A week ago or so me and some uni mates paddled Aira Beck. This is a short run (about 3km) of pure boulder bash with some class drops. The get on is a little village called Dockway, and the get out is on Ullswater. The get on started with a river which is about 10ft wide, and about 2ft deep in the deepest places. On the way down you come to some small rapids and drops which you basically grind down on the rock.
You then come to the first drop, a great little drop going into a slide, this drop is brilliant, you can get out and go and do it many times!
Just after this little drop was a continuous slide of about 50ft which was almost flat, it was very wierd, but very cool, especially when you do it backwards like I did. After this there were some more drops, until we came to a 30ft drop which looked sweet, the only problem was that it slammed into a wall, had a step which would over rotate you half way down and funneled into something the size of a tea cup! We walked this, further down there was also another rapid which was unrunnable, it was a very deep gorge which looked very cool from above, but the run in was also again about a grade 7!
We then came to Aira Force. We did not run this, for anyone who does know what Aira Force is, google it, it is very famous and def unrunnable! However we did run the drops just below Aira Force. The first was a drop double which was too narrow to boof, so you had to pencil, however this led you to being pinned by a rock in the middle of the plunge pool, when the water pushed down on the stern of the boat it popped you out of the pin and could run the second drop, again too narrow to boof so you penciled again.
The drop just below that was a slide into a drop, no matter how you landed you got sucked back, d****d a little and then spat out.
The rest of the paddle was a gentle grade 2 onto Ullswater where we paddled along to find where we parked the car, easier said than done as we couldn't remember where we parked the car. We ended up finshing in the dark, still had a great day though.
