would be on the water with Carl and I, and the two Daves would be following us on land, documenting the trip. All of this was to be done over three days.Īs well as Carl Sawyer and I, we also had three others with us Jason Sawyer (Carl’s brother), Dave Butt and Dave Robson. A 96km paddle from Fort William to Inverness, taking in lochs Lochy, Oich, and Ness, as well as multiple canals and locks. I recently got into SUP and have had a great few months learning the sport.Īll of my previous SUP adventures had been in training for the ‘Big One’: an attempt to become the first registered blind person to SUP the Caledonian Canal, a.k.a. For those of you who missed the last issue of SUPM, my name is Dean Dunbar and I’m a registered blind adventurer. The Tonette, which phreak Bill Acker first used in 1968 in Farmingdale, N.Y., produced the right 2,600 Hz squeal if you took off its detachable mouthpiece and blew through that.Come see the blind man wet himself more like! My personal best in downwind had just increased six fold and the blind man was a tad uncomfortable. In the mid-1960s, a phreak in Los Angeles discovered that the Cap’n Crunch whistle that came in a box of cereal emitted a desirable 2,600 Hz tone if you covered up one of the holes before blowing. The first phreak to use a toy whistle for the purposes of phone hacking was living in Knoxville, Tenn., in 1955, when he happened to figure out that a Davy Crockett Cat and Canary Bird Call Flute made the correct 1,000 Hz tone that would let him into his local phone system. Once the phreaks figured out the patterns of these tones, they could insinuate themselves into the system. As Lapsley describes in his book-and in this episode of RadioLab-the network’s machines “spoke” to each other by emitting tones of particular frequencies and in particular sequences. The whistles worked because they emitted particular tones.
Blind man whistle phone free#
On the hunt for weaknesses in the system, the phreaks found a number of workarounds and tricks that would allow them to make free long-distance calls.
