Ryan Joyce

Fergus Scottish Festival Fun! We taped a GoPro to a twenty-foot Caber and tossed it...

During the first year of the pandemic, the Fergus Scottish Festival and Scottish Games asked me to help produce and film content for the virtual festival. We decided to have some fun with a twenty-foot caber and a GoPro camera.

We filmed and produced a ton of great content to celebrate what was supposed to be the Fergus Scottish Festival's 75th Anniversary Celebration. This was the first year of the Pandemic when things were heavily shut down.

Over the course of several weeks, we filmed content for the festival 5 pillars

Pipes & Drums, Heavies, Dance, Performance and Heritage.

On this particular day, we were filming Heavies and we decided to have a little fun. We taped a camera to the top of a twenty-foot caber and tossed it.

I was perfectly fine with a caber possibly destroying my camera, it was already damaged from a previous experiment involving height. I’ve lost and destroyed several GoPro’s over the years. There is one is floating in a river in New Zealand at the bottom of a seventy-foot waterfall.

First Attempt

We didn’t have many resources available to attach this lightweight camera to its much larger wooden tripod.

We barely got it attached before the camera fell off. In our defence, wood isn't an ideal surface for cloth sporting tape.

After hulling the caber into the air, the slightest breeze flopped our camera lens face down on top of the caber.

I was thankful not to be lifting.

Time to bring it back down.

Second Attempt

More tape.

We managed to secure it with reasonable confidence.

More lifting.

With the caber fully up in the air, Jamie had to slowly rotate the caber before tossing it to make sure the lens was facing forward.

And toss.

Perfect execution from Jamie.

Did the camera survive?!

We rushed to inspect the camera and to our surprise, it appeared to survive the impact. There was no way to know for sure until the footage is downloaded.

Overconfident in our success, we decided to test fate and attach the GoPro to the metal ball and chain and throw it a couple of dozen feet.

They call the 56lbs ball and chain “The Widow Maker,” for obvious reasons. Thankfully this was only 16 lbs attached to a four-foot handle.

Not for competition today, we were using it to lob a GoPro across a field for fun.

Great fun and another apparent success!