Contingency Plan

Spent the morning watching Andy playing well, but being completely dominated by Novak Djokovic, I'm starting to worry that he may just be finding his limit in being third / fourth / fifth in the world which in itself is a significant achievement, but not one that Mr Murray will be content with. Here's hoping that he can find that little extra to take him up that level, but I'm afraid today with Novak in that form there was no contingency plan that would've helped him.

Our plans for the remainder of the day were to camp out on the bealach between Aonach Mor & Aonach Beag, taking the gondola up to 600m, over the summit 1221m then down to the bealach at 1080m. This was partly as a preparation for our Scandinavian Arctic trip in March. In the previous eight years we've used mountain huts and carried emergency bivi gear, but this year there is a lack of huts in the area we're going to, so we're considering taking full camping gear. Anyway whatever we end up doing there will be assorted contingency plans in place.

So when we heard the overnight forecast was for winds gusting to 85mph, there was a suspicion that a contingency plan may be required for this evening's trip. We ended up getting ourselves fairly high on the mountain at around 1100m where we managed to not lose any tents in the wind while we set up camp in the vicinity of a ski tow hut, which made a good shelter for cooking the evening meal (photo). Then around 20:00 we retired to our rather noisy tents with the knowledge that at least with us inside they'd probably not blow away.