Seachain an duine a bhíonn ina thost

I spent last weekend Up North, mostly attending the BUSA Canoe Slalom event held at the Four Seasons white water centre at the Teesside Barrage, but also visiting my friend Sarah from school.

Teesside is quite a fascinating place: there's a big dam thing making everything upriver navigable while everything below the barrage is tidal. This creates a big reservoir type thing above the barrage, about 1/3 of which is sitting above the white water section, waiting for the dam to be released so it can flood down the white water course.

Here's the barrage itself:



This is the white water course before lots of water was let down it:



You can see the fibreglass (or something) ridges in various points; these create the eddies and currents and stuff and are apparently attached to rails which makes them easy to relocate providing "an almost infinite" number of potential configurations according to the information board.

I don't really have a good photo that takes in all of the course when it's full of water, but this one gives some idea of what it was like:



You have to go downriver through the green gates and upriver through the red ones; quite tricky really.

So there now. Isn't that interesting? I liked the north generally, although it really is grim in some places, very flat and full of chimneys and train tracks. But Newcastle is lovely, so many huge bridges and lovely tall buildings. And I really enjoyed seeing Sarah and meeting her fiance Roberto, who is lovely. They're off to Peru on Friday for round one of the wedding ceremonies -- quite exciting really.