DUBLIN OR QUITS – DUBLIN BACK or DUBLIN FORWARD.

This is going to be very short and succinct (muted cheers, mutters of ‘bloody good thing, too,’ rustling of papers, and sound of eyes skim reading ahead to end).

Last heard of I was leaving Dublin whistling along to Miss You, and Start Me Up, a trifle tired and frayed around the edges but with the many hours of bus riding back to Malin Head in which to recover. The weather was not nearly as poor as it had been. So was merely poor in comparison to a normal late August day. Spent a night – again – in the wonderful Sandrock hostel – Rodney and Margaret becoming old friends at this point, and with the view of the sea and the guitar to strum.

The next day – 22 August – I set off on the last half of the trip – so some 600 miles ahead of me. The first hurdle was getting round Malin Head. Poor weather had stopped Sam for several days, and I’d spent almost a week not getting a window to get round in. It’s one of those points on the coast – being the most northerly, give or take a headland or two – where the seas coming in from the Atlantic get confused about which way to go and so mill around aimlessly like an unruly mob trashing things. A bit like the Mizen at the other end. Whilst staying on Malin I spent an afternoon with the coast guards talking about water safety, their work and so forth; Firstly it was great to meet three of the men – Pat Lynch, Manus Patten and Patrick Canning - whose voices I heard each day on the west and north coast reading out the shipping reports on the VHF radio. I’ll write about this at greater length when I have more time, but whilst I was there there was a sudden emergency with a small sailing boat sinking with three people on board off Clifden and I got a first hand experience of the team swinging into action calling up helicopters, reassuring the dunked sailors, guiding in the lifeboat – some of whose crew I’d met when I was Clifden down at the sailing club and when playing music around the bars – which launched and found the boat with incredible speed. It was all very reassuring.

I had also gone up to the Met station and met metrologist Sean Venn and chatted to him about the summer’s weather. Asked to sum up the conditions over the past months he thought very briefly and then reckoned that the summer had basically been ‘winter.’ So there it is – we’ve all be kayaking around Ireland in November and December, just with longer hours of daylight.

I got round Malin at first attempt – it was bobbly with an lot of reflected waves and some big chop but then it all smoothed out and I headed off along the coast into the afternoon and finally camped the first night back on the seas at a small beach, one of the few landing spots along the rugged, cliffy coast. A delightful little patch of grass by a stream and black, as I soon found, with little bastard black flies.

But I have a wonderful new luxury in my life, a one pint Kelly Kettle. I was given this by the Patrick Kelly of Mayo whose family manufactures them – visit www.kellykettle.com. Basically it’s a chimney stove – small and lightweight that shoots the fire made with a few twigs up the centre of the pot which contains water. It lights and blazes in any weather, takes almost no fuel other than a few bits of drift twigs or whatever and boils water in scant minutes. But it does so much more – I quickly discovered that I could cook on the little fire pan filled with embers, and in fact haven’t used my petrol stove since getting the kettle. And when the screaming millions of midges come out of hell to plague you/me, then you can throw some damp grass onto the kettle fire and set up a smoke screen. Oh, and you can warm your hands on it, and there’s a cheerful glow at night to sit round. Whilst left primed with twigs and a twist of paper the night before I can light it from my sleeping bag and get up to hot, fresh coffee. It’s a brilliant bit of kit, and weighs ounces. Everyone should have one. Or two. One of the small ones and one of the big ones. And it also has wonderful old-fashioned properties like allowing you to burn your fingers until you learn not to pick it up the wrong way. And teaching you elementary combustion lore. Every child should be presented with a Kelly Kettle at the age of ten to put them in touch with the real world and give them responsibility and let them burn their fingers and feel the pride of starting a fire properly and making a cup of tea or hot soup. But enough fan club gushing and back to the trip.

Sam was obviously the problem with this year’s crap weather. The very day that he finished his trip in Dublin the Azore’s High began to assert itself and the weather improved quite a lot and the winds though still strong were still paddlable and quite often from a helpful direction. It was still cold and wet a lot of the time, but a small price to pay for being able to put nautical miles under my keel. (yeah, I know kayaks don’t have keels, but if I’d written the technically correct ‘rocker’ then many of you would have thought it was a typo and….). The 23 was a stormer – one of longest days in distance, and at eight and a half hours non stop paddling in time; crossed the entrance to Lough Foyle, entered Northern Ireland and pushed on beyond Portrush to camp at dusk – and here’s a problem, the days were getting markedly shorter and I was often making camp in the dark if I’d started late to catch tides and currents. I camped on a storm beach below the Gothic majesty of Dunluce Castle. Woke to a poor forecast and a grey drizzly day, but I am a tiger of the seas now and pulled on damp neoprene, mounted my charger and set off into the waves that soon settled down to a gorgeous sunny day. Rounded the Giant’s Causeway – if you like all things hexagonal then this is the geology for you. And passed the Rope Bridge of Carrick-a-Rede – which is what is says it is, a rope bridge high above the waters crossing a chasm to a small island with nothing on it, all of which inexplicably forms one of the most popular tourist attractions in northern Ireland. I was picking up the very speedy current that accelerates as a significant proportion of the Atlantic tries to squeeze itself between the NE of Ireland and the SW of Scotland. It’s a free ride if you get it right. And I could see the Mull of Kintyre across the way – close enough to look like an easy half day paddle. And of course that very irritating song popped into my head and I found myself humming it as I paddled until I chose to stick my knife blade into my brain and take out the memory cells that hold onto vile songery with a few swift stabs. I camped in the most glorious scenery on the Antrim Coast. Though had a late dusk visit from the inshore lifeboat – I guess someone saw me, lonely paddling into the dusk and got a bit carried away and so I had a shouty conversation above the howling of the wind to the RIB crew as they hovered off the rocks. They seemed disappointed that I didn’t need or want rescuing; ‘are ye SURE you DON’T WANT US TO PICK YOU UP….REALLY SURE?’ It rained most of the night. And was grey and raining when I set off the next morning early.

Basically the tide and the wind did all the work – it was only looking at the map that evening that I realised that in just a few hours I’d done around 20 miles, at a speed twice my normal. But it did go a bit wrong towards the end when the wind blew up even stronger to a 5 gusting 6 and I was getting swept along in large waves and with no obvious landing place. With dark coming on. Until rounding Garron point I saw a small slip; I pulled in and hollered to someone I could see in a nearby house if I could camp on the waste ground. They got their husband to come and talk to me, who dashed my hopes by saying, ‘No, you can’t…’ before raising them to new and unprecedented heights by adding because it’s all rocks under the grass, so you’d be better off camping in our garden, and coming in for a beer.’ Brendan sailed this coast, and so we talked currents and buoyage whilst his wife, Pat, cooked me a huge fry, and Judith and her son Christopher chatted to me. And then to top it all, I was shown to a shower – well, needed but also a glorious luxury. I fell asleep, fed, clean and pink, lying on soft grass and with stars above me as the sky cleared.

I set off early the next morning, 26th, just past dawn to catch the current south. Smart move – as in another shortish day I made huge current assisted distance, crossing the mouth of Larne Lough in a nasty sea and wind, to stop for the middle of the day and let the winds blow out, parking my boat in Allain and Liz English’s garden slip in Brown’s Bay whilst I went off to have a long and leisurely breakfast with the Sunday papers, before continuing on into the evening. I camped on a small beach, I think – all becoming a bit of a blur at this point, even looking at the map. I was pushing hard as I became more and more aware that I was running out of time and that if I didn’t finish or at least get a huge amount of the remaining trip done before the equinoctial gales blew up in – what – early-mid-late September, then I might not get around.

The next day was similar. Still the current on my side. Still high winds, but still possible to keep paddling. And again a mid-day break of several hours to wait for the tide to turn, this time in Donaghadee. I was able to pull the kayak up right into town on a patch of sand in the harbour. I changed from damp stinky neoprene into damp stinky civvy clothes and went off and had two fried breakfasts. Finally towards low tide I went back to relaunch and set off again; bugger – I hadn’t realised that the whole harbour dried and the kayak was now about quarter of a km from the sea; it took me half an hour of dragging and hauling to get it down and launched, before I set off again. That night I stopped after dark, setting up camp on a small island, of Portavogie on a bed of shingle.

If you’re still reading this, you can see how the need to keep moving is turning this part of the trip into a paddle-fest with little in the way of distractions and ‘stories.’ Things did happen – meetings with remarkable seals, and dolphins and porpoises, and conversations with people here and there; but essentially I’d become the zen monk of repetitive paddling. Funny how time works; the first hours slunk by, slow minute by slow minute and then suddenly – WHHOOOOOOSH, zooooooooooooooooom – and five hours had gone by and it was twenty miles further down the coast. Which was good of time to do.

Another day – another paddle. Feeling pretty tired at this point, and I was now battling head winds and big seas. I appear to have got just a little fitter over the past months, as I can keep paddling away hour after hour at full bore without actually keeling over. Still I was pretty tired that night so dispirited that with the spring tides it was a long carry up from the low water mark in the dark, by torchlight. And I gratefully made camp on a spit of shingle. But then about midnight just was I about to go to bed I began to wonder just how high the tide might come at High water at about 1.30 am. I looked and pondered and went down to the coming in waters and shone my torch around looking for the tide mark and then finally reluctantly moved the whole bloody camp further back still onto a patch of nobbly grass. The next morning I checked where I’d had base camp 1. Not only would I have been flooded, but where my tent had been pitched first time around there was now a dead, decomposed and gut dumping porpoise lying on the shingle.

The next day was another eight hour plus current surf on one hand and paddle into strong head winds that late in the evening took me across Carlingford Lough and back into the Republic. I camped at dusk at Cooley Point. And woke on the 30 August to strong westerly winds gusting up to a 6. Westerly meant the winds were off shore, and I was faced with Dundalk Bay to cross, which across its mouth from point to point is about ten miles. I did some calculations and figured that the risk of the offshore wind getting stronger and me not being able to hold my course and getting pushed out to sea and across the North of England was unacceptably high. I gritted my teeth and prepared to inch my way up the north shore, into the sloppy wind driven waves and gusts that were strong enough to stop the boat dead. I shore crept for four hours to the head of the bay, then crossed over the entrance and then made a huge mistake. I hadn’t noted that Dundalk bay is extraordinarily shallow and very big. This is a poor combination. Rather like emptying a bath – when the bath is full there’s hardly any movement on the surface as the lower waters swirl down the plug hole, but as the last inches drain away suddenly all the water’s rushing towards the plughole and god help the hapless spider that’s been gently breast-stroking around. Well, reader, I was that spider. At first I exulted as with the wind and the current behind me I shot off down the miles of open bay before me. I even stopped paddling and had a bite to eat. But then, even though a few miles from the nearest shore, I suddenly found I could see the bottom a few inches below me. Well, I didn’t want to get stranded aground on mud for the coming twelve hours so I paddled out towards the shipping channel further into the centre of the bay where the waters were running at huge speed towards the open sea. I did some basic calculations – speed of ebbing tide, wind that was now sitting in as a solid force six off-shore, against distance across both tide and wind to reach the southerly point of the bay’s mouth at Dunany. With a rather sickening jolt I realised that I had very little chance of making it – I guessed I was doing something like 6 or 7 knots down the centre of the bay, and by the time I’d paddled the four or five miles across the bay I’d have been swept far out into the Irish Sea, and would be reduced to the shameful need to send up flares and wave my arms around and call the lifeboat (if my VHF was high enough above the waters to get a signal) and gnash teeth, and sob a little and flush scarlet with embarrassment, and if I was really unlucky and stupid (and I seemed to be both that day) end up capsized and drowning. This was not a pleasing scenario. So I decided to fight back a little. I turned the kayak back into the wind and current and for the next four hours wound myself inch by inch against the forces which so wanted to poke fun at me. It was like spending four hours climbing up a rope – arm muscles at full force, trying to stay relaxed, judging just how much energy I should expend in complex equations where I tried to come up with a paddling pace I could keep up for however long it took to reach shore whilst still trying to make some headway. The idea was that by inclining the kayak just a little shorewards and keeping paddling enough to stop myself losing any more ground than necessary the kayak would ferry glide over the hours. Well, it worked, but it was a worrying four hours, and I was too tired for any air punching exultations when I was finally inland from the headland and only a few hundred metres off shore. And then a strange thing happened – instead of taking my sorry arse shorewards into the approaching evening and setting up camp I decided that I had to take my fear – and I had been fearful – and keep going around the headland and prove to myself that I hadn’t been beaten by the sea and that I could overcome my own stupidity and that I was still competent to be out on the sea. So still in big seas, but close enough to the shore to know that I could stay in control I rounded Dunany point. And then there was another problem, with dusk approaching and with low tide almost reached and on springs the coast line was a huge distance from the water. Stopping anywhere would have meant a long carry of the kit, kayak and caboodle. So I kept going and going and going until finally I found some rocks a little closer to the shore than elsewhere and ran the kayak aground onto a patch of sandy mud and climbed out. Nine hours of paddling in big winds and against unpleasantly choppy and then nastily large waves, with only a couple of oat biscuits and a carrot. My legs staggered a little as I tottered around. Then in the dark I carried everything up and over an assault course of weedcovered rocks and found a tiny patch of grass as a drenching drizzle came in and I set up camp and cooked in the rain and fell asleep.

Surprisingly the next day I woke with a spring in my step and happy as the proverbial. I had time to kill whilst the tide turned, there was a cold wind and odd bits of drizzle, so I walked the few miles into the town of Clogherhead where I found a shop doing take-away breakfasts. And then the sun came out and I sat on the wall outside and ate and slurped tea, and then strolled back through harvested fields with blackbirds singing and poppies and lovely land-based nature. I thought I’d take an easy day but the devil was on my tail and I rounded the head with the current behind me and sheltered from the strong offshore wind by the sand dunes as I paddled along a few metres from the surf line and it was straight line travel, and so I travelled, down past the mouth of the Boyne river (once I’d planned to be there at the time of the Stones’ concert so I could have paddled up stream to Slane), and escorted by a flotilla of terns who may well have been showing their gratitude for the very happy day – it seemed so long ago – in spring when I had spent an afternoon as a volunteer watching over their patch of shingle where the colony nested.

And on I paddled through the day, untiring, and steely of gaze. Until I’d passed Skerries and had Dublin on the horizon and dusk coming in. Another long carry over seaweedy rocks to a patch of grass under a cliff. Up with tent, a view in the darkness across to Wales, the moaning and singing of the seals, Kelly Kettle lit and cooking away.

The next morning was the 1st of September, autumnal in feel though sunny and my birthday. I was going to give myself a present and make Dublin that day. Even though there was strong offshore wind. Long carry down to the sea across the rocks. Hopped in and paddled off. One of the problems is where to leave the kayak when taking a day or two off, and I was about to take a day or two off in the whirling circus of luxury and delights that is Dublin. I came up with an audacious plan: The Howth Yacht Club. Four hours of splashy paddling against and across the wind and I was pulling into Howth harbour, just as Eileen Murphy and Sean Pierce, both round-Ireland kayakers, were taking a bunch of paddlers out to round Ireland’s Eye. (check their trips at www.shearwaterseakayaking.ie ). The yacht club were charming and despite my unsavoury appearance and palpable odour gave the kayak house room in the park. I changed, packed up things to take into town, stuffed everything else into the kayak, and sloped across the road to the first café I found; a late afternoon breakfast and paper, and then when nourished and happy I took the DART train into Dublin, kit bag on my shoulder, stubble on my chin, hat on head and every inch the returning sailor.

Now after two days of R and R, some partying, meeting friends, downloading pix and writing emails, buying maps and a few oddments I’m ready to go back to sea again. So this is a sign off, before taking the train back to Howth and pulling on my damp wet suit and heading south, on the last leg. There is still anxiety as to whether I’m going to beat the autumn weather, and hope that I might get a clean run and lose no days to winds. Tune in to find out what happens next….