Seekajaktour: Umrundung Irlands im Seekajak 2015

Planning
Planning session in Crookhaven – after the first pint of guiness of course
We didn’t have a complete plan of the tour with daily mileage and stopping-spots in advance
as it would not have been very helpful with the conditions we had. So the main planning was
done depending on our daily progress and the next day´s weather forecast.
Anyway before describing our daily planning routine, here are some things we did in
advance:
Oilean: It was a good coincidence (or fate), that the 2 nd edition of this book described
almost every Irish island with camping-, water- and landing-facilities from a kayakers
perspective. It was just published in our preparation phase (end of 2014) for the trip.
This really saved us a lot of preparation and planning ahead. Especially the tidal
information and the details about the currents were extremely helpful for our daily
planning.
Experience: Mirco got all the details of landing spots and tour info´s from Justine and
Barry, who did the trip a few years ago. Although we could not land on most places
they landed or camped on (the weather they had must have been better), their
experience was a very valuable resource of making up our mind and planning the
next day.
OS-Maps: Being used to charts in our home area I was first surprised using an OS –
Map.
Although Oilean contains the grid reference for the larger scale (1:50000) the hint we
got to use the smaller scale (1:250.000) proved to be very helpful. Especially when
planning the crossings and the compass-bearings for the big crossings, the largescale-maps
did not cover the area we needed. So we did the basic planning on the
smaller scale and used it on our kayak-deck, having put in the detailed information
(landing spots / piers, etc.) from the large scale 1.50000 maps the evening before.
Actually, we had the detailed maps of the whole west coast which proved to be
© Christian Dingenotto 2015
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