Paddle: A long way around Ireland

Part One

CHAPTER ONE

A Gut Feeling

T

HE GREY, SWILLING WAVES

that I’m paddling through are, what? – a foot high? – two feet? – six feet? Or, maybe, they’re just uppity ripples and better measured in inches? Even here, right in amongst the waves, I realise that I don’t really have a clue as to how big they are – and abstracts like feet and inches and miles per hour, and their metric equivalents, and even the more nautical fathoms, knots and Beaufort speeds, are not much help in getting a grip on confusions of water and air.  

Wet stuff, especially when it’s moving around and being frothed up by a stiff breeze, as it very nearly always is in Irish seas, can feel very big. And many times it is. Other times, you take a look and think it’s on the benign side, not worth taking seriously, and discover too late how wrong you are. Like jostling a small, mild-looking guy at a bar by mistake, and finding him full of close-wound anger and quick with his balled-up fists. Then – at a bar or at sea – there’s the shock of sudden blows and struggling and being thrown round and fighting back and coming out the far end with heart racing, wondering how you could have missed all the signs, and how lucky not to have got badly hurt.

Right now – day one of my kayak trip around Ireland – the waves are looking and feeling, well, quite big. And the sky doesn’t look so great, either. Everything I see in an arc southwards from the west back to the east is either sea or sky. Even the coast far to the north is no more than a thin, dark haze squeezed between more water and air. Everything in my long vision is monochrome grey. Close up there are splashes of bright, plasticky yellow, blue, orange and scarlet; the kayak, my buoyancy aid, the sleeves of my cagoule and the paddle blades.

And if I don’t have the measure of the waves, then I have even less idea of the size of the smooth Atlantic rollers rising under the kayak and lifting it slowly up and up and then slowly dropping it again. The waves are sharp little peaks knocked up by the local winds here and now. But the swell is a powerful heaving. A storm shadow rippling across the ocean from some long-past hurricane off the coast of the Americas that pushed millions of tonnes of water up into towering hills and then left their subsiding energy to oscillate through subsequent days and across thousands of miles. And as it travelled, the swell has picked up the earth’s own resonance from its out-of-kilter orbiting, and from the pull of the moon. Here, in the Celtic Sea, just off the coast of West Cork, where the sea bed is shallowing from thousands of feet to a few hundred, the rollers are running out of depth and so lifting even higher to corrugate the surface of the zinc-coloured ocean. Inshore, against the dark suggestion of the cliffs, I can see them running aground, but under me the rollers are silent. There is only the odd sharp splash sound as wave peaks of similar bulk and height smack into each other. Or into the kayak. It’s all just so much more stuff that I can’t measure.

The wind, though? Well now, that’s definitely blowing a force three. Unless, those are real white-caps and not just scummy foam streaks coming off the tops of the waves (the waves that I don’t know the height of), then it’s somewhere around a four, maybe gusting five. Of course, if only I was closer to the land – which would be about two miles distant, I suppose – then I could do some Beaufort Scale checks to see if the leaves are barely shivering on the trees, or smoke is being whisked sideways from chimneys, or escaped hats are bowling down streets.

I keep paddling. The kayak stretches fore and aft of me, so it’s like sitting up in a yellow coffin. The feel of its hard plastic under my arse, as well as the heft of the paddle loom as I dig the blades in one side after another, are the only solids amongst these shifting, immeasurable elements.

I’m still trying to make sense of my surroundings. Most of the waves muscling in on me look, I now decide, about the height of a coffee table. The bigger ones, every now and again breaking over the bow, are pitched about the height of a kitchen table, while occasionally one rises as high as a fairly substantial breakfast counter. The swells, meantime, I chart at the height of plump sofas, with their white surf flapping over the heavy waters like linen loose-covers.

Calibrating the seas in terms of furniture and upholstery helps them seem familiar. It makes the waters seem domestic and indoorsy, like paddling through an IKEA catalogue, rather than the threatening reality of cold and wet. I’m wrong about this, of course, but reassuringly wrong. Kayaking amongst these furniture-sized blocks of water I picture myself as a drunk making his way across a large room booby-trapped with dancing armchairs, scuttling three-piece suites, wobbly occasional tables, scattered bolsters and ruckled carpets. I’m likely to fall at any moment but, with a drunk’s confidence, I’m pretty sure I can make it from, say, the door to the drinks cabinet with no more than the odd lurch. In terms of what I’m doing now that means paddling from the Stags Rocks, which I’m just passing to seaward, and then onwards some twelve miles further west to reach Roaringwater Bay – around which there are, appropriately enough, a number of drinks cabinets, so to speak. MacCarthy’s. Bushes. The Jolly Roger. Caseys. The Algiers Inn.

Hello! He-llo! How are you? Lovely day, isn’t it? A bull grey seal is flopped out on a narrow ledge on the Stags Rocks, high above the splash of waves. He raises himself into a ‘U’ shape, his head peering down at me, the furled bunching of his tail flippers twitching skywards.

Don’t mind me. Just passing through. No, no, no, don’t get up, please, please, don’t bother, really… I greet him politely, aloud, glad of the company, feeling a little less alone to find him so at home out here, a couple of miles offshore.

The seal, exuding bad temper and bad breath, gets up anyway and undulates heavily across and down the sharp blades of rock, putting me in mind of a plump slug. He tumbles into the water with a surprisingly light splash and disappears. His head pushes up through the waves beyond the rim of rocks, stiff whiskers bristling. He gives me an irritated look. I provide him with a gruff, disgruntled deep baritone voice to answer me in.

Sod off, you yellow weirdo… I’ll come over and tear your nasty pointy little head off and stuff your stupid red flippers up your arse.

Barely into the trip and I’ve started talking to seals. As a seal. Talking to myself, in other words – and not in my own voice. Nor uttering what I would have thought of as my own sentiments, either.

It is early June and I’ve set off to kayak the whole way around Ireland. Ahead lie a thousand miles of these furniture-sized seas. A month and a half of paddling, perhaps. Two months? Or, depending on the weather, maybe even longer. A lot of talking to myself, anyway.

Ireland is only the world’s twentieth biggest island. Far smaller than Greenland, New Guinea, Borneo or Madagascar; smaller by half than the mainland of Britain. But twentieth place is still a fair ranking. Ireland is many times bigger than any of the Mediterranean islands – Crete, Cyprus, Malta, Sicily, Corsica – or even the two-country, Caribbean bulk of Hispaniola. Bigger, too, than Sri Lanka, which is roomy enough to accommodate herds of wild elephants.

Which means that kayaking around it, on your own, is a serious undertaking. So serious, in fact, that nobody had thought to do so until Tim Daly paddled himself into the record books in 1979. And, since then, you can count the solo kayakers on your fingers. Most people with any sense go in teams. Not that sense is always foremost in this particular pursuit. Take Sean Morley, who decided that his route must go outside all of the inhabited offshore islands of Ireland – meaning he had to loop out around Tory, Rathlin, Lambay and all the Arans, as well as Inishvickillane, the last inhabited of the Blaskets. Or Tetsuya Nogawa from Japan, who not only spoke no English when he arrived in Ireland in 2000 but navigated the coastline using a road map.  

All of which, I reflect, is encouraging. But on the other hand … one doesn’t know so much about those paddlers who set off to ‘go round Ireland’ and then give up. Those kayakers whose frail hull of dreamy optimism crashes into a sharp, pointy rock of realism when faced with the cold and the wet and relentless grinding. I sense that I’m thinking about giving up a little too much for comfort on day one. That I have some gut feeling I’m not going to make it. That it would take just one too-big wave, or even the sobering realisation of just how vast the sea is, to send me pulling for shore and walking away from the whole daft idea.  

And the reason I am thinking this is that I have already failed to kayak around Ireland. Failed rather miserably.

It had been a year ago, to the week, that the two of us – myself and my partner Elisabeth – had set off, paddling out to sea from the very same bay that I had left just a few hours ago. And I had been in the same kayak then that I’m in now – a plastic Necky Narpa. Mine was coloured the dull, glazed yellow of a burger-bar mustard dispenser; Elisabeth’s a matching red, like ketchup. A pair of recycled, squeezy condiment bottles, bobbing companionably along.

Back then we’d trained together for the trip, paddling out almost daily in wind, rain and frost through the early months of the year. We’d practised all of the safety manoeuvres – ‘T’ and ‘X’ rescues, rafting-up, wet entries, towing, assisted rolls – that we might use to save each other. Skills depending on two people paddling together that mean little now that I’m solo. We’d bought a VHF radio and flares, and a tent and a complicated petrol stove. Elisabeth had referred to the camping part of the trip as ‘cam-ping,’ pronouncing it with a gleefully emphatic note as if we were off to a summer-long Mardi Gras festival on a tropical beach.

Neither of us had huge kayak experience but, given luck with the winds and weather, I felt we had every chance of getting a fair distance around the south and up the west coasts. And maybe, if the weather was exceptionally good, a reasonable hope of making it right around Ireland. But getting around wasn’t that important, we’d told each other. It was to be a fun trip. Elisabeth had declared that we’d stop if it became clear we’d overestimated our abilities or underestimated the risks, or if there was unremitting rain and winds, or the trip became miserable. I had gone along with this manifesto, though deep down I’d made other vows. That if Elisabeth wanted to stop, then I’d keep going alone – whatever the risks, however awful the weather.

I didn’t mention this to Elisabeth because it was ‘our’ trip we were embarking on. But I should have been more honest. I should have owned up that, for close on three decades, the idea of kayaking around Ireland had been a touchstone for me, its plans blueprinted and rehearsed in my imagination many, many times, and new details added whenever I found myself looking out from a cliff path over an unfamiliar bay. It was a reverie to return to whenever I was landlocked or urbanised or had spent too long abroad. Because beyond any physical adventure it had become an idea of calibrating my ‘Irishness’, testing if this country where I’d been raised by English parents – albeit with a dash of Irish ancestry – was indeed my home. Just like the sea’s swell and its waves, I had been born in one place and brought up in another – and at times the passage had seemed a choppy one. But here was a chance to both explore and bind myself to my adoptive country. And it wasn’t a chance I was going to lightly abandon.

Elizabeth knew a lot of this, of course, but not the extent of my determination to continue, come what may. Which in retrospect was fortunate. For it was entirely down to me that our circumnavigation came to an end only four days after we had started.

The trip had started with much promise. For the first two days, the weather was fine and we made good progress, camping out on remote beaches with bottles of wine and ambitious meals and laughter, finding ourselves oddly at ease with the swells and seas. Then, pinned down on shore for a couple of nights, whilst we waited for high winds to drop so we could round the Mizen Head, I woke at midnight with an odd feeling in my gut. By dawn I was in sweat-popping agony. Mid-morning I was in hospital, unconscious, with a sign reading ‘NIL BY MOUTH’ over my bed-head and a nexus of tubes and pipes, catheters and IVs running into and out of different parts of my body.

The diagnosis was gallstones. I must have had them for years, it seemed, and ignored the symptoms whilst they  were merely uncomfortable. But then the gall gravel had shaken loose and turned my bile ducts and pancreas and other bits of internal plumbing into a dangerously infected tangle. That sounds oddly routine and could have been so, but there was a problem when the first-line antibiotics failed to work. A rather more serious problem when the second-line antibiotics didn’t perform, either.

The doctor was chatty but not reassuring: ‘To be honest, your stones are a bit worse than we’d like to see. There’s quite a problem in the way they’ve inflamed everything around them, and because they’re not responding to the drugs, well, actually that’s not so good … But don’t worry; we will find an antibiotic that works and then that’ll ease things. The pain is pretty bad, right now, though, is it?’

I nodded despairingly. I couldn’t speak.

‘Haven’t had gallstones myself, I’m glad to say. In medical school we were told it was like a combination of childbirth and a heart attack, which sounds bad enough already … and you’ve a few complications on top of that.’

I fell in and out of consciousness. Joint-locking rigours convulsed my body, leaving me shivering and juddering; then came wild temperature swings, where first the sweat ran from my skin in a steady, continuous hot flow, then I would feel frozen ice granules within my flesh. And there was fear, too. Fear of not living for much longer. Or, worse, feeling like I wasn’t going to live for much longer, but actually living for far longer than I could bear.

When I did drift back into lucidity, it was invariably far into the night, jolting awake alone and even more fearful. My co-patients were all elderly men, laid low by falls, or failed plumbing or senility. They filled the gloom with a sound-collage of coughs, farts, mumbles and sighs. I had the life-sapping feeling of being on an interminable intercontinental flight, going the wrong way across time zones to a destination I didn’t want to arrive at.

After two weeks I left the hospital – no longer a round-Ireland kayaker but an invalid, bent and frail, barely able to walk a hundred yards even with a stick, nor to hold a thought steady in my mind for more than a few minutes. It was as if I’d caught chronic elderliness from the men in my ward. And hanging over it all was that, while a final course of drip-feed antibiotics had pulled me off the danger list, I still needed an operation to have the gall-sac removed.

The waiting list was long, throwing me into six months’ of limbo, advised never to be more than a few hours from a good hospital. I started on walks across the hills that grew longer until I’d walked myself back to some kind of fitness. Then a few hours in an operating theatre undid it all. It was spring before I was pronounced fit by the surgeon. Though, fit for what? Not for kayaking round Ireland, that was for sure. I hadn’t even played a part in retrieving our kayaks, which for weeks lay abandoned in a field on the Mizen Head, before Elisabeth had them brought back to our starting point on the quay in Castletownshend.

And yet I couldn’t shake off the idea of the trip. It began to take shape again as a kind of rebirth, after the days of fear. And as the spring edged towards summer, my misguided, silent manifesto from the year before – to keep going alone if necessary, whatever the risks, however awful the weather – still had to be made good. Only, this time, there wasn’t much of a choice about the going-alone part. Elisabeth and I were no longer together, so I would be going solo.

CHAPTER TWO

Out of My Depth

T

HERE’S A GOOD REASON

why most round-Ireland kayakists paddle in teams, or at least pairs. It means that if they capsize they have a decent chance of getting helped back into their kayak, and if in trouble they can raft-up to rest or be towed to safe haven. Solo paddlers, by contrast, are entirely reliant on their own skill, decision-making and courage. Kayaking out at sea, unaccompanied, in poor conditions, is quite a risk.

As noted, I have quite a few other things against me as I launch again in mid-June from Castletownshend, chief among which is a lack of fitness and training. It seems hard to credit the lunacy, but this new attempt to paddle solo around Ireland is actually the first time I’ve been out at sea in a kayak since I went into hospital, almost a year ago. Not only am I unfit, but whatever kayaking ability I had is forgotten and unpractised.

Perhaps equally serious, I don’t know an awful lot about sea kayaking. The longest I’ve been at sea with a kayak previously is a week in Croatia. But that was on day jaunts in the Med – in summer and with friends. Ireland is a harsher assignment with its untrustworthy seas.

My other kayak trips have all basically avoided the sea. The toughest was a trip down at the very southern tip of Patagonia, a trip that took us along freezing rivers and lakes to reach the shattering of icebergs that had fallen from the snout of the Serrano glacier. With the cold, and the danger from the shifting bulks of ice, that had been mildly dangerous. But I’d been with people who knew what to do – and we stopped when we reached the sea, after floating around for an hour or two amid the cool toothpaste blues.

The other big trips were in a much more distant past. As a teenager, I spent a summer paddling out of Dublin in a fibreglass kayak along a flow chart of canals and rivers that carried me across the country, through the south of England and down the length of France. I had become hooked on kayaking, thinking of myself as a paddle-propelled Kerouac-esque beat-hobo, searching for sartori by going ‘On the River’. However, my silences stemmed less from Zen wisdom than from very bad French, and – more pertinent to this trip – when it came to crossing the Irish Sea and the Channel, I had taken ferries.

Then, several years after that – so in the mid-1980s, before the tumbling down of the Berlin Wall – I had propelled, with two friends, a couple of Pouch Faltboots, bought from a department store in Ulm, down the two thousand kilometres length of the Danube, from its Black Forest source to its Black Sea delta. Our naïve conceit was that we were on international waters and that we had the right of free passage, but this didn’t stop a Romanian soldier in olive-drab pyjama-like uniform from screaming at us to stop, and then firing shots in front of our bows as we kept padding, hurriedly, towards the Bulgarian shore. That trip taught me a lot about absurd politics, state police, the general goodness of human nature and surviving home-distilled spirits. But again there was no sea involved – apart from arriving at one, then stopping.

I comfort myself with thoughts of a man called Paul Caffyn, who paddled nine and a half thousand miles around Australia. Alone. I’ve only got a ninth of that distance to cover. Which I decide means that I only need to be one ninth as fit, one ninth as dogged, one ninth as skilful and only about ten times as lucky.

I do, though, rather wish that I had nine times less kit to load into the kayak. Whilst preparing equipment, there had been so many items on so many lists that at one point I’d made a list of the lists to keep track of them, which I headed Listing Heavily to Port. It became the frontispiece of a sheaf of papers itemising kayaking gear, safety tackle, clothing, food, camping paraphernalia, cooking utensils, cameras and numerous amusements. I realised the folly of it earlier this morning, trying to pack a car-sized load into a kayak. Eager to leave, I’d started unloading kit at the high-water mark. The water fell further and further down the beach, like an hourglass, and still I couldn’t get all the stuff into the hold.

The problem was that I hadn’t properly allowed myself to decide if I was off on an expedition or going on a jaunt, just seeing how things went. Whether I was a competent Ernest Shackleton figure victualling himself for months of deprivation, or a Jerome K. Jerome type who only needed a dog and a banjo to be happy?

A give-away that I had lost sense and perspective lay in the list I’d made for books, which was headed ‘Ship’s library’. The ‘library’ had a large waterproof bag to itself that bulged with Melville’s Moby Dick, Celtic nature poetry, field guides to flowers, birds, weather and stars, an Irish dictionary and The Oxford History of Ireland, as well as a block of novels swept up from second-hand shelves as a defence against the boredom of being pinned down in my tent.

And books weren’t the half of it. I had spent the previous months dreaming up situations that could only be resolved by, for example, a bunch of cable-ties, a sheet of waterproof nylon, a thick-nibbed permanent marker and a jar of Vaseline. And then, as if they were essential talismans for success, or at least a substitute for my lack of real seamanship, I’d felt compelled to go out and buy exactly those things. And many, many other things as well.

In the most unlikely of shops – a chemist, a garden centre, a garage – I’d seen supplies and items that I needed: Norwegian fisherman’s hand unguent; a sea-fishing line with spare feathered hooks; a folding corkscrew; a length of one-inch hose; twelve slim notebooks with charcoal-grey covers and rich cream-coloured pages; waterproof binoculars; a digital Dictaphone; three tin-whistles in the key of D, C and a particularly shrill one in F; a blue-and-white-striped woollen hat for cold weather; a kepi-style cap for sunny weather; a pack of different length bungee cords. Oh, and  an underwater housing for my camera that would protect it to forty metres of depth and therefore far past the point at which I would already have drowned.

In an actual specialist sea-kayak centre, and in a ships’ chandlers, I’d filled counters with more legitimate purchases: flares; Imray charts; waterproof tape; a paddle-float; roll-top waterproof bags; a map case; a deck compass, a long-john wetsuit; and lengths of rope in different diameters. Then there was the ‘Wardrobe List’. Warm clothes in case it was cold. Dry ones in case it was wet. Cool ones in the hope that it was going to be a long, hot summer. And into the same bag I stuffed shirts and trousers that would allow me to go ashore disguised as someone who wasn’t paddling around Ireland.

Standing on the beach this first morning of the trip – Friday 9th June – forcing stuff into the holds of my canoe, I curse all this folly. If I don’t launch soon, I will miss the favourable tide running westwards to Baltimore and will be struggling against the current. As with pretty much everything else to do with the trip, I decide things will sort themselves out once I got going. So I fix the two left-over bags onto the decks, fore and aft of the cockpit, rather pleased that the impulse buy of bungee cords has been justified so early on. I pull on my paddling clothes, bundle my shore clothing into a bag behind the seat, and inch by inch drag the hugely heavy kayak down to the water’s edge.

I know this first stretch of coast pretty well. I paddle down Castlehaven Bay from the spit of gravel at Reen, past the village of Castletownshend, where Elisabeth and I had lived together for nearly a year, and where – almost exactly twelve months ago – we left from to kayak around Ireland … or, as it turned out, just a bit up the coast.

Other boats are on the water already: the two small potting boats that fish out of the bay, a couple of yachts and, swinging from a buoy, an Ette – one of a local class of small, Edwardian sailing boats. In the summer there is still an Edwardian air to the big houses and holiday homes filled with families who have been coming here for years, and in some cases generations. This is where Somerville and Ross lived and wrote the Adventures of an Irish RM books, about the bemused English and shouty, tweedy Anglo-Irish aristos, and the moral virtues of having a good seat over jumps. Edith Somerville proclaimed: ‘I would put in a plea that the parish of Castlehaven may be kept as a national reserve for idlers and artists and idealists.’ She and her sisters had done their best to that end, combining a penchant for lounging around on the seashore in the nude with a practical interest in the new art of photography.

Leaving for the second time in a kayak, I feel some claim of my own to idealist and idler, but try to focus on the task ahead and think myself into nautical mode. So at the end of the bay, I say to myself, I’ll turn starboard, along a heading running roughly south-west-west, on an initial course of around 235º. Coming out into the open sea, looking back over my left shoulder I can see Skiddy Island behind me and, beyond it, the bulking of High and Low Islands, and, very far to the east, Galley Head. It seems impossibly optimistic to believe that, if I just keep Ireland on my right – er, starboard – and paddle a lot, that in several weeks’ time I will come upon the Galley, and then High and Low and finally Skiddy again on the home strait. Actually, it feels more like an article of faith, like being