Adventures

Hang On, This Looks Familiar....

2007-09-21T05:04:00.000-07:00

Now that i've actually finished paddling around Ireland, it's time for revisionism and tall tales, Oh, didn't i mention it before... i do seem to have muddled my way the thousand or so nautical miles around the Irish coastline. Somewhat against all the odds, i'd say. Certainly the slowest circumnavigation on record.

Though, actually, records for circling our great nation by kayak are a bit patchy. I've been trying to get a rough number of those who have gone around - but it's guess work at the moment. Relatively few, so few indeed, that i've met a fair few of the circumnavigators either during my own trip or at other odd times, or at least heard from or about various others. I met up with Sam, and was in touch with Marcus, the two Americans who went around separately this year. I've read Chris Duff's book: he is also American and went round quite a while ago (indeed i could tell you exactly when if i'd only raise myself from my chair and nip upstairs to have a look at the book...which i haven't). The three Dungarvanites flew round earlier this year and i followed progress on their blog. And Mick O'Meara, also from that neck of the woods went round with two others a few years back. Last year i also met the Japanese guy who paddled around not many summers before; his feat probably is something of a stand out as he wasn't a great English speaker, was navigating off a road Atlas (allegedly) and generally found Ireland fairly exotic and confusing as any of us might find Japan if we decided to - hang on, there's an idea for the next trip...! Then in Howth i met Sean and Eileen, both of whom have been around in the past. And there are numbers more.

But those numbers, added up, probably only come in at some where around twenty i've been told by people who might well know far better than me. By contrast some 448 people have been into space, and close on 1,400 have stood on top of Everest. In the case of every space voyager, and in the case of nearly all those who have trod Everest's summit, there were huge back up teams and massive logistics - but everyone who's gone round Ireland has merely pushed off at some point around the circle paddled themselves forwards for a month or two or - ahem - three and then climbed out of their little craft back at the point from whence they started. We could fit the whole reunion party of round-Ireland-paddlers into Dick Mack's in Dingle and still have room for the musicians and any passers-by; which now i think about it seems a pretty good idea.

So, anyway, i slipped back onto the beach at Reen in Castlehaven on 13 September having left on 9th June. No fanfare, no press, and indeed nobody to meet me which seemed fitting, and was - as it turned out - my preferred closing of the circle. I pulled all the gear out, and bundled it into bags, hoisted the kayak up onto Jim's kayak rack, made a phone call, then called up a taxi and headed into Skibbereen for a late breakfast and the paper. It's taken the intervening week to get round to finally updating the blog and bringing it to an end.

So as detailed in update, when last auto-written about, on the 3rd of September, i was leaving Dublin for Howth ready and keen to paddle south. Or fairly keen. Two nights of big city life, some wine-bar action to celebrate something or other, and the ten days of paddling down from Malin had all conspired to take a little of the vim and vinegar out of my movements. So,naturally i got a little delayed on route, what with dropping into Rathmines for a full Irish breakfast, and then spending several hours in an internet cafe writing up the trip from Malin to Dublin, and then ambling out - kit bag on shoulder - to Howth on the DART and having another cup of coffee and, then, having to pack everything into the kayak before launching.

With my usual luck this delay was all to the good. It may have been by accident but it meant that i finally pushed off from the Howth Yacht Club (to whom a big thank you for looking after the kayak over the weekend) in the late afternoon, yes, but just as the tidal stream turned south, and as the sun went all summery. I paddled out from the harbour, out past Ireland's Eye and turned south with the current and slid nicely down the east side of Howth Head, meeting Dave Farrell and Declan McGabhan who were kayaking up against me. As an observation, i met more paddlers within five miles of Dublin Bay by a factor of five than in the whole rest of the trip. Three women paddling from Rush to Portrane when i came down from Skerries, the aforementioned Round Irelander's, Sean and Eileen taking out their group just as i arrived in Howth, and now Dave and Declan. And there were to be more.

It was getting on for dusk though still with good visibility and i did do some thinking about the wisdom of setting off across Dublin bay which is the landing zone for ships heading into Dublin Port and boasts a confusing array of ferries, some of which go rather jauntily, especially the Sea Cat or whatever it's called. So, i could have gone right into Dublin Bay and then turned and scuttled across the navigation channel at its narrowest before making my way back out of the bay. In other words doing three sides of a square rather than just the one. Reader, of course i went for the one. I appeased myself with the faultless logic that if a bundle of large boats really wanted to - were actually trying - to run down a flighty little fella in a tiny kayak in tens of square miles of water what chance would they have? As much as an elephant trying to stamp out the life of a grasshopper in an expanse of veldt? The chance of a single piece of plankton being sucked into the gaping maw of a basking shark?

What, even, i further reassured myself was the chance that any boats would be coming in at just the time i was heading across the bay, anyway. None; zero; zilch, nada. Surely. So i plied the paddle and paddled onwards and lovely it was: the scribble of Dublin with the two spikes of its tall chimneys at Money Point was bathed in gold and looked particularly Monet-isd in his Waterloo Bridge and sunsets period. The sea was calm with the odd porpoise actually leaping, so pleasing was the evening. There were rafts of young gulls, and terns and adolescent guillemots and razor bills. And all was well with the world. Bar a troubling little dot on the Welsh side of the horizon. Which might have been a buoy that i hadn't previously noticed. Though if so, was a buoy that five minutes later had doubled in size; still a tiny dot on the far reaches of the sea's limit but not half so small as it had seemed only such a...hang on, now it's four times the size....and bigger again and whiteish...and looking more ship-like though obviously so far away that i'm going to be long across the shipping lane before it....doubles in size in half the time...i think it may be growing exponetentionally, (if i actually knew what that meant, or, indeed could spell it). It's now looking like a very distant tower block that has fallen on its side and is sliding across the ocean at a fair old rate. Now it's very definitely the Sea Cat thingy. The fast one. The big fast one. Though obviously there's no panic - given my earlier logic. In fact all i have to do is wait until i can see the whites of its sides, or more particularly one side or the other and then if it's the left/port side then i'll just speed up south a bit putting more distance between me and it. And if it's the right/starboard side then i'll just back up for a while and let it pass nicely distant before heading on. Except the bugger doesn't seem to have any sides, but rather is all bow. It's like that 'your country needs you' chap with the piercing eyes and pointy finger that follow you around the room wherever you are. I can see the wake creaming off the arse of the ship (funny how nautical terms rather drop from ones vocabulary when under pressure) and the bow wave building under its speeding bulk. Well, naturally, in the end it passes several hundred metres to the stern of me and i was fine. In fact i'd just kept paddling keeping in mind that elephant and grasshopper analogy.

But it was getting darkish at that point and my plan to try and get round Bray Head seemed a little pushy. Especially as Sam had talked so highly of Dalkey Island as a camp spot. And he was right. I pulled in amongst a mob of singing seals on a handy slip below the Martello tower (disturbing two more kayakers who had been drifting along listening to the song of the selkies). I had the tent up by dark, and the Kelly Kettle bubbling away and a meal rustled up even as the lights of the posh area of Killiney lit up amongst its villas and big gardens and waterfront mansions and architectural one-offs, which in the last of the sunset and a dark blue cloudless, star sharded night gave an air of Italianate grandeur to my view. The Kelly Kettle, by the way, has become my sole kitchen - there always seems to be enough drift twigs to light it up and i have made a little grid to take my saucepan, so the petrol stove has become so much dead weight, like much else which i don't use but keep carrying because it seems a bit daft to dump good stuff when i might as well as carry it to the end. In fact only at the end of the trip when i was sorting out gear i found that the petrol stove wasn't actually working any more having committed auto-ethenusia in a petulant huff at my neglect, my infidelity and my taking up with the Kelly tart.

And at this point of the trip, setting off on the last leg, i am thinking of the end. Though having to play complex psychological games with myself to cover all eventualities. The poor weather up on the Antrim coast and around Dundalk have reminded me that autumn and the equinoctial gales are due at any point and i could get storm bound for days with little warning. Yet the weather feels like an Indian summer so i'm also trying to get as much mileage in as i can in case it breaks, whilst not going crazy and knackering myself, and trying, too, not to rush so much that i don't even see the east coast as it flashes past. I somewhat fail in the last endeavour; two and a half months from Mizen Head to Malin and as it turns out (rather spoiling the will he won't he beat the weather suspense) i got back from Malin to Reen which is only a day's paddle from Mizen in two and a half weeks. Thus i either had four times worse weather at the start, was four times fitter at the end, came across four times as few distractions on the homeward leg, or merely smartened up a bit and stopped hanging out in bars quite so much. The down side was that i have four times fewer pictures from the last half of the journey, and possibly only a quarter of the stories to weave into travellers' tales. But when has that ever handicapped a doughty scribbler of 'what i did in my hols' schlokky anecdote?

I'm up at dawn the next morning, packing the dew soaked tent, getting into clammy cold wet suit, launching the kayak amongst the seals and heading of towards Bray Head and beyond to Wicklow. There's a bracing autumnal chill to the early morning, but also a cloudless sky and there's a happy making sunrise and the jolly sight of the little green train that - still pretending that we're in Italy or similar - winds its way along the coast and then through a series of tunnels around the head and paces me down the coast.

People had warned me that i would find long stretches of the east coast deathly dull as it's all flat strand and dunes and beach with little of 'interest.' Perhaps because my expectations were thus lowered, and given the sunshine and the bright colours and the good weather and a general feeling of well being i was actually charmed by the landscape. A few rare figures walked the miles and miles of embankment between the railway line running to Wicklow town and the sands; i rather felt that i was strolling with them, though initially at more of a brisk pace than the average biped. This changed though with the tide and even more so as the braking effect of a rather annoying wind sprung up from the south and thus onto my bow. My pace slowed to that of even the most obese and least sprightly of the distant strollers. And then less even than that. A granny with a Zimmer frame pushing a pram could have outpaced me. And i rather think did. The waves kicked up a bit as well and finally i realised that lunch in Wicklow town was going to be too hard fought for and instead i pulled up on the beach - a wet affair through light but still breaking surf.

What was almost certainly a hen harrier(the other possibilities being a common or rough legged buzzard or a black kite, none very likely at all, though equally oddities are becoming more common in Ireland with both an osprey and a sea eagle having been spotted last year around west Cork, and the former spending most of the summer on one estuary) floated by over the marshes inland. Then with the kayak between me and the wind i lay down and fell asleep like some endangered sea mammal, my slippery skin of rubber drying pleasantly in the sun.. A few hours of that and it was time to light the Kelly and have a sup of packet soup and a cracker or two with some tuna, peanut butter and honey. Having sat out the strongest part of the contrary current i remounted, splashed out through the surf and paddled on. I skipped Wicklow and instead rounded the lighthouse on Wicklow Head and began picking up a good southerly tide down to Brittas Bay.

The biggest problem with autumnal paddling is longer nights and shorter days. By eight i needed to start looking for a place to pull in and camp. It was that point where it wasn't quite late enough to make me choose the first reasonable or even possible haul out and so i ambled on looking at beaches and headlands and strands and finding none of them quite to my liking. This especially as i hate camping on or landing on or being on sand with a passion - you get soaked coming in through the surf - or worse - all your kit gets covered in sand - inside of wet suit, coffee mug, sleeping bag etc - and you can't get the tent pegs to hold. And nearly every 'obvious' camping place was a sandy beach. Until when it was nearly dark i found a crazily steep rescue boat slip ascending onto a steep headland with - strangely a backing of manicured lawns and possibly occupied holiday houses of a most superior stamp. I found a golf-bunker size of non-sandy, thickly matted grass above a cliff and hauled all my stuff up to my airy perch. I did note a slight but piercing smell of raw sewage but ate and slept undisturbed; it was only as i was packing the next morning - again everything dew soaked, but better than wet sand, still - at dawn and brewing up a quick coffee and generally trying to catch the tide whilst it was in my favour that i saw that a low-tech solution to posh house sewage disposal took the form of a cracked pipe running down from under the lawns and spilling out from the end of the cliff a few feet from my camp spot. And i'm sure that there's some kind of political or social metaphor in that for those who care to search for it. I don't.

The real problem with the shorter days/longer night thingy is that if the six hour cycle of favourable southerly currents is early morning and late in evening as they currently were (5th Sept) i can only get a few hours of each of them and have to break travel in the middle of the day, or have to prepare myself to paddle against the current for hours to get in mileage. Frustrating. And leads to tough decisions as provided by Arklow. By starting from Brittas at dawn i had a theoretical five hours of positive water travel to ride, and in only a light wind and without rain; but then i found myself at Arklow after two hours. Bummer! Did i continue paddling taking full advantage of the favourable stuff. Or head into the Avoca estuary for breakfast, a paper and little pleasures. Go on...take a guess.

The Avoca had a powerful current running out between the harbour arms which make a narrow corridor parked up with big fishing boats, and it was a half mile or so to get up to the town and the marina which is in a little cut and basin to the right. There was another cut and basin boatyard to the left on the way in which is apparently where the Asgard, Ireland's sail training figurehead boat, and Francis Chichester's Gypsy Moth II were both built. Whilst Arklow is also know for its own vernacular traditional boat, the Nobby. In the leisure marina i fell - so as to speak - on my feet. Lorcan the marina manager not only allowed me to tie-up in berth three on the pontoon (this is a luxury as requires the minimum of effort and means i can leave everything safely on board) but also offered the run of the fantastic shower block and a quick guide to where i could get a paper, breakfast and an internet blast. Shaved, spruced, dry-clothed and away from the kayak one could almost have mistaken me for a normal person. Ruefully i realised that there wasn't a chance of me getting back on the water whilst the current was still in my favour so decided to make the best of it all and lounge and enjoy and linger and procrastinate and enjoy every minute of my lost current.

I walked up the river bank - a number of pleasing wooden boats at mooring - bought two papers (well, as you ask, the Irish Times and the Guardian), and settled in for the full Irish and a number of coffees. I leisurely checked my emails and the weather forecast at the internet cafe next door and finally got back to the Marina. I changed back into my malodorous, damp paddling kit (and noticed the one draw-back to Arklow as a stop-off point, and one well know amongst the boating fraternity, seemingly; the river is full of raw sewage - very raw - and i tip-paddled my way back out to the open seas) and fuelled by bacon, eggs and caffeine set my back against the current and the head wind and paddled happily onwards.

There was more beach and the odd house and a pleasing view or two and then dead calm seas and sun - i think, as this day is a bit of a blank, seemingly without photos, diary entry or any other markers. I did seem to have knocked off about 25 miles or so; perhaps i was listening to the radio, my time-passing vice which is allowing me a huge insight into the Bertie-gate tribunal, and the Irish farming spokesperson who every time another English case of foot and mouth engendered by the ineptly run Surrey lab is reported goes off on his rant about Brazilian beef imports, and the various murders dotted around the country. Oh and to track the boom and bust retoric about house prices in Ireland and beyond. And hear talk of recession. And listen to more Iraq-balls. And paddle in time to 60s rock and jigs and reels and drive time pop. The radio is a little bit of a vice; but it does pass the seven, eight, and nine hour days spent on the water involved in a somewhat repetitive task pleasantly enough.

Can't actually recall where i camped that night; generically there would have been the duskish searching of the shore, then the landing, and the stiff climbing out of the kayak, and noting the chill evening wind and some muttering about autumn, and then the pschying myself up to make the six trips up and down between water and camp spot needed to carry up all the kit and the kayak...this often accompanied by me talking to myself, the bags, the kayak and the weather, in a loud voice or - um, actually, quite often - voices, plural, rather worryingly. And then in the unlikely case there was anyone around to listen to me talking to my many selves, there was a further treat as i stripped off my paddling clothes, allowing the wind to dry me, before pulling on my dry (and mostly they were) clothes, setting up the tent, beach combing for drift twigs, firing up the Kelly, looking at the charts for the next day's paddle and writing any relevant details from books or chart into my notebooks, calculating tides and currents, slurping down some soup whilst whatever inventive slop i was stewing up stewed, eating whilst listening to the radio, drinking tea, climbing into my sleeping bag, ambitiously arranging my books to read (Moby Dick still unfinished, a book of Celtic poetry good for dipping into, and a pick from the second hand section of a charity shop, the Ned Kelly novel-biog by Peter Carey to hand on this part of the trip). Actually i never read more than a few lines before turning off my head torch and falling asleep, though i usually woke at just short of midnight and again an hour later to hear the two shipping forecasts on RTE and the BBC.

6th Sept: a glorious morning turned into a day of Mediterranean intensity. The sky was azure, the sands golden and a line of dark trees backing the shore looked like those pines that ran along the Riviera a few decades back. I paddled happily, as with the passing days the favourable currents are running later into each morning and so by being on the water by seven or so i'm getting the full five and six hours in my favour. As long as i don't stop for breakfast in some passing village; but there are few enough temptations on this stretch of coast, so undistractedly I come up to Wexford Bay which apparently has some strong currents - but then don't they all, and though i haven't got totally blase about currents and streams i have come to realise that i've been caught unawares more often in places that weren't obvious potential trouble spots than i have been in these flagged up places. And indeed there is a strong current heading out, but it's slightly in my favour, as indeed is the large ship that charges up the channel usefully showing me which bits of the confusing landscape of mid bay sand banks and distant spits and so forth are which. Some very large seals lie on the yellow sands far out in the bay.

I'd made good time with the tide but it was both burningly hot and i was wearied after the past three long days and so i ducked out. I closed on the spit that is Rosslare Point, saw a gorgeous, sun washed beach on the point, pulled in for a bit of a rest and almost unnoticed the afternoon had flowed away and it seemed as good idea as any to make camp. Even if it was on sand. Ah, but what sand; warm and sun-gilded and low lying so that in the morning all i had to do was drag the kayak a few yards to have it in the water on the top of the tide ready for me to be sucked round Carnsore point and well on my way. Though there was a mild drama that night when i saw a succession of flares going up further along the point. My first thought was that they were fireworks or something similarly fun based. But then my conscience niggled at me and i thought how i'd rather hope that if i'd blasted all my flares into the air and someone had seen even one of them that they might just do something. And besides it's always fun to call 999. Which i did, getting the centralised switchboard who asked me what i was on about, and then put me onto the coastguards in Dublin who told me that the Rosslare coastguard were training further along the beach. I think that morally that might have scored me a half point for future play.

I could see long lines of trawler-dredgers going round and round two buoys the next morning scuffing up some shellfish species or other, and the two bulks of ferries departing the ferry terminal; one to France, i guessed, and the other to Wales, i knew. I mused over how only a few months before (as noted in the very early pages of this blog) i'd come in on the same Fishguard ferry, looking out of the window and noting the size of the waves and wondering what it would be like to be paddling through them. And, lo, here i was doing just that.

The ferries having cleared it seemed a prudent time to dash across and soon i was down on Carnsore Point with another great field of windmills (i know nothing of these - there were seven on a bank off Arklow, and another huge amount near Cahore point - near where i spent the night i couldn't remember, but which i can now - a delightful shingle beach under a low cliff with a Mediterannean sunset and little fishing boats and ample driftwood for a fire and one of the happiest nights of the trip; isn't memory a funny thing; i could reel off every minute of some of the unhappiest nights of the voyage, but this, the jolly, warm joy filled one....?)

The beaches beyond here are another memory teaser; as a five and six year old roughly around the time that the Beatles released Rubber Soul, Revolver and Seargeant Peppers, i spent family holidays near here at Tomhaggard, and one of these long stretches of sand must have been where i enthusiastically dug sand into heaps, and ran in and out of the water and crunched my way through biscuits with sand dusting. But which one?

I got to Kilmore Quay, a busy fishing port, with a stiff €10 launch fee for all craft from the slip, and a marina which i tied up to instead with full permission. (I'm a complete hypocrite about marinas - against them in every way until i paddle into port and find i can just moor rather than having to pull out and worry about security; so as pleased to find one as is everyone who is less hypocritically against them. Ah, live., eh?). The marina is mainly full of small sport fishing boats, and one putters in just as i'm changing into shore clothes. Two large seals follow the boat into the Marina and then throw themselves high out of the water to grab mackerel from the hands of one of the fishing captains. It's like something one might find in Florida with dolphins, or more like those jumping salty crocodiles in Australia.

I find a shop and re-provision, aware both of what i need but also wondering if i wasn't able to get away without another bottle of honey if i was only going to be another week on the water. Which is a thrilling thought, in some ways. I have a pint, a huge bacon baguette and a coffee in a bar, and then find an internet terminal where i mainly check the weather. The forecast is so-so, but the weather outside in the early evening is glorious - some people are shirtless, girls are in short dresses and tee-shirts; it's still warm at six as i paddle out, passing the Saltees (i'd come in over St John's bridge a strange shingle underwater, wave-throwing 'bridge' which runs most of the way out to the little Saltee), and entering the wide bay to the west to look for a camp site. I suddenly remember reading about two small islands mid-bay and see dark shapes in the far off, and make towards them arriving at dark. I'd also, though, forgotten that they were bird sanctuaries for the least continent and fastidious species of sea bird and they were one of the least prepossessing camp sites of the trip, but with dark and being a fair bit off shore there was no option. A long haul up over a tumble of seaweed covered rocks, and then a thin strip of bumpy, guano splashed shingle that seemed to be right on the limit of high tide, whilst the interior offered no hope with it's impenetrable weeds, briars and stinky abandoned shags' nests. The littoral held the bodies, bones and feathers of those chicks of various species that hadn't made it. I camped on the shingle...

...and woke to a thick fog. It came and went and then clamped down. I had a longish crossing to get to Hook Head and the forecast was for off-shore winds rising in strength. I packed, - cold and damp, everything - launched and took some compass bearings and paddled up to check current against buoys that i found and made a safe 'under' bearing to Baginbun Head. It was eerie but also rather enjoyable in the fog and there were occasional moments when it thinned enough to give me a glimpse of something to back up my compass route against. And then it cleared altogether after a few hours and i was roughly where i expected to be and a while later i was rounding Hook Head in bright, hot sunshine and shooting across Waterford Harbour and landing at Dunmore East.

Another deja vu moment; there was a feeling of familiarity which i couldn't place, until i remembered that i had holidayed here with friends when i was about ten, for a week of sailing and swimming. And the long hot summer days of childhood were given another go; it was probably the best day of the summer. Recklessly i tied the kayak up to a bit of sheltered shore by a boating centre, figuring that sudden squalls, waves or wind were looking unlikely, and still in wet suit and paddling stuff walked through the docks, climbed the steep steps up to the 'town' and got a paper and then sat outside in the sun with a breakfast and coffee at a small table overlooking a world with which all was right. And i chatted to a bunch of divers at the next table, and we came round to my the opinion, which i may have mentioned earlier, but if i haven't i should have as it's the mainspring for me doing this trip, which is that the last great adventures you can have in Ireland are on the coast and at sea; i see Germans and Dutch cycling around Ireland dodging huge SUVs tearing along narrow country lanes and think, sorry folks, you're twenty years too late, driving itself is a pointless and frustrating occupation anywhere in Ireland from a pleasure point of view and walking is less and less attractive as fewer and fewer land owners are willing to tolerate people marching across their acres. So, ironically, the only good 'road' trips one can make in Ireland are to sea (which is kind of a full circle thing given our maritime past) or in the sea, or on the shore and into the water, or below the surface.

And then, heigh ho, i strolled back down again after a few hours and set off gently paddling up the Gold Coast, a stupendous surprise for me, not knowing about it. It's like that bit of coastline in the James Bond film which is somewhere in Thailand? and is all towers of rock and fantastic arches and deep interconnected caves and so forth. Well that's what this was. And i drifted and paddled along in the late sun happy as a happy person. There were two lads out on sit on top kayaks fishing away, and then i met another trio doing the same. one of whom was Fergus Power who went up to Iceland to kayak with Mick O'Meara a few years back. They were trying to haul out mackerel for a barbecue and getting a few.

I paddled on beyond a few more towers and past hidden beaches and through a tunnel and an arch and then found a shingle beach to myself and landed and began to set up camp which is when two dogs arrived and i prepared myself for a stroppy landowner and instead met ?????? an architect who lives atop the cliff and who was coming down to cast a spinner or two. The mackerel are boiling i told him. As indeed they had been when i'd paddled in. We chatted for a while, then he fished whilst i set up my camp and threw sticks for the dog. And finally i cooked up in the still night, listening to the fire crackling and the water bubbling.

The next day was a perfect Indian summer dawn - the rising sun hit the beach as i packed and set off. But the day got worse. So i can remember little about it except the rising off shore wind and listening to the radio when i could and then a long and choppy becoming big waves and wind in the face crossing of Dungarvan Harbour when i wondered if i hadn't been a little bit too ambitious and was about to get into another Dundalk Bay type scenario. But i got across okay, as one does and rounded Helvick Head and then Mine Head and then with evening coming on and feeling tired i followed the coast line looking for a good camping place, and i guess i must have found one, though again my memory fails me at this point other than recalling it was a shingle beach found at dark and that i was backed up against a cliff and rather hoped that the wind didn't start blowing onshore at high tide in the early hours and soak me and wash all my kit away.

And the next day was windy and drizzly and cold though not actually bad but looking like it could go that way, and i had to cross Youghal Bay which the River Blackwater somewhat rushes through, getting mixed up with some shallow sand bars in the middle of its expanse and making for another of those places that people had warned me to be careful off. This time as the wind was rising from the west and so was offshore i played a little safer and headed inland, into the bay and into the wind for a while until i could get a good angle on the headland. But the wind never got worse, i rounded the head without a care and was into Ballycotton Bay where the wind began to rise again. Again i played safe, adding on a few miles to head into the bay to get a better angle on Ballycotton village. I was back in Cork now, and back on coastline i knew. A long and wet haul across the bay and i was surfing into the harbour. Ballycotton, like Dunmore East, rises high up a hill above the harbour and then straggles along a road going inland. I needed somewhere to put the kayak whilst i went ashore. The quay was being expanded and was full of heavy machinery, small beaches and quays looked insecure, and so i landed beside the Lifeboat station slip and went into to ask if i could leave my craft on the scatter of sand by the slip for a few hours.

Inside the coxswain, Ian Sheridan, was putting life back into some engine part. And the RNLI came to the rescue; within minutes he'd helped me drag the whole kayak and contents up the slip to the station door ("It'll be safer here."), showed me the shower room, said he was off to put the kettle on and left me to scrub, shave and generally tart up. I joined him in the operations room; he'd just been going over the chart and reckoned i had just on sixty miles to get to the end of my trip. He was from Howth, full of great stories about lifeboat life; amongst them, a new directive in the light of the growing numbers of kite surfers is to cut the strings as soon as they pick up the boards and sails - one lifeboat man lost a lot of his hand and others have had fingers and palms sliced open and cut into by the strings. And tales of drug pickups at sea, ungrateful rescuees, big storms and the rest. He naturally as i've found wherever i've ended up on Ireland's coastline we knew people in common.

I said i was going to walk up town to get a few provisions before setting off with the tide turn. In turn he offered me the station to sleep in if i wanted to make an early start. With the Blackbird pub opening at five it was a tempting idea and i left my options open. I walked up to Skinny's Diner for the all day breakfast. Then i galvanised myself into action with a second shot of strong coffee; i couldn't guarantee the weather lasting and once the winds picked up i could be in for weeks' of gales and it would be frustrating to be stormbound just a day or two from home - i decided to press on. But as i was walking down the street i suddenly half-recognised Rosin, the daughter of a friend, Rory, coming down the street towards me; much more miraculously she full-recognised me and the next minute i was in a garden with a beer, waiting for Rory who just happened to be on his way down to go out to fish. A wonderful coincidence, though the weather worry, and only that, gave me the strength of will to turn down the offer of a bed for the night, a second shower (undoubtably needed), food and a chance to catch up on news and play a bit of music. So, Rory and his crew chugged of in their boat to catch mackerel and i dressed once again in my noisome paddling rubbers and launched down the slip and headed west along the coast. I found a chink in the rocks that put me onto a shingle beach, just above high water mark and with a fuel bonus of Kelly Kettle twigs and huge amounts of both vile and interesting debris on the storm wave line. I put up the tent in the dark, weighing it down with rocks and sticks buried in the shingle rather than fixing it down with pegs, set the kettle ablaze and mulled over the fact that if the weather held i was only a few days from the end of the trip. I was caught in the cleft stick of wanting to finish and wanting to continue, though with the year running into darkness and chill and howling winds on the horizon the former took practical precedence.

I woke to a spectacular sunrise, packed and had the luxury earned by risking making camp so very close to the high water mark of only have a few steps to load the kayak up as it sat on the water's edge. Seemed that i might after a thousand miles or so have finally got the hang of the tides and currents lark. I hit Power Head on the east of the entrance to Cork Harbour and then rather like someone preparing to dash across a motorway put my head down and paddled the couple of hours across to Robert's Head. There was little traffic, and it was all small fishing boats, though a herd of small pilot (?) craft with blue hulls and orange superstructures came out past Roches' Point and milled around seemingly waiting for something. The something was - i guess - the destroyer or similarly naval vessel i saw steaming along the horizon from the west later in the morning; nationality unknown.

These were all very familiar waters. I'd run a windsurfing centre inside Cork Harbour one summer, quite, on reflection, some time ago, and i'd sailed in and around the harbour at different times. I'd lived in Cork city opposite the quays for a number of years, and recalled the ships coming in, as well as the ferries i'd taken first from in the city and then from Ringaskiddy when heading to England over the decades. And from Robert's Cove west to Oysterhaven i was on coast that i'd kayaked, climbed, walked, swam, explored for season after season when i'd been working in Oysterhaven as a windsurfing instructor, and outdoor trainer and management trainer. I started recognising actuall rocks and caves that i remembered, and recalling the personal anecdotage of a long and happy period of my life, intensify as i saw the Soverign Islands ahead and as i took the inland turn into Oysterhaven Bay and paddled up to the Oysterhaven Centre to say hello to Oliver and Kate whom i used to work with.

This was all a bit of a root around in my memories and a trip down memory estuary. I pulled up the kayak high enough to be above the rising tide. School groups were heading out to sail, kayak and generally get wet and learn something about team building and self reliance. I headed into the reception, from where i could see my kayak and its relation to the rising tide on the beach CCTV monitor, a new bit of technology. Talking to Oliver and Kate - whose day i totally disrupted - felt familiar, making the rest of the trip that had gone before suddenly seem less substantial. Pitting years of familiarity up against a few months of novelty.

It was beginning to feel like the beginning of the end of the trip. But there was still the Old Head of Kinsale to get round, which pokes so inconveniently far into the sea that it creates rips and currents that have a bit of a reputation. My plan for that night was to get to 'this' side of the old Head and then round it on the morrow. But fuelled by Oysterhaven pizza, bean salad and coffee i found myself closing on the head with light still in hand, and even better realising that it was calm enough to head into the eponymous Hole Open Bay and go through the Open Hole. There is a bit more to this than such a simple phrase suggests. Or perhaps there isn't. The Old Head at i's narrowest has three natural tunnels that cut right through to the other side, saving going round the head itself and thus cutting down on both time and risk (and possibly engendering another question on just what 'going around' Ireland is defined as). But - to tell the truth - i'm not over keen on long dark tunnels especially when it's getting dark and when of the three tunnels all i have heard is that one is good and clear, one is chocked halfway through and impassible and the third is meant to be navigable for a kayak at highish tide; what i haven't heard is how i'll know which tunnel is which. And you can call me a wimp, but i don't fancy getting half way through a tunnel and finding myself aground in the dark and having to Braille my way out. In fact i've almost convinced myself that i'd much rather go round the head, and that only partly because i can't seem to find any tunnels let alone three of 'em.

But then suddenly in one of the many dark caves in the cliff wall that i'm passing i notice a small, exact square of light in one corner of its receeding darkness - it's either a very small exit hole on the far side or it's a bit of a long way through. Dusk is on its way. To hell, - both metaphorically and according to popular Grecian myth's depiction of same - and i paddle in. It might be any of the three, but at least i can literally see light at the end of the tunnel. The walls glisten and then grow darker and then i'm paddling in your actual dark save for the dull small patch of light ahead. And then it's growing and it's obviously big enough for me to go through, indeed amply so, and then a few more paddle strokes and a helpful surge of water and i pop out like a grinning champagne cork on the western side of the head and i'm heading west. This is (and sincere apologies for the personal turn this blog has taken from its even handed, objective former self, ahem!), even more nostalgia - the coastline where i spent my boyhood years - climbing and exploring and bird watching and swimming and having adventures, sometimes with friends and sometimes alone. And i recognise tiny little cliffs that i can recall being frozen on whilst i tried to find the next handhold whilst i scaled them. And the small beach where i found a storm beaten, dying shag that i carried home dead and then practised my keen but amateur taxidermy on. The ledge where i'd swim from, above a cave out of which once exploded, 'putting the heart across me,' a seal that had been up on the shingle at back in the darkness (ah, there's that watery cave mistrust in embryo, perhaps?). And where when i was a little older i'd bring friends on moonlit nights with bottles of wine to watch the silvery path of light across the sea towards the Barrel Rocks that with its low wave washed bulk and warning pole stuck straight up meant that in my younger years i'd thought of it as an oddly permanent submarine. And then at dusk i arrived at 'my' beach - where we'd come for years as a family for evening picnics after haymaking in the summer, and where as kids i'd played with friends, and where i launched my attempt at a windsurfer after seeing a picture of one in an American magazine which disappointingly refused to surf, sail or indeed float with my weight on top of it.

I landed by the old boathouse and started making camp, and just as i had the Kettle lit and was noting that there was a real September chill in the air a flash of torch marked Tasha whose family live by the beach coming out to welcome me in with a apple and berry pie. We sat and drank tea and then we walked back across the rocks to the beach - rocks and pools and paths i still knew inch by inch after decades or running and climbing and shrimping across and through them. Or perhaps didn't because as i returned to my camp i slipped on one rock, tried to save myself by a goat like leap to another one, slipped on that and skied into a knee deep rock pool. I sloshed back to my tent and fell asleep to the sound of the surf. And with the regular seven second flash of the lighthouse on the old Head that i could see on clear nights from my childhood bedroom (or do i just mis-remember that i could).

I woke to grey. I had camp down and packed into the kayak when Tasha - ah my gratitude - arrived with a breakfast thermos of coffee. A pod of porpoise undulated across the sea, and then a dolphin or two jumped further out. Caffeined to the hilt I pushed off into the sea to join them.

I was now crossing the entrance to Courtmacsherry Bay, and could look inland to where i'd spent most of my years as a boy. I'd thought that maybe i'd paddle into the bay and cruise around Harbour View, perhaps visit a few old friends, even head under the causeway bridge and up the estuary to the Kilbrittain stream and actually kayak on the waters where i'd spent hundreds of days and evenings from when i was about eight onwards in various home made boats, and rafts, or fishing for tiny trout, or falling in or sitting and talking and dreaming about heading off on trips. I thought it might have been instructive in some kind of way to have the adult-sized kayak filling - as it would have, almost side to side - the tiny stream of water that seemed big to me as a child. But there was no time for such self-absorbed diversions - i could feel both a change in the weather and the end for the grasping if only i'd put in some goodly paddling. I set off paddling in as goodly a fashion as i could muster.

I passed Horse Rock - the black chunk of rock that i'd been told by my father was so called because a shipwreck had stranded horses on it and they were kept alive by men rowing out bales of hay to them, which as a seven year old i struggled to disbelief - and on which there was a seal that slipped into the water. Then there was Seven Heads and the wind going up and down and the sea getting lumpy but made bold by the thousand miles behind me i still decided to cut straight across Clonakilty Bay to Galley Head. Galley Head i saw to my stern when i left Castlehaven three months or so earlier. It was a wet old push to get to Galley and on the far side there was a reef that threw up a breaking sea that i splashed through, whilst thinking that though i couldn't rightly recall anymore i rather thought that this size of seas would have seemed worryingly large and unpredictable to me only a few months back and what with being mixed in with being off shore against big cliffs would have made for unhappy paddling, whereas now it didn't seem to bad at all, in fact positively pleasant seeing as how all the waves and current and wind were mostly behind me and therefore giving me a free helping hand. And that therefore perhaps i'd learnt a little about paddling in the past months.

Now i was caught on the triple horns of a dilemma - a sort of trycitops of a dilemma. I could head onto Baltimore, stopping at dark wherever it happened en route, for an arrival tomorrow thereby overshooting my starting point for the sheer hell of it. Or could just go to Reen, the spit of stones and sand and mud where i'd actually set out from and which i could just reach before dark and thus finish the trip that very day. Or i could stop anywhere from Galley on and make my decision in the morning. The latter option seemed pleasing and i toyed with the idea of heading into Glandore and getting a bite to eat and a pint, but realised that really i wanted to be alone and savour the last hours of the trip and revel in the glorious sunset. I crossed over to Rabbit Island and made camp on my own little deserted paradise. I set up my tent between the two ruined houses on the inland side and then walked to the south beaches to pick wood and look across to High and Low Islands which had been part of my paddling grounds for one happy half year, and then look beyond them at the sea rolling out to the horizon. It was a perfect evening. I cooked up the most luxurious of the ingredients left in my stores into a haute cuisine slop; the tuna in OIL! Three spoons of peanut butter. The good rice. Two packets of soup. It was a fine example of my stew making. I sat outside the tent with a mug of tea looking up at the sky and the stars listening to the waves slapping on the shingle beach. Later in my tent i listened to the weather forecast; pretty much whatever came up now i'd be able to get back to Reen in the morning. And even if i had to spend a day on Rabbit Island, then that was just extended pleasure. The forecast suggested that the next day was going to be poor with rising winds from the south west. I fell asleep planning to head to Reen the next day and not onto Baltimore; i'd arrive back where i started from and not beyond. Why not?

During the night i heard a resonant gnawing sound from the canoe. Twice i got up to investigate. Rats and rodents had been flagged up as menaces on so many of the islands around Ireland that it seemed a little hard if only an hour or so from the end some rat gnawed a hole in the bottom of my kayak. The sound continued on and off all night, and i woke on and off all night. In the morning i found that an apple that i'd left under the netting deck 'safe' had been gnawed through the mesh - a real country rat as there were plenty of far more luxurious foods around for a lot less work if his tastes had been a little more sophisticated.

The morning was cold. But then the sun came up. So up, indeed, that when i finally pushed off it was - for the first time on the trip - without my jacket and with bare arms. I skulled over to High and Low Islands and drifted amongst their rocks and surprised seals. The bad weather wasn't in yet and i didn't want the trip to end. I headed across to the rock at the mouth to Castlehaven, mentally ticking off landmarks, pausing to drift for long minutes, feeling the sun on my skin, licking the salt of my lips, hearing the calling of the gulls, watching the odd comorant or shag pop to the surface and then snake back down into the depths again..

It suddenly struck - and struck me as highly humorous - that i was coming back into Castlehaven from the opposite side to the one i'd left from. When i'd tried to define the trip before starting out i'd claimed that i wanted to do nothing more than turn right - or starboard, indeed, or west, if that's your fancy- when i departed Castlehaven and then just keep paddling until i could turn right again and find myself back again in Castlehaven. And that was what i'd just done. What a really silly idea.

Worth a Thousand Words and can Launch a Thousand Kayaks

2007-09-17T07:10:00.000-07:00

The four following pix are just a sop until i get down to writing - er, um, well somewhere around four thousand words to update the last of the trip from Howth to the finish at Castlehaven. Because finish i have.

The first pic shows the crap weather i've been enduring over the past weeks.

The second shows how very light i was travelling and how i became more and more shipshape and Bristol fashion with ever passing (nautical) mile.

The third shows either that i was actually on the water at least once in the past three and a half months - or a new found adroitness with Photoshop.

And the last is a triumphant grin at pulling a fast one on geography and geology; rather than battling my way round the Old Head of Kinsale i headed into Hole Open Bay which does what it says on the tin - there is a narrow, dark and rather claustrophobic tunnel that burrows right under the head. I shot through it and saved myself an hour's paddle, some sloppy waves and found myself on the homeward leg.

In the final two days i kayaked round about 100 kms in two shots - didn't want to get to the end that speedily but with autumn coming in felt it would be peeving to get caught by gales only a few miles from the end. But the forecast's had all the accuracy of the previous few months; it's still gorgeous weather here in West Cork and i'm getting used to sleeping under roofs again.

Instead of paddling for x hours every day am now involved in the far less rewarding arm activity of typing for similar amounts of time each day. So there will be a final blog update here in the coming day or so. Until then...

2007-09-17T07:06:00.000-07:00

2007-09-17T06:58:00.000-07:00

2007-09-17T06:51:00.000-07:00

DUBLIN OR QUITS – DUBLIN BACK or DUBLIN FORWARD.

2007-09-03T06:22:00.000-07:00

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….

SHIRKING THE PADDLING THING – AGAIN.

2007-08-20T15:13:00.001-07:00

If you’re in anyway interested in sea-kayaking, then this is not going to be the blog entry for you. I’ve been – not for the first time – diluting the minimum amount of actual paddle action required to make any forward progress with the maximum of diversion and off-sea activity. The last week has been a master-class in not kayaking around Ireland.

Last significant entry – bar even more significant announcement that Sam Crowley completed his circumnavigation earlier today by, I imagine an ability to focus on the task in hand and keep going whatever the distractions, which is so unlike the home life and mindset of your current correspondent – was that I was sitting out poor weather on Malin Head at the exact halfway point of my own aimless circling of Ireland. I may have promised to update my Malin days, but as I haven’t actually left there yet it would seem a little risky to spill the beans on all those nights in various pubs and the characters I met in the days I was based there. I’ll do that when I’ve put some distance behind me and am no longer relying on those same pubs and characters to provide shelter and amusement.

Though I will say that being based in the wonderful Sandrock hostel has been a bar to rushing off into potentially and actual bad weather. So, as I may have mentioned, happy days reading, playing the house guitar and lounging. Though I was looking forward to the Malin Head Christmas Party in the Crossroads Pub. I even had a drink in the afternoon whilst they were putting up the decorations and I felt the atmosphere growing. So much so that I persuaded a Canadian couple and a German girl to march up the road through the drizzle for some carols and mince pies. But by the time we got there there had been some mysterious change of heart and Christmas had been cancelled. There was still a bit of a session but it just wasn’t the same. As a manqué investigative journalist I can’t leave Malin Head until I know why Christmas was cancelled after all the lead up hullaboo. There was, though, a wonderful clear night on the walk back and so a chance to see the streaking ‘shooting stars’ of the Persid showers in the moonless, blackness of the bible-black night.

There was a bit more fun the next night, also at the Crossroads, when there was a dance. I wondered along with a couple of Germans, and it has to be said that my heart sank a bit when I saw that the live band was one of the ubiquitous keyboard, drum machine and whooshy sound effect and backing track computers played by a one-man-band, but in fact it was all very jolly. Not many people actually got up to dance, of course, apart from a couple of dogged waltzers, a few handbag circling girls, the two German sisters who demonstrated the ‘disco fox’ to a riveted bar-front of farmers and fishermen, and – at one point or two – myself trying to make something faintly salsa-ish from the relentless country covers. But then the two Germans took the evening to a different level by asking the one man-band if they could perhaps sing a song. Which they did – the Everly Brother’s ‘Dream’ – in time-stopping harmony, that silenced the whole of a late drinking bar. As did the double harmony folk song they sang next. I was desperate for them to sing ‘Stille Nacht’ and reinstate the Malin Head August Christmas tradition. But it was not to be.

The next day – ushered out by a forecast of many days to come of high winds, small craft warnings, and gales – I took the bus to Dublin. On the Friday morning I had a live interview on TV3 about horse holidays around the world; this required all kinds of horrors like getting up at six without coffee and getting into a taxi and trying to remember what my kayak-addled brain actually knew about horses. A quick dash into make-up – I got the colours, the shades and the rest of the details so I’ll know what to buy for the future so I can achieve a flawless, non-shiny complexion for myself – an injudicious amount of coffee and onto the couch. A quick yak about horse hols – I may have looked a bit bemused, as the whole horse thing seems like it’s from another life – and I was back on the street, and with a holiday feel to the coming weekend.

That night – Friday – I rolled down to the Crawdaddy to see Tom Russell, one of America’s best and most literary and interesting (for which, also, read seriously overlooked) songwriters and performers, who rides the edge between Cormac MacCarthy gothic, Kerouac beat and cowboy cool, with much homage paid to the right kind of boots, red wine, things one should have done but didn’t, and the things one got instead, as well as the coming and goings of good and bad with women. A goodish crowd but not packed meaning I could sit on the side of the stage in peace and enjoy Russell and his excellent accompanying guitarist, Michael Martin, with a pint and at leisure. I’ve managed to miss seeing Tom Russell playing by close shaves in several continents and often only by hours, or a few miles over the past decade so was good to finally catch up with him. Especially as he wrote a song called ‘Blood Oranges’ based on a book by Paul Bowles whom I used to see when I passed through Tangier, and thus I’d told Paul about this left-field homage, and wanted to complete the circle by telling Tom that I’d told Paul. Which I did. So that was that.

Note, there’s a fair bit of music involved in this week’s attempts to avoid kayaking. And it grows to a crescendo. Because my old friend David who manages and tours all kinds of rather groovy band from around the world was in town to put Tuareg band Tinawiren on stage. Now I’d go pretty much anywhere to hear the Malian guitar slingers play – and indeed proved it by heading down with Dave a few years back to the festival in the desert which took, and takes, place somewhere to the north of Timbuktu near Essakane. So the chance of seeing the once-kalishnikov, now-Stratocaster toting lads do their thing out at Slane was too good to miss, especially as they’d signed up the Stones as their support band; there was a bit of a scheduling mix-up that saw the Stones taking to the stage after Tinawiren, though I think that was just so that the Tuaregs could get back to their hotel early.

It was a lovely summer’s day. Ie, not actually torrential rain, and the mud no more than ankle deep. Dave and I and friends of his, the delightful Michael and Abegail who’d been at the last gig the Stones played in Ireland, also in Slane and 25 years ago were smart and took the bus from the centre of Dublin to the festival, at Lord Mountcharles’ place. As did some 70,000 other people. Ah, the elitist joy of back stage passes. The transport may have been bus, but once we were in and flashing our passes left right and centre (I’ve tried using mine since but sadly its power seems to have waned a little, like an overdrawn credit card) we were limo class the whole way.

The rain stopped as Tinawiren took the stage (a huge Fritz Lang Metropolis type affair of such dimensions that it made the countryside and trees around it look out of place rather than the other way around) and their familiar camel lope rhythms and languidly commanding guitar riffs drew the crowd and a kicked off the day in truth, though supporting the Stones (as the Hold Steady and the Charlatans also discovered) is always going to be case of being there and killing people’s time before the main act gear up. But of 70,000 people a significant number might know now where Mali is and a few number might go and check out Tinawiren for themselves.

There was a brief flurry of rain – boats patrolled the swollen river to stop swimming gate crashers, the mud liquefied a little more, and dusk approached. But we missed getting wet as we were back stage in the encampent with Tinawiren drinking mint tea brewed on a small stove that seemed to be their significant backstage ‘rider,’ and drinking the fridge full of Guinness that seemed to be a general artist’s perk. Then it was up to the VIP catering area for a bite to eat, and a pre-gig drink.
Injecting the only slightly off note into a marvellous day was a rather – no, really – obnoxious woman who made the already trying attempt to get drinks from the crowded and chaotic bar less pleasing by queue jumping and queue jumping others. My parting shot when she tried to justify all this self serving and irritating behaviour was a rather terse, ‘Look, just go away, you’ve annoyed me enough already, I don’t want to hear whatever your excuses are…I’d just rather not see you again.”

Then down to the Golden Circle right in front of the stage, and a general air and in my case a very surprising and uncool air of expectancy and anticipation and excitement. Though after half an hour’s wait and given that there were 70,000 souls arrayed around the huge area that is the natural amphitheatre it seemed to pass belief that the woman talking loudly and pushing herself and her friends right in front of us was my pal from the bar scrum.

1. Some smoke, some explosion and just as it got dark there was – I won a bet on this – the opening bars of ‘Start Me Up.’ And so it went from there. The full on show. An inspired mixing of split second timing and choreography and the seemingly loose, juke joint pace of the band. And every song a cracker, given that they chose almost exclusively from the early, solid classics. 'Miss You', 'It's Only Rock 'n' Roll (But I Like It)', 'Satisfaction', 'Honky Tonk Women', 'Sympathy for the Devil', 'Brown Sugar' and 'Jumpin' Jack Flash'. A goodly – sensible choice – of stuff from Exile. A great James Brown cover – upped hugely by Lisa Fisher from the backing singers doing an Uber Tina Turner sex and shrieking act. But enough there are other sites out there that will tell you all you need to know about the concert (set list anyone?

1Start Me Up
2. You Got Me Rocking
3. Rough Justice
4. All Down The Line
5. Dead Flowers
6. You Can't Always Get What You Want
7. Midnight Rambler
8. I'll Go Crazy
9. Tumbling Dice
--- Introductions
10. You Got The Silver (Keith)
11. I Wanna Hold You (Keith)
12. Miss You (to B-stage)
13. It's Only Rock'n Roll (B-stage)
14. Satisfaction (B-stage)
15. Honky Tonk Women (to main stage)
16. Sympathy For The Devil
17. Paint It Black
18. Jumping Jack Flash
19. Brown Sugar (encore)

THOUGHT SO!)
Seemed a pity to end a great evening so early and what with the slow trickle of crowds out of the mud-soaked fields it seemed a sound idea to head back to Tinawiren’s backstage room with its roof, sofa and chairs, oh and that fridge of Guinness. Then we marched back along the road and got the bus back to Dublin (organisation of every aspect of the show was exemplary) and then it still seemed a bit too early to call it day, so it was back to Abegail and Michael’s house in Monkstown and some Jameson and then finally it was five or something like that, and then suddenly it did seem like a very good time to get some sleep.

So, can’t recall much about yesterday. But vaguely recalled that I’d been doing something with boats or similar in a past life. And bit by bit it came back to me; ah, yes, I’m meant to be paddling around Ireland and I’m in Dublin and my kayak is up in Malin and it’s all going horribly awry. But I woke this morning at six, still in Dublin, heard a familiar litany of gales and force 7s and small craft warnings for the coming two days and so just rolled over. Tomorrow I will – probably, well, very likely, surely – head back to Donegal and take to the waves again. Or maybe I’ll just grab my guitar and go back on the road playing blues and hollering. Seeing the Stones still convincingly at it gives us all home. What are the odds, though, that four guys in their sixties have all got their hair (or bloody convincing wigs), haven’t turned to fat, and can still move around a stage at a fair old lick. Of course Mick can sprint up and down the length of the wings and up and down the stairs – that’s what he does, but there was a murmur of ‘Fuck, he can run…’ when Keith made a slight less manic sprint from one of the wing stages. And Charlie was looking bloody spry too, despite a few problems over the past years. And Ronnie may have been staying fit by climbing on and off a wagon a lot at a fair old pace but he arguably was the guy who kicked everything along. ‘The Man from Naas,’ as Jagger introduced him, though he shut him down when the popular applause as Ronnie took an extended saunter down the front of the stage went on and on; ‘Right, right, I think that that’s quite enough…crowd pleasing of the cheapest kind!’
Actually Jagger is the school monitor, on every team, fit and enthusiastic whilst Keith and Ronnie are the two slackers at the back of the class telling jokes and smoking. Often whilst Jagger is doing another run or two the length of the several hundreds of yards of flying stage Ronnie or Keith will stroll over – still playing – to have a word with Charlie (‘where’ll we go after for a drink…up to Henry’s or back to the hotel…’) or to light a cigarette; there is a safety net in one of the backing singers who also hefts an un- or barely-played guitar who I guess is there just in case both the lads decide to light up at the same time and there’s a sudden drop off in guitaring. But in fact it’s the miracle that in the seemingly ramshackle approach to the strumming and picking the two boys are always bang on – it helps that they arrangements are unvarying from when first played, twenty and thirty and forty years ago but still it’s an artfull air of chaos more shamrackle than ramshackle. And Keith is an amazing specimen – effortlessly elegant yet rough looking (at points of passing concentration his mouth falls open and his lower lip, still balancing fag, tends to drop giving him the look of one of the PG Tips chimps).

A brilliant piece of intimacy is provided when the core band tighten around Charlie and his – almost toy sized compared to most skin bashers – drum kit and that bit of stage detaches and starts moving out into the crowd. It’s possibly meant to look space-age but for an Irish audience its little canopy and glass sides around Charlie and the white framework and its stately progress reminds us all of the Popemobile. Which in so many ways is appropriate.
Another miracle is that Jagger seems to get younger as the evening goes on and as he notches up another marathon distance of running and hollering; making him the only man who has a giant, wide screen picture of Dorian Grey above his head to keep him young. It’s apparently pretty nippy up on stage what with the wind and the chill night air. And the oldsters keep shedding layers of clothing and then thinking better of it and pulling on something. This means that Jagger towards the end is striding around the stage dressed in a long white raincoat and a super long scarf wrapped around his neck and trailing in the breeze. He’s either become Tom Stoppard, or the Baker chap who used to play Doctor Who.
And on that note, it being close midnight in a Rathmines internet café and a bit of walk back to the house and an early start to Donegal I’ll stop this digression through the world of music and reinvent myself as fearless, horizon gazing round-nation kayak paddler.

LEADING FROM THE FRONT – SAM CHECKS IN

2007-08-20T13:33:00.000-07:00

Sam just called me to say that he’s landed on Dalkey Island, from whence he started out round Ireland a few months back. He was being serenaded by a singing seal as he talked and seemed – justly, totally justly – pleased to have got round.

I’m only half a circumnavigation behind him of course, so I can feel fairly confident, if we have a good winter and I keep paddling away, of getting that same ‘done it’ euthoria in a few months’ time. Anyway check out Sam’s blog at http://www.seakayakspecialists.com/Ireland2007/blog to get the full story.

THE DIFFERENCE A WORD MAKES….

2007-08-16T10:46:00.001-07:00

If only I’d thought to have said I was going to kayak the ‘length’ of – and not ‘around’ – Ireland I’d have finished the trip at this point. So, popping of champagne corks, general huzzahs, some back slapping – oh, and of course the problem of getting the kayak back from the (by definition) furthest point from where I’d started. Because the kayak is indeed up at the most northerly tip of Ireland at Malin Head.

But i'm still going for the full 'around' trip. And thus ready for another month or more of plying the paddles at a fair old rate. It helps, obviously, that from Malin Head it's all down hill back to Cork. I'll probably barely have to paddle at all, in fact. Just sit there and drift southwards. Or something like that.

Malin Head is lovely.

Er, I though am actually down in Dublin, as i write this. For reasons I’ll come to later.

But anyway, a quick gallop through the past weeks’ fun and games. I was last heard from at Easky – surfers paradise and kayakers nemesis if one wasn’t careful. Some truly spectacular surf and made all the bigger, taller and bulkier by some truly Novemberish weather and high winds. I ended up in Easky for three days and three nights. My tent was a bracing half an hour walk along the coast on a small headland above a beach of amazing fossils (basically a whole herbaceous border and a bit of jungle turned to black and white stone). Every morning I got up and walked in to the village and every morning I arrived soaked from head to foot by torrential rain. I got used to it. But once there I could dry out and warm up over a full Irish breakfast and newspaper – my knowledge of Irish news is unparalleled given that on the rare occasion I find a paper I read it from cover to cover and then re- and re-re-read it over the following days.

I have – as most of you know – no interest in any kind of sport that requires grown men fiddling around with balls and writhing around in sports gear either being hurt or pretending to be hurt. But several days of finding entertainment where I could find it have turned me into a bit of a GAA fan; there were a slew of matches over that weekend and I had the joy of being the lone Corkonian in a Sligo pub, with a local man on the Sligo team to boot, as Cork ran the Sliggers ragged.

I finally set off in something that passed as sun and in a decreasing wind. I could probably have got off earlier if I hadn’t been looking at a long open sea passage to get to Inishmurray – a far and distant dot roughly in the middle of Donegal Bay – with no chance of shelter if the wind got stronger than I enjoyed. And my barometer – as it were – lay in the seemingly very expert surfers skiing in on the tops and faces of huge, tubing rollers. Even on the relatively calm days there were far more people with surfboards standing along the coast deciding not to go out than actually out.

Each night I lay in my little tent as the canvas flapped and crashed and the poles bent, and the rain pattered and drummed and thudded and the wet little wedge shape of dry space bent and flexed and distorted and contracted and expanded again; it was like trying to sleep inside some kind of asthmatic snake.

So, something of a relief to actually get back on to the water again. I nearly ended up under the water. Picking my way through the big breaking waves that were crashing into the bay and up onto the beach I just thought I’d cleared the danger area when one boomer rose up just in front of me – quite a surprise as I was suddenly paddling into a wall of water that rose high above my head. Luckily it hadn’t started breaking as the canoe rose up into it heights; when it did break I was almost at the top and so though the foam and spray and a goodly weight of water swept over me, well over me, over my head and higher I managed to stay upright. The waves were still behaving unpredictably a half mile off the shore. And the 20 mile or so paddle was made tedious by having to quarter my way across a big swell.

Inishmurray is unique amongst the once inhabited islands – the Skelligs apart – in not having any obvious landing place. There’s a sort of breakwater jutting out into the sea and a couple of deep clefts in the rock but none provide real shelter. So though it was bright sun and the island looked green and welcoming I was unsure whether I’d be able to land safely in the big swell that was crashing onto the rocks. Eventually I found a patch of water behind a big jut of rock that was breaking the waves before they hit another smoothish patch of rock running up to the dry. I waited for a lull in the waves, paddled like hell and skidded the nose of the kayak up onto the stone, jumped out and pulled it clear off the next wave coming in. Text book stuff, good luck and a resounding advert for plastic kayaks. I dumped my gear up on a patch of grass in the sun; put things – everything – out to dry and went to walk my new fiefdom. As the Simon Cowell of islands I can safely say that Inishmurray has a future. It’s lovely. Maybe the winner. Oh, and it also has a past – lots of it. So there are neat rows of abandoned cottages along the inland facing east coast; rabbits hopped out of the way, though not very convincingly, as I passed, accounting for the neatly shorn grass footpaths.

The last islanders left in the 1940s. But though roofless the houses still feel like a village and a community. I walked up to the far SW point of the island where huge rollers were shooting in great clouds of spray across the reefs and up the cliff faces. Yet in the midst of all this watery chaos a seal was happily swimming in and out of the foam, picking his moments to duck under the most immense of the breakers and popping up the far side. The island is a paradise of birds; black-backed, shags, and all the obvious seabirds crowded the rocks, the beaches, the cliff faces and the beaches. But more welcoming were the numbers of garden birds; wrens (how did they get there – its four miles or more to the nearest mainland?), blackbirds, and starlings. And a bit of a rarity; an eider duck with her single chick bobbing around off the beach.

I came back via the island’s treasure the bronze age ring fort with its round wall still higher than my head all around and still with its wide top that one could march round and ramps up to the top, and little cells and rebates and crannies. And in the middle of it a perfect little and even more perfect big bee-hive hut from early Christian monastery when this island was a hugely important centre of learning – there’s a whole lot of stuff about early saints and book copying and arguments and people leaving in a huff to set up rival monasteries which I’ll need to look up. There are slightly more modern, or less ancient, churches in their and a fine collection of cursing stones – orbs with crosses on them lined up like Andy Goldsworthy sculptures. So, I sat in the strange stillness and gloom of the bigger of the two bee-hive cells and thought worthy and spiritual thoughts like what to have for supper and why I’d forgotten to buy a bottle of wine for the trip in Easky. Then I finished the circuit of the island – it being a few miles around, with a couple of lakes in the middle – and having surveyed my estate I put up my tent and then found a barrel of water from the roof of the recently reroofed old schoolhouse and so had a full shower. The wind was still strong and chilly, but behind the wall of the schoolyard in the evening sun I was able to lounge around like a lizard.

Gosh, I thought to myself, this island is so lovely I could stay here for ever. That’s the kind of stuff the gods listen out for, isn’t it, so they can punish you by giving you what you wish for.

I woke the next morning to a stonking wind, big seas and all coming straight out of the 20 miles of big sea that I needed to get through to get across Donegal Bay and round the next headland. So had a day on my island. By staying on the east side, away from the wind I was able to cook, and even read happily in the sunshine. And I revisited the fort. And walked up and down the little street of houses. And said hello to the birds. And checked the rabbits for plumpness, and tendency to stay within a stone’s throw of a passing stone carrying fellow. And had a late lunch. And – what with food getting a little low – an interesting mix of things for supper; peanut butter, some rice, tuna, curry powder and sweetcorn boiled up and eaten with relish.

The next day the wind was if anything higher, and the seas bigger. I could have quite easily and safely slipped of the east side of the island between the waves hitting the shore and got blown across the mainland a few miles away – but that would have taken me off in the wrong direction and I prepared to tough out another night and eat rabbit. But then towards later afternoon the wind eased a bit to a 4 or so and I decided to head off and battle through. It was a long half day – close to seven hours as the headland never seemed to get closer and every stroke was a huge effort. The last miles when I was close to and running parallel to land offered no help as it was all soaring black cliffs. Then it began to get dark – bloody hell the summer really is over; ten o’clock and it was gloomy as an October midnight and I could barely see the small cove that I was aiming for. I hoped I was aiming for. Or hoped would be a small cove when I got to it, rather than more cliffs.

Well it was very close to a cliff – but there was a tiered rake of jettys and quays scrambling up seventy foot or so the steep hillside that plummeted into the water. And there was the steepest slip I could imagine actually being functional. The local fishing boats were hauled up the slip almost vertically by a winch. No such luxury for me. It was dark and I had to land everything ashore in a sucking and rising swell that banged the kayak against my shins and pulled things into the water and at one point nearly pulled the whole kayak out of my grasp and out to sea. So, understandably, and conscience free given the remoteness of the harbour and the distance of the houses high on the hillsides above their lights twinkling in the dusk, I kept up a steady stream of cursing. So it was a trifle embarrassing when I finally put my head up over the lip of the first ledge of jetty to find a small boy, and his mother, happily, or less happily since my arrival, perhaps, fishing away. She seemed very understanding and directed me to a house for water. I put up my tent had a midnight supper and fell asleep, arms aching, shoulders throbbing and generally somewhat weary.

But at six the next morning I could hear a strange sound – the sound of windlessness. Arms like damp rags or not it was time be off. I loaded up the kayak high up on the slip and then bobsleighed it down the piste and into the water. I rounded the head into the current and then it was behind me, whilst a gentle breeze freshened and that from behind me too. On that basis I made a bargain with myself; if I could keep going all day and reach Aranmore Island I would reward myself with a steak dinner, a bottle of wine, plus my post picked up from the post office the next morning, and a haircut and a massage. Suitably bribed I set off being pushed along by wind and sea over what turned into close on 30 miles of paddling – and though assisted by all this stuff happening behind me there was still a big swell and I had to stay fairly alert. And then the navigation got a bit confusing – as an economy measure I’ve stopped buying large scale maps of the coast because as I’ve mentioned before on a fairly energetic day I can cross a couple of maps, and if going around headlands or zigzagging around to follow the coastline might go through even more in a day’s journey, and at €8 a pop that’s a bit of a tax on knowledge. But still when a horizon full of tiny islands and reefs all sort of meld into each other and one can’t work out exactly where one is a better map would have been useful. But on the other hand it was fun playing hide and seek with myself.

And very finally after close on nine hours in the kayak (facilitated by a small but vital adjustment to my all in one long-john wet suit; several hours out I attacked the crotch with my knife and gave myself a rough semblance of Y-front wet suit) I arrived at the island’s town. Steak, wine, massage, shower, papers, post.

Er, no. First problem was that the place that it’s the norm to camp at according to my sources had big signs forbidding this. And I’d already wondered if putting up the tent near the town/village was such a good idea – there seemed to be gangs of boys wandering around in a Lord of the Flies sort of way. The small block-house shop at the top of the pier – selling sweets and a few other small things – had massive bars on the windows and door. The telephone kiosk had had its panels removed; it might be jumping to conclusions if I said that they’d been kicked out. I landed my kayak beneath a Garda car, and hoped that would buy me a little time. No restaurant; the two possibilities were one in the village closed because of a funeral or several miles walking to the other side of the island to the hotel. Dripping water from my wet suit I stood in the bar, that was called, according to the sigh painted on the seaward wall ‘BAR’ I tried to think of some pleasant rewards; a pint of Guinness and two packs of crisps. I didn’t bother asking if there was a masseur on the island; like the telephone kiosk I may have been jumping to conclusions but it seemed likely that there wasn’t a lot of new agey stuff going down in Aranmore. On the pier I ordered a selection of deepfried stuff from a van, that was going to be my restaurant for the evening. I ate propped up, chilly and damp, on a rock above the slip keeping an eye on the kayak as the night fell.

I opted to paddle out to a small island in the harbour that I thought I could land on and put a tent up atop. But as I passed a large and attractive yacht riding at anchor I was hailed. “Do you want a drink?” I gave this idea as much thought as I think it required; in a period of time that could only be measured by the latest in vibrating quartz watch technology I’d tied off the kayak at the stern, and vaulted over the taff rail and was settling in nicely. The yacht was the Kaparda out of Scotland. They’d passed me in the big seas the previous evening – I’d noted with envy their big red genoa and the wind behind them as I plugged through rising swell into the dusk. “Yeah, we saw you and wondered if you were okay – we nearly came over to check but then thought…no, you look happy enough.” Rups, Alastair, Kate, Nick, Alex and Olly were powering around the coast to get back to Scotland. Check those names again, assigning gender appropriately. Yes, Kate was basically the beneficiary of whatever the male equivalent of a harem is. The five lads, one her husband, were up and down the companionway to the galley, and kept busy cooking, pouring drinks, washing up and generally being useful. And I was the beneficiary of all this galley action with the drink turning into a invitation to stay on for supper (or perhaps I just imagined the invitation – whatever it would have taken a crowbar and couple of pulley blocks to have winched me off that boat). I almost asked if any of them gave massages.

The crowbar and pulley effect came in the form of Jaegermeister. I realised after a few of them that I’d either have to get back into the kayak and paddle over to the island which was now lost in the pitch dark or have a few more of them – served in urine sample test tubes, interestingly – and sleep on the deck. I skittered back into my jolly little craft and paddled off cackling happily at my reversal of fortune. The island with its low tide, long assault course of rocks sized from football to sofa and all covered in seaweed was a bit of a challenge but I got the tent up and everything – I think – onto dry land and finally leapt into my sleeping bag and fell asleep. It began raining steadily and heavily at some point in the small hours. I woke to hear a dismal forecast at six, and more rain. And then woke again to even heavier rain at nine. I needed breakfast and there was no chance of cooking it, so in a break in the rain and into the face of a force 6 (another small craft warning day) crossed back to the slip by the village. I set off to walk to the hotel – a few miles away, getting a lift from a charming farmer in a venerable and dignified Volvo. I arrived just in time to have breakfast and a read of the paper as more rain came in. Then it was sunny – genuinely sunny and what with brekkers and the rest my heart soared and all was well with the world. So I walked back to the kayak, noting that the blackberries were coming on well and that autumn was in the air.

At the slip I got into the kayak watched by a gang of underemployed children who were busy trying to dismantle a trawler against the quay side with their bare hands. They stopped to watch me getting sorted. “Will that thing fall over?” one yelled. I’d gone through something similar as a conversation with one of the children the evening before and it hadn’t been rewarding as the tyke only seemed interested in knowing whether the kayak might sink or capsize or otherwise prove dangerous to me. So I ignored the morning’s attempt at conversation. “I hope it goes over on you,” another yelled. This seemed to meet group appreciation, so they built on this slim gambit. “I hope it goes over on you and you feckin drown,” offered another. “I hope it sinks and you go under and that you die.” “You’ve got a big banana,” called out one small girl; given the kayak-s shape and colour this almost counted as Dorothy Parker-esque sparkling wit. But the original one was drowned out by a rising chorus of children who hoped I’d drown. This all depressed me.

But the wind had moderated quite a bit, though only to be replaced by a thick fog. I couldn’t see even nearby rocks or the shoreline but nothing would have kept me around Aranmore at that point so I retook my island and began packing everything up; at the critical moment when the tent was down but not everything was in dry bags the foggy sky suddenly released a great swinging deluge of rain that soused pretty much half of my stuff, and all the clothes I was wearing and all of the kayaking kit I was about to put on. It seemed the kids’ wishes had come close to true.

I navigated north by compass. The wind had dropped, and when the fog cleared after an hour or so the wind stayed dropped so I was able to trundle along with good humour restored. Being, though, a little weary from the past few days I got to the pleasing little island just south of Bloody Foreland and decided to camp up. I had water – in abundance – and food that I’d sourced in the village but lacked all but a drop of petrol. So, reader, I made camp and then I made a fine stove from rocks that allowed me to burn the scant handfuls of salty, damp driftwood that half an hour of rock-combing had offered up down into a pile of embers and then cook up soup, pasta and tea. I felt satisfied as I went to sleep.

The next day was a top day. I woke early – ignored the doom-mongering of the various forecasts, stuck a wetted-finger up in the air and deduced that the breeze was coming from the south and swinging to the west. I made a sad decision to not visit Tory Island which I could see on the horizon, its light house blazing away in the bright sun and instead set about making some distance. I rounded Bloody Foreland and had both the tide and the wind with me. I paddled mightily, knees tucked up into the cockpit in a racing position and shoulders and arms swinging nicely back and forth (the art of kayaking long distance and efficiently is to barely bend the arms at any given time but rather to swing and twist from the torso; think along the lines of doing seven hours of twist-sit-ups to get the idea).

It was lovely piling along the coast of Donegal in the sun with the wind at my back and the current rolling for six hours under me in the right direction. I stopped off in the swell to eat a tin of herrings, eat an apple and look around – though my quiet alfresco lunch was rather spoilt by the distant rumble and thump of two RIBs that appeared from behind the swell and felt it perfectly in order to come and circle me like sharks whilst shouting questions at me. I may just have been feeling curmudgeonly. But I was more charmed by three fulmars that apropos of nothing except that cheery friendliness they trade on, made a few passes and then plumped down into the sea right next to the kayak, less than a paddle’s length away and bobbed away for a while looking at me part quizzically and part with great tenderness. So that cheered me up. (I’ve written earlier of the reasons why fulmars are a fitting symbol for this trip and why I feel so warmly towards them).

I was going to stop at the head of Sheep Haven having done a very respectable distance by that point, but I was on a roll and kept paddling right to the head of Lough Swilly. So had got close to forty miles in one day, and nearly half way across the most northerly stretch of coast. There was a big sea breaking on the rocks and few attractive places to land until I saw a small storm beach under the lighthouse with a patch of green above the rocks. I staggered out of the kayak and dragged everything up onto the patch of grass and then thought that – being a polite sort of fellow – I’d just wander up to a distant farm and ask if it was okay to camp overnight. Still in wet suit and lifejacket I walked the half mile or so and found a guy mending a truck. It wasn’t his land. He didn’t know who owned it. Or perhaps he did but it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to go and ask him. But if I insisted then it was the house further up the road, next to the pub. That all sounded good.

I found the house and knocked on the door. No answer. I put my head into the pub and explained that I was down at the cove and wanted to camp and was just being polite and asking for the sake of form. There was silence and then some sucking of teeth. And then somebody told me come up and camp in a field they owned. I explained why I was bit tied by the kayak and so forth. “Really, I need to camp down there.” There was some murmuring. And then a woman got up and offered to try the man next door. It was all sounding a bit serious. She went and tapped on the door. The owner – apparently – was off on his honeymoon but she hoped his mother might be there. “She probably would let you camp, maybe, well there’s a chance she might as he’s away.” It seemed that the majority view was that the owner of the land wouldn’t want me there. It seemed to me that as it was getting on for dark and I was still wet and cold and he was off on his honeymoon that I could risk camping. So I did.

I woke up at five, tired and aching but keen to hear the forecast – there was a relatively light fingering of rain on the tent. The Radio 4 shipping forecast painted a gloomy picture of strong to rising winds and coming gales. But then it got to the coastal reports and what the Met station at Malin Head was reporting was a perfect calm. I made a hasty decision; I didn’t want to get stuck by high winds for days (and I would have been as things turned out) on a beach where a man who may or may not have had a satisfying honeymoon but who seemed unkeen on people camping on his land whatever his mood might turn up at any moment. And Sam had reported a wonderful hostel right at the head, only a few miles from Ireland’s most northerly point. The sea was lost in thick fog but nonetheless I packed quickly – breakfast was two spoons of peanut butter – and was on the water by six-thirty and paddling off into a preternatural silence. Despite map and compass the tide and the currents seemed to be running fairly strongly and only catching glimpses of distant darker ‘clouds’ that were in fact far off land left me disorientated. But keen to pull onwards. I told myself that the hostel might me another Aranmore and its imagined delights might amount to nothing, but for several hours I paddled through the early mist and tried to find the small dip that would give me the pier at Port Ronan and suddenly I had it and I was gliding into land.

I walked a little bit up the road and found the hostel. It was full! A sigh announced ‘No Vacancies.’ But I hoped that was a summing up of the previous night’s occupancy and not a prediction of the coming night. People, feel my joy when I met Rodney – with Margaret, the owner of Sandrock Hostel www.sandrockhostel.com - and he was sure that they could find me a bunk, and told me that I could put my kayak into the back and there was a shed to open my kit up in and leave it to air and dry. Not much later I was in a piping hot shower, and then shaved and clean and dressed and dry for the first time in days. Margaret bought me cup of coffee and a tin of biscuits as I sat in the picture window and looked out on the weather from the inside. This alone made the whole trip worthwhile.

And gosh, I did well to get to the hostel. Because I arrived early on Saturday the 11 August. On Wednesday I was still there – virtually a resident of Malin Head. The few brief hours each day when the current around the notorious head is suitable never coincided with the occasional hours when the wind fell below a five or six. Or a gale. There was a house guitar, which I strummed. Tens of books, which I browsed. And a constant party of people come to stay. Just up the road – a brisk twenty minute walk or so – were three pubs, all of differing atmospheres and which I tried in rotation. There was restaurant that did breakfast and a good steak. There was a selection of papers in the shop. And pleasant people to talk to. And anytime I felt a little peeved that another great tranche of poor weather was slowing my trip to standstill I just had to think that I might have spent four days huddling in my tent, running out of food and waiting for an angry landowner to come and shoot me. Truly I have many blessings to count.

Much else is there to tell about my sojurn in Malin – but it’s not over yet so will bundle it altogether. But right now I’m in Dublin, I’ve done a long day here in the office and it’s time to go and party or whatever it is people do in cities.

Head North, Young Man

2007-08-03T07:29:00.000-07:00

A very quick update from Easkey on south of Sligo Bay. An unscheduled stop – but then the gale currently building outside was unscheduled until yesterday. And my walk in from the distant headland where my tent is (or was when I left a few hours ago – with the wind still not at full strength, so may be ahead of me on Donegal coast by now) has rewarded me with in order of importance and order in which I’ve enjoyed them; a) a lovely blue hand thrown ceramic bowl to replace the one I lost in the surf when washing up yesterday, b) two newpapers (and thus two ‘wind day’ crosswords), c) a huge all day breakfast, d) somewhere to charge my phone, e) this computer to write on and check emails, and f) shops including one that instinct tells me might well sell wine. Does life get any sweeter?

So six days since I left Clifden and even a cursory glance at a full map of Ireland will show you that the lad has been applying the paddle with a fair bit of dedication. Was so glad to get back on water, even late in afternoon, last Saturday when I left – and even tired and tender after staying up hoping that a very mediocre French band might become interesting especially if I drank more (they didn’t so got to bed about 2ish – that I blasted out of Clifden bay and through necklace of islands, laughing in the face of boomers, and then to Innishboffin which looked tempting but not enough so I kept going and finally ended up on Innishturk. Wasted time and energy and luck looking for landing place amidst high cliffs and muddled sea on western edge before heading back east along coast of islands and spotting a fish save box moored in the water and then a Narnia like lantern on pole above the rocks. Discovered a corridor narrow crack that turned at almost right angles and then opened into the nicest, sweetest little cove I could imagine. A bunch of people above the currachs on the quay. “You’ve come for the dance, I suppose,” said one, Noel Kidney. It was about ten then and – reader – I’d love to say that I landed, made camp in lightening speed, spruced up, slicked down my hair and headed off on the couple of miles of twilight walking that would have taken me to the village hall and the tiny community at play. I failed you. Not least because it always takes an hour or so to make camp, and because one of the fisherman gave me a huge double hand full of crabs toes to boil. Then it was midnight and the dance went on without me.

The next day was murky with big swell, waves and a contrary wind. I pushed off confidently for Clare Island to the north and wondered if I hadn’t been over confident but then made the western tip of Clare okay, if wet and tired and there passed my first ‘other’ kayaker not counting Sam. An English chap doing a mainland to mainland circuit of Clare, with the wind and the current with him, lucky sod. I could have pulled out onto N facing beach on Clare for the night, but felt the sea and the wind was abating and kept going to make the entrance to Achill sound in the evening. A bit of a debate about whether going ‘around’ Ireland required going around Achill Head rather than through sound, but as my mission statement is to enjoy the trip AND to get round this shortcut is a way of making up for all the bad wind and non-paddling days. As a reward where I camped in the dunes I had two hours of dolphins playing in the waters – not bottlenose, but the yellow bellied ones, and in a group. Well, here’s where I compare and contrast with Fungi the sad, sole, leadenly performing auld fella and this group springing and dancing and slapping and splashing all through the evening and into the dusk and into the moonlight. They seemed ecstatic and I was ecstatic.

I woke at dawn in a cold dew, packed everything up and caught the fast n tide flooding up the sound to where it changes at Achill village. I was followed by a young seal.

At the point where the tide meets I pulled a masterstroke; I had to wait a few hours for the tide to ebb northwards up the northern part of the channel. I put kayak onto the slip, spruced up a bit and walked into nearby hotel. Lads, here’s the secret to holidaying in Ireland and good value; breakfast. Nappery, silverware, as much meat and orange juice and goodies and refills of coffee as I could want and…AND change from a ten euro note. From now on I eat out in the morning. That old adage about breakfasting like a king, lunching like a prince and supping like a pauper for health; well, from now on that’s me, and for fiscal reasons as much as anything.
And look at the result. I came out to find the waters galloping northwards; I sat atop their swirling current and poked my paddle into the water the odd time but mosty took a post brekkers siesta and soon was in Black Sod Bay. Another moral debate here; could go outside the Mullet Peninsula to find some good islands and pass round Erris Head, but the forecast was poor and every chance that I’d get stuck out there in wind days for a while. Or I could keep going up Black Sod Bay to Belmullet where there was rumour of a channel that cut through to Broadhaven Bay. Of course I would be stuffed to the tune of twenty or more wasted miles if the rumour proved unfounded. Hot sun. Hundreds of black plumed and yellow beaked scoter duck in the middle of the bay. A fair bit of effort to keep going as the wind changed and veered. Then Belmullet and no obvious channel and some cursing until a small slot in the quay wall revealed something more like a storm drain but with the rising tide definitely swirling up and through it. I paddled into the ditch and was carried nicely for a few hundred yards or more to arrive in a muddy, stinky estuary but definitely on the right side of things. Tide was still coming in, so paddled down as far as mud and stink abated slightly and landed to spend a few hours sunbathing (almost a first time this summer).

Recharged by solar power I caught the tide as it changed again (are you all agog at my superior tidal catching skills; truly the joys of the free ride and the conveyor belt school of sea kayaking) and floated down into Broadhaven Bay proper. At this point I realized that I’d forgotten to buy necessary provisions for the coming days along an essentially village free coastline with a poor forecast. I didn’t panic though as I had two secret weapons; a new high tech fishing line with day-glo super sparkly hook lures which on first and only drop back near Innishboffin had pulled up three mackerel at the same time in this summer of no mackerel, and Melanie’s incomparable fruit cake. Sent all the way from London to post restante in Clifden it had perfumed the paper and stamp glue atmosphere of the post office, so I knew it had arrived even before it was handed over to me, (the first time I’ve used post restante in years and also letters from Erika and suddenly I remembered all the sweet joy and anticipation of picking up real letters around the world – or not in those cases when they were filed under ‘M’ for Mr and similar challenges – and hurrying off to cafés to read them). Anyway, Melanie’s cake has the specific gravity of some kind of benign plutonium, and about the same energy giving properties. I reckoned I could survive about a week on the cake alone, and paddle through hurricanes, across maelstroms and over mountains with a slice or two.

I camped under the lighthouse in Broadhaven Bay. Woke to a dirty windy day with white caps and streaming seas – roughly in the right direction. Just getting the kayak loaded and into the water down a steep wall of rock into a swelling and fetching sea was hard work but decided to go for a look sea, ready to turn off into a bay and land if things seemed to hairy. Got to Kid Island and indeed the seas had been challenging but I got used to being thrown around and the waves slapping over me and seemed secure enough, so I jostled and bucked and splashed my way through the narrow sound between the island and high cliffs with the wind squeezed and speeded up to a 6 or so. I could have pulled off into a cove a few kms on but felt good and secure enough to keep going. It was impressive; dark, black cliffs, yawning caves, great geysers of foam and spray being shot up and exploded from the cliff face. And sudden katabatic winds blasting down from the heights. And jagged rocks and reefs and stacks diverting and stirring the seas.

I had another escape bay a few more kms later but bloody minded and strangely calmed by the initial over expenditure of adrenalin I decided to keep going even though the wind was strengthening. Rain storms blasted in but everything was behind me and I was being helped eastwards into Sligo Bay. Then in the lee of a huge cliff the winds were blocked and I was in a relative calm and silence – the eye of a storm. I had my anorak hood up. A sudden feeling made me turn around. Right behind the kayak was a large dorsal fin gliding along in my wake. A dolphin I thought. It looked similar in shape and almost in size to Fungi, who I’d had some experience of. I had to look forward again to keep balanced. Looking back the fin was still there, only a few yards behind the kayak still exactly in my track. Then I saw the vertical tail fin. This was a fish, not a dolphin. A shark. This was an interesting revelation. Especially as it didn’t seem to square with being a basking shark, which I’ve also had some experience of. The recent talk of great white shark on the radio and in the papers came to mind. This didn’t seem likely. But neither did it seem impossible that I was some large and non-basking shark, great white or otherwise. Strangely I didn’t feel any apprehension at all. Genuinely. Except I felt a very, very strong disinclination to capsize at that point. The waters were still turbulent and the waves unpredictable and big.

So what did I see? A large fish, some kind of shark, probably about twelve foot long. A fish that was calmly following me, with its nose right on my rudder (and how long had it been behind me before I noticed?), swimming calmly and swiftly with little effort to keep up with my wind assisted five knots or so. The fish gave the appearance of bulk – in the thickness of the fin where it joined its back.

What did I think I saw? The water was clear but troubled – I think I caught a glimpse of a rounded head rather than the pointed nose of a basking shark. I sensed a casual curiosity.

What else. Suddenly the shark was gone. Ten or twenty seconds later the fin popped up in the waves circling swiftly perhaps thirty yards away. This seemed far too active for a basking shark, even a flight juvenile. Also the weather, the state of the sea was not what you’d expect to see basking shark on the surface in. But by far the most likely was a basking shark behaving atypically, rather than a big, non-native shark acting typically.

I kept paddling for another hour – necessarily as there was no way to pull out. Nor indeed any point, on reflection. Though unsure whether I’d seen a basking shark or had been followed – stalked – by a predatory carnivorous shark I felt – strangely – elation. Whatever the fish was it felt like a totem species symbolizing a point in the trip where to be out on the waters in all weathers feels normal. I half hoped that the shark whatever it was would keep swimming with me. And being unsure whether it was a benign basking shark or some other species seemed a happy mystery to be accepted at whatever level I chose. Because even half believing that it was not a basking shark but a big ‘other’ shark I was still happy to be on the water and to keep going.

I landed in Belderg Bay on a big bouldered storm beach – this really is a remote and harsh and bleak coast, more so than any other I’ve seen so far on the trip, and with far, far less boat traffic out there on the waters. I’ve seen two or three sailing boats since leaving Achill and very few more crab and fishing boats. I camped on a tiny patch of grass out of the wind next to an old lifeboat house. Asking permission of the nearest house I met Seamas and Ann Caulfield, an exhilarating meeting. Initially it was their kindness that marked them out – driving me to a shop in the nearby village to provision up and granting me permission to camp. But the next morning Seamas arrived to invite me for a full Irish breakfast and a shower; two words that are of huge import to the round Ireland kayaker. Over breakfast I discovered what a remarkable and inspiring couple they are. As a professor of archaeology Seamas made sense of the geology, the landscape and the hidden pasts of the coastline that I had blindly drifted past; we talked for the whole morning – and I will elaborate on this at greater length later, but needs more than the bones alone account that I’m writing here, especially with the rightful owner of this borrowed computer wondering when my ‘twenty’ minutes will actually become an hour. Or has that already gone. Er, yes!.

I pushed off in early afternoon, wondering if I might be shark-scarred/scared. But no, in fact the sea seemed a richer more exciting place. Though I looked over my shoulder a bit more than of yore. The wind and the tide was with me – luckily as the preivous four long days meant I was tired and slow witted and heavy limbed. Got as far as Lacken Pier, and camped on a narrow path above a steep drop. The next day still with a following wind and still with large waves and also a big swell, but also sun I laboured across Kilala Bay to Sligo Bay. There was big surf breaking off the shore – this is Ireland’s premier surfing spot and so poor for kayaking, really. I finally camped in the dusk having passed the seal like surfers waiting on the great tumbling walls of water (I got caught a number of times by unexpected sets, twice having waves break over my head and sweep everything of the front deck and my cap off my head, - though all recovered in the calm on the far side as all tied on but strings going all directions).

Today there’s a gale coming in. I walked into Easkey and – as you’ll recall from the opening para found a paradise of small things.

Back to my tent and a crossword and a beer before seeing what the coming weather holds.

Away Wid Yer.

2007-07-28T03:21:00.000-07:00

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by; ...

Well, that's the opening bit that everyone knows but old Masefield's poem gets beter and much more apposite to me...

I must go down to the seas again to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,

And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sails shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume and the seagull crying.

I must go down to the sea again, to the vagrant gypsy life,

To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife:

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow rover,

And a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

And the 'whale's way.' I like that. Though one of the Irish red top paper has front page news today: Great White Sharks off Irish Coast. Well apart from the fact that they seem to think that Dorset is a part of Munster it does seem that a great white was seen off a beach terrorising a dolphin (watch out Fungie!) in England. But this is hardly news - they've been around off and on for quite a while. But nonetheless i might dangle my fingers a little less in the waters during my opensea lunch breaks.

Must buy petrol, bananas, water and er. that's about it. So better go. Innishboffin this evening with luck and then some head down paddling over the coming days to make up lost time.

The Mackerel That Got Away

2007-07-26T12:37:00.000-07:00

Roisin, the editor of Outsider Magazine, Ireland's biggest and best outdoor and adventure sports magazine has just put up a news item on the various kayak expeditions heading around Ireland this year.

She's has the technical wizardry and the know how to have got my basking shark video up via You Tube. So, to those disbelievers who thought i might have been exagerating the basking shark episode back in Brandon Bay i can now say, well maybe just a little but go and judge for yourself at....

http://www.outsider.ie/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=278&Itemid=66

Blog Off

2007-07-26T05:12:00.000-07:00

When sending out scatter-fire email to all my contacts to point out that there was another slew of news from the kayak trip I mentioned – merely in passing – that the word ‘blog’ caused me pain, actually offended me, clanked with its ugliness and generally could do with a replacement. I also noted that – like my palpable disliking of the phrase ‘cold cuts’ – I realised that it was illogical to dislike what was a perfectly serviceable and descriptive word for no real reason.

Well, here’s a surprise, it seems that there’s much more interest in talking about the origins of the word ‘blog’ and suggesting alternatives than in any nonsense about kayaking. More interest even than in updates on the mackerel situation; (the latter a poor subject as assiduous readers might have noticed from the lack of my promised mackerel specific entries; it’s been a really bad year for them – I’ve caught one, one measly little brisling-sized enfant of a mackerel, and everybody else out fishing reports a similar lack of fish).

So, there has been a flurry of emails on the blog (and I have to point out that accusations of the blog-o-sphere being ultimately self referential to the point of parody is being borne out by this experience). Thank you to those who pointed out that blog is from an editing of and elsion of letters in web log. That doesn’t make it any better. On that logic I could come up with an apposite word through roughly the same process performed on the words blog’s hit.

Thanks too for those – Gerry, in the forefront, and Rory running him hard – who suggested coining my own word. Klog for a kayak log, perhaps. Or Clog for circumnavigation log and because the output tends to do same to people’s inboxes.

I’m tempted, in that case to go back to the nautical roots of the log and combine ship’s log into a ‘slog.’

Or perhaps most accurately I could just add the F-word to denote the weather to my log to get a ‘flog.’ As in what one does to a dead horse. This entry very neatly proving its own aptness.

Winds due to moderate tomorrow so should be able to de-Clifden-ate myself and use up energy paddling again. If I don’t escape soon could end up being Dingled again. I found a very nice vintage Martin guitar in a session last night and plucked and strummed a couple of numbers. And on that basis have been asked along to another session to play tonight; that way lies employment. It’s time to blogger off and get some coffee.

There’s Wet and Then There’s WET. I’ve Got The Former.

2007-07-24T12:26:00.000-07:00

Nothing like a bit of global news to put things in perspective, eh? It’s positively comforting in a perhaps callous way to be here on the west coast of Ireland – Clifden, as you ask, and well past a quarter of the way round at this point – where i buy a paper and see the biblical vengeance being meted out on England. I’m obviously very, very tempted to postpone this dawdle around the coast of Ireland which frankly I could do any old year and go for the once in a lifetime opportunity to circumnavigate the Home Counties. It would have attractions, surely. I could paddle right into those lovely Gloucestershire villages and up to the counters of pubs – which is an improvement even on those Irish bars situated pleasingly close to piers, beaches and pull-outs. And I could land on ‘islands’ such as Glastonbury Tor, and Cerne Abbas (or Cerne Homer, as it is now).

But that’s not the trip that I’m on, so back to a quick update from Ireland.

I’m in Clifden, on the west coast, heart of Connemara, Mecca of ponies and general all-round good place. Arrived in sunshine, but didn’t let that fool me; I knew it was going to rain. And, lo!, it has. Nothing wrong with that. Surprising if it hadn’t.

So, last info was from Doolin, where I was preparing to leave by slopping up to the town for a big breakfast and a chance to dry out whilst reading the paper. Finally, I got everything into the kayak and set off towards the Aran Islands. It was a bit of a dirty afternoon – choppy with the wind going up and down but nothing too off-putting, and after some brief showers the evening pretty much cleared up. I’d hoped to have spent my rain days on the Aran Islands but they were blued away in Doolin instead which was fine, too. Between Sam and his pals and their fleet of kayaks and getto of tents, and my own craft and lean-to-tent and friends from Cork - Sarah, Tasha and Pat - swinging by Doolin there was plenty of fun, with music every night in O’Connors.

But once on the water I pulled past the two smaller Aran islands – Inisheer and Inishmaan, tempting as they looked and drew abreast of Inishmore and thought about heading into the island’s town, Kilronan but couldn’t think of any good reason so to do, and rather kept ploughing through the leaden sea towards the western tip of the island. It’s a strange and compelling perspective slipping past the coast of places, observing but not touching. There was a huge amount of sea traffic with a seemingly endless procession of big ferries bringing people to and from the ‘big island.’ I could hear a roaring thumping when the biggest and the fastest of the ferries were still far away, and often obscured by the swell. But it was salutary how quickly they hove into view and with what speed they rushed past. My plan was to camp in Kilmurvy bay from whence I could walk up to Dun Aonghasa, the superbly preserved triple-walled fort on the cliffs that is – from all I have seen of photos, and read of it – atmospheric and enigmatic. Enigmatic because outside the walls that sit as half circles of different radii on the cliff edge are – damn, I’ve forgotten the technical term – stones set up like lithic spikes which are best employed against an onrush of horses and especially those pulling chariots. But on an island, and a not very large island despite its name, the chance of aggressors landing with their full compliment of Golden Age cavalry must have been slight. Perhaps like ‘Star Wars’ and tit-for-tat nuclear deterrents of our own times they were a paranoid and unnecessary ultimate defence against a theoretical but unlikely/impossible threat.

Yet, I suddenly found myself losing the will to land on the island at all – I seem to be developing a very exact form of ilaphobia which has me veering away from all the iconic Inish-es that I have long wanted to visit and instead finding joy in small, less-interesting but new to me islets. Whatever, I pulled out, nearly at dusk on a small headland, watched by a seal, and found myself in a maze of stone-walled fields. I put up my tent in a broken-down walled field next to the beach. The machain grass was so thick that it was like erecting a tent on pile of duvets; bad for taking tent pegs, swallowed up anything small and heavy I dropped, but heavenly to sleep on.

Next morning I woke to the sound of oystercatchers and no wind. Then whilst I was having breakfast the ‘tock’ ‘blop’ ‘ktrack’ of somebody opening and closing a gate Aran style; fields are opened and closed by knocking down and building up bits of wall. A farmer was moving cows from one tiny bedroomed sized field to another. Then there was the sound of voices carrying across the bay as strings of tourists in bright coloured macs rode bicycles along the lower road. Then the sharp clopping of equal lines of ponies and traps bearing more tourists in the general direction of Dun Aonghasa. And suddenly I lost any will I had to hike over the hill and go and look at the fort. (Maybe those ‘caltrops’ – is that the word for spikes set in the ground, I rather think it is – are actually a modern invention to hold back the hordes of tourist toting jarveys poneying up to the Dun).

I set off northwards. And passed a significant milestone; the definitive quarter-of-trip point as marked by having to turn over my large scale map which shows Ireland in two halves, one on each side of the paper. Having started midway-ish along the bottom half, I moved onto the other side of the page for the top half of Ireland. I’m now on the same page as Malin Head, which is – arguably – Ireland’s most northerly point.

Next destination was Mweenish Island which is joined to the mainland by a bridge and is one of those large, populated but rather overlooked islands that Ireland abounds in. Mweenish boasts no shop, and no pub, which is a bit of a first for an inhabited island in my experience. There I was going to meet up with Tasha and Pat. And paddling happily across the several miles of open sea crossing from the Aran islands I suddenly realised one of the great joys of having a ‘ground crew’ with a van. I texted in a shopping list; wine, fruit, real coffee, newspaper. I began to wonder if I hadn’t planned this trip all wrong with my ethos of carrying all my own gear, and being self-sufficient and a steely-eyed, horizon staring, lone voyager. What I probably want to be is the kind of smart biscuit who has a bright and intelligent team tracking his every move so they can be on shore ahead of me with tent up, meal cooking, bottle open, camp chairs out and the day’s newspaper waiting. That’ll be the way I’m going to tackle future trips, methinks.

I arrived on Mweenish Island, land-falling on an idyllic beach marked by a ruined hut and two strange, vaguely Mediterranean looking trees. There was a sudden burst of sunlight on the golden sands and the whole beach lit up, and the grass scattered with flowers behind the rocks too, and the aquamarine waters and the bright green seaflower gardens below so I felt that I might have been in Ibiza in the 1950s. Temporal and geographic reality was reasserted by a sudden, ejaculatory downpouring of rain, of a weight and liquidity more than enough to flatten the sea’s waves and swells and turn it into a sheet of beaten zinc whilst mist obscured the Twelve Pins Mountains that only minutes before had been in full view and looking very like one of those paintings from the early 1900s’ daubed by Irish painters like Paul Henry from what I term the ‘Far Blue Hills and Big Clouds’ school of landscapery. I unpacked all my stuff in the rain, and slepped it up the soaking, mud like sand to a small patch of grass near to the van, and put up my tent. And then the rain gave up, and the wind dropped allowing some of the most persistent and vicious black-fly, ‘midgets’ as they’re quaintly called around these parts to billow up from the wet grass and attack every part of me. Bastards.

But the next day was perfect. Mweenish was suddenly summerish. It was actually hot. Or comparatively so. Enough, at least, for me to take my first swim of the year. Voluntarily, at least. The day was given over to fosicking around on the beach, and identifying plants – two kinds of orchids, eye-bright, sea asters and a whole palette of splashy colours across the meadows and on the shore-line above the beach.

Mweenish had a strange almost unsettling atmosphere. Everybody – and it’s nearly all year-round residents on the islands – was incredibly nice. As were their dogs, I had conversations with everyone who passed. And with their dogs. They couldn’t have been nicer and more welcoming. I began to think of the Wicker Man, for some reason. Though one fellow who was a connoisseur of islands being a diver suddenly let the mask of civility drop when the subject of Inismore in the Aran islands came up. He effed and blinded and denigrated and character assassinated the rapacious, grasping Inishmore population for having sold their island down the river to mass tourism. “Ruined, totally ruined, they’ve fecked the place in their greed – it’s a bloody mess.” His diatribe made me rather glad that I hadn’t done more than touched down to sleep for the night, and had escaped with my morals and my conscience intact from what he painted as some sort of ‘oirish’ Sodom and Begorrah. Or maybe he just worked as an undercover agent for the Mweenish Tourist Office.

Summer being a bit of a delaying tactic I only managed to paddle around the coast of Mweenish for a few miles to land back on Mweenish again (one of those mythical islands one might never escape?) to camp for the night. The wind had freshened and I passed a line of Galway hookers spanking along in the fresh and sprightly breeze as I made my short trip. Mweenish is the ‘home’ of these traditional boats, and is where many of them were built a century ago in some cases, along with the smaller wooden craft of the west coast (in descending order of size), gleoiteoigs, leath bhaids and pucans.

Out to sea there was a rock – Duck Island/Rock – with a large box of metal on top of it. All that remains of a trawler that went up on the rock in a storm a few years back. All four crew were drowned. I heard more detail from different people on my two days on the island. How one body came ashore, still warm, on the beach – “see that rock there? That’s where they found him, they think he must have been a powerful swimmer, and to get so close to shore and still die, but it was an awful night.” It’s the kind of thing that makes one look at the sea in a different way. Salutary. A useful warning.

Perfect timing. The next day – Sunday 22 July – was the second day of Roundstone regatta, where there would be races for traditional boats as well as currach races and the fun of summerish water. And it was only a few hours paddle on. The problem was that the shipping forecast was promising a force 6, possibly even more at some point soon. I set off with the kind of trepidation one feels in the calm before the storm. Because calm it was. Oily calm. Lazily soughing waters. Barely ripples along the rocks where sea met the land.

And I thought that perhaps I’d got the wrong day for the regatta because there was no sign of life as I headed down the bay. Which was because the hookers and other classic boats – big, bellied, barrelly, buxom hulls flaring out from the water line, and with tan red and black sails – were all just wallowing in the dead calm off the pier head. It was all rather magnificent; the boats have the lines of galleons and so to have twelve or more of them all mixed up and drifting in different directions with booms swinging was like paddling through some ceasefire in a 17th centyury naval battle. An illusion heightened by the smoke that billowed out of many of the hulls where the traditional bucket of burning peat for heating the tea and cooking on puffed away. Motor boats were trying to corral up the drifting boats as if – to change my metaphor – they were huge cattle that needed to be driven out of the way of the rowing races. Some of the currach teams had come up from as far as Kerry. There were under 16 women’s teams, single rowers and the most serious the four-oar crews. I dumped the kayak up on the rocks below the pier wall, on a falling tide and headed into the village. There was live music on the pier, and a big board the size of two cottage doors laid down for people to get up and stamp, thump and hop their way through dances.

Then rain stopped play. And sent everyone into the pubs. Whilst the hookers finally set off – starting for every race was a shotgun blast giving more naval warfare ambience. I decided to put in some more miles and set off westwards into the calm and evening. I passed the winning hooker coming down the bay, its two oars out and men walked them up and down in great, slow sweeps (these are big, heavy boats) whilst the sails hung like wet sheets on a clothesline. I paddled through to close to darkness in a confusion of islands and itzy bitzy shoreline whilst trying to rendevous with Tasha and Pat; this time I had the wine, though, giving me the magnetic attraction. By dint of texting and some terse phone calls we did manage to meet up just as it was getting dark.

Next morning – Monday 23 – I was keen to make up time and get to Clifden. But there was another of the confusing sea forecasts and I didn’t know what to expect. Actually to be honest the weather has become unforecastable even half a day ahead at this point. It’s a bit like that conundrum; which is more accurate, a watch that has stopped or a watch that loses five minutes every hour; where the answer is along the lines of well at least the stopped watch is right twice a day, whereas the losing watch is only accurate about once every fortnight. It’s just not helpful getting a forecast for high winds that don’t materialise meaning that one has stayed on land in unnecessary prudence; but it’s dangerous getting a forecast for light winds if one gets a sudden whirling wind storm when ones several miles of the coast. The coastguard’s weather reports have tended to fall back on generalisation and ‘variable’ to cover whatever might come up. I on the other hand have slightly lost my obsession with listening to the late night forecasts and the early morning ones; I’m doing better looking out of my tent and going when I feel good about it. But this is helped by being on a coast which doesn’t have the long commitments in terms of distance with no escape routes as I had when passing along the miles of cliffs further south, or having to make ten mile open sea crossing. On this coast there are small coves, low islands, beaches and quays all over the place and so plenty of safety nets; or hopefully so.

It was in this duck-out spirit that I set off from Ballyconneely Bay towards Slyne Head (actually an island) which has rather a malevolent reputation. This is because whereas the interesting rock action and contouring is above the water line further south in Kerry and Cork, here the sea-bottom is amazingly shallow for huge areas across whole bays and far out to sea, and reefs and rocks and ridges run along only metres down before dropping off into Atlantic depths. It’s a breeding ground for ‘boomers,’ big waves that can rear up unexpectedly, metres high, and often tubing, without warning and right out in open water (if you check the chart closely one can guess where the deep-shallow juxtaposition might throw up a boomer, but in miles of open sea it’s easy to lose ones bearings).

I actually hadn’t taken these boomers too seriously. And in fact had more to worry about as I ploughed first across and then into a force four and then force five wind with occasional gusts as I headed for Slyne. It was all pretty enclosed – the wind was off-shore and so the seas were relatively flat and there were strings of islands to catch me if I got things wrong, so I was interested to see how things went in what is a pretty strong wind to make headway against in a beamy, heavy, windage-prone plastic kayak. Well, it went okay but as I got to the end of the mainland which runs into a line of islands that finally culminate in Slyne Head with its two lighthouses and turned the corner and threaded my way through a maze of islands I could see the seaward and northern side was throwing big waves over the reefs and up against the islands. I landed on an idyllic beach – white sand, interesting jetsam and flotsam – and ate a tin of kippers and then sunbathed. Sunbathed in this case meant lying like a seal in my wet suit and jacket in the wind-shadow of a rock as the bitter north wind howled over head whilst I soaked up a little sun-heat.

With the tide turning and hopefully flooding north and the wind seemingly a little calmer I launched and made my way through what the dropping waters had turned into a lithic Hampton Court maze full of dead ends, narrow channels and tight turns. Then I popped out into open sea between two chains of islands. The wind hadn’t dropped at all out here and there was a big swell that the wind was combing off into breaking waves. I felt happy with conditions though, and with only a mile or so to go before ducking behind a five mile long string of islands I battled across feeling like the time I was entered into a bull riding competition in Cuba and found myself being bounced across the arena on a bullock so small that he wasn’t able to throw me but only bucked and rolled beneath me from one side to the other. There were some big sprays of water and foam getting up over some rocks further out but just like you’d get off the Cork coast and I was speculating that this ‘boomer’ thing had been rather overplayed.

I slipped behind the first of the long, coast shadowing islands and entered a world of calm waters where the wind just pushed steadily and consistently. The surface of the waters were matted with a brown sea grass that made paddling like trying to fork a goodly portion of tagliatelli out of pan onto a plate with each stroke.

I came out from behind the first island and was crossing the channel which could have taken me out to the open seas beyond that and the next island. And then I saw boomers. Along the horizon the water would suddenly erupt into a great roiling cloud of spray and water that circled and whirled into the sky whilst beneath it a wall of white foam would tube into a huge wave that sped along the sea’s surface. The impression was closest to the pictures one’s seen of the sun’s surface exploding into sunspots – and the proportions, the heights, the immensity of them were similar. I didn’t really want to be out in a force 5 amongst boomers. So I stayed on the inside channel – note; I’ve defined ‘going around Ireland’ as paddling around the coast and NOT going under any bridges; this has allowed me to go inside Dursey and many other islands but will ensure that I don’t go inside the significant area of Achill or make similar shortenings of the route – and played ‘labyrinth’ in the twisting channels and amidst the confusion of islands, isles, islets, isleens, demi-isles and big rocks.

Remember that I left that idyllic beach on Slyne Head at low tide; even after an hour or two of paddling it was still low water and I discovered at the most northerly end of the most northerly island of the chain that had given me shelter for so far that the final channel was only passable by even a kayak at high tide. I contemplated unloading everything and portaging over to the water I could see on the far side of a ridge of seaweedy rocks, but then figured if I was empting everything out I might as well just camp and continue in the morning, despite the poor forecast. And so I did. On a small island. And the joy in the bitterly cold north wind of finally shedding my kayak kit and getting into dry clothes and then into the shelter of the tent and then cooking up a mess of rice and tuna and having a mug of soup and reversing into my sleeping bag and falling asleep.

I woke up at five thirty this morning to confirm the bad weather and then realising that what ever the predictions the wind had dropped and the sea looked calm and it might be a good idea to run for Clifden as fast as possible before more bad weather came in. It was low tide – again – meaning numerous trips with the kayak and then armfuls of gear (it’s a minimum of four fully laden totes to get everything from one place to another – and laziness or forgetfulness usually makes this five or even six, but the leg exercise is always appreciated). But having trudged across the sands I launched into a beautiful morning. A jewel like morning, with a light breeze at my back, a warm sun out and a strong tide pushing me in the right direction. With the sea and the wind calmed the boomers took on an almost playful aspect, and I found myself drifting closer to them rather as if I was on safari watching something big and unpredictable but currently quiet, like a gently grazing rhinoceros or a wallowing hippo.

I was almost at the entrance to Clifden bay when I passed a small quay, with a happy looking but imposing house above it. Something was nudging my memory. The stairs that led up to a first floor entrance door seemed oddly familiar. And the gateway and the garden wall. Buggered if I could remember. Then suddenly it fell into focus. Quite a number of years ago I came up here as a friend of a friend of a friend to gate-crash a house-party…I was sort of adventuring in the Regency sense of the word and it was something of an ill-conceived trip, but fun none the less. I remember the door now and how it led straight into the dining room, rather bizarrely, and a dinner where a tight-knit house party of close friends already had their own vocabulary of in-jokes and anecdotes, and a lot of wine and there might have been some guitar playing (did I bring a guitar from Cork? Details are all hazy). And I remember how the next day we all went en mass into Clifden where it was chucking down rain and hot whiskey’s were the necessary order of the day. And Clifden Connemara pony show was on, and I changed ‘hats’ as it where and went of to research a piece on the show and take photos.

I left the kayak at Clifden sailing club. Kids were heading out in a flotilla of lazers, whilst I sorted out stuff to take into town to wash, and things I needed to write, and other stuff. Then got a lift into town. Where I’ve just written this. And still need to write an article on snowshoeing in Bulgaria (which will be easier to do given the freezing north wind of the past days acting as an aide-memoire.) But first I might draw on that past experience and the nostalgia and nip off for a hot whiskey down at the memorable pub at the far end of the street.

One Around

2007-07-19T04:10:00.000-07:00

Marcus Demuth made it solo around Ireland this morning. A fantastic trip as he kept going through all the bad weather - an inspiration. Check out his complete trip on www.marcusdemuth.com.

Sam and his pals Yukka from Finland and Nancy from the States left this morning from Doolin for the Aran islands and beyond. Being lazy and comfort loving i left Doolin pier at about the same time to go and have breakfast. It was sluicing, sheeting, showering, splashing rain from all directions and grey and cold. But it's stopped raining now - we don't count drizzle any more - so i'm going to head off to the Aran islands myself; slower and later. First though i'm going to give my wetsuit a few tumbles in the camp ground drier - nothing like damp and warm next to the skin rather than cold and wet.

To the waves, and to the islands.

Sam makes tent history and paddles in united nations grouping

2007-07-18T04:45:00.000-07:00

Sam has a whole lot more updating on his blog - his technique is perfect; he phones in his 'copy' to his blog-editor every few days and lo, it all gets updated. Smart idea.

His blog address is: http://www.seakayakspecialists.com/Ireland2007/blog

Meanwhile, i'm still in Doolin - feeling smug (again) that i pushed the 40 kms or so to get here before the weather changed. It's been wind and rain since though there's just enough blue sky to make a pair of sailor's boxer shorts - or maybe just a jolly Jack Tar's G-string. Might get out to the Aran islands later today on the tide. Or tomorrow.

Just over a fifth - or just under a quarter of the way round Ireland at this point. Taken a while, but significantly most of that distance was covered in under two weeks of actual paddling days. So if the summer turned into an actual summer getting around before autumn actually looks feasible! If not, then winter might provide better kayaking climate. But i'm fantastically upbeat about the trip - it was never meant to be a super-energetic flail around the coast in as short a time as possible (which given my lack of real experience and fitness is just as well) but merely a form of transport that would allow me to see Ireland and find some good stories. So the more 'weather days' the better - better to be sitting in bars and cafes and people's houses getting real stories than ending up with nothing more than six weeks' worth of paddle talk, or kayakity-yaking.

Still, would like to get out to the Arans and Innishmore to spend my next weather days. If that patch of blue turns into enough to make a sailor's shorts or even culottes and the wind drops then it's heigh-ho for the west. If not it's another night in O'Connors. If only all life's choices and fates were so easy and pleasing whichever way they fell.

WESTWARD HO!

2007-07-17T06:44:00.000-07:00

This will be a necessarily truncated account of the last week’s doings. For the simple reason that there’s time to write long screeds of words when the weather is too poor for kayaking, but when there’s paddling to be done the keyboard goes to hell.

So, a quick update. (there’s bound to be some bad weather coming up when I can fill in the details).

I left Dingle - momentous feat in itself - on the 10th of July, with an OK but no better weather forecast, and late in the day. Dipping into Ventry – again – to pass the night was a possibility, but the weather seemed set to hold with light to moderate winds and I pushed on round Slea Head and towards the Blaskets. The islands have some resonance with me for various reasons – readings of ‘20 Years a’Growing’ for one – and walks around Brandon looking out over the islands. Staying out on Great Blasket Island was to be one of the highlights of the trip…so it’s a strange working of the human mind that as I skidded and slid (there were the famed and weird undercurrents beneath my keel) across the sound and spotted a couple of fishing boats and a small yacht tied off the iconic white sand beach and realised that there would be other people on the island I suddenly decided to veer off and stay with the terns and gulls and sheep on the tiny Beginish Island. Pulling everything up a storm beach over boulders. As someone one pointed out – possibly me, in Cuba re the Nacional – it’s a good policy to stay in the second best most beautiful hotel in town as long as it has a view of the most beautiful hotel. I woke to a foggy and atmospheric dawn and the Blaskets coming and going in the mist. Great joy to be on the water again, even if the weather looked poor.

And indeed as I made my way towards Brandon and has just passed Smerwick Bay, it kicked up a bit with some swell, some rain and a few squalls. And then a strong wind just as I got to my goal Brandon Creek. More personal history there – I watched Tim Severin’s St Brendan leather boat being launched there in 1976 for it’s epic voyage (and a bench mark adventure book, I may add) to America, uniting history, myth and sheer guts. I’m back to the camera amongst the crowd in my father’s fawn coat in the book and National Geographic feature photo of the launch. And I spent the bones of three years learning harness making from John O’Connell the master harness maker who made the leather skin of the boat. With miserable rain and cold and wind I had plenty of time to lie in my little tent and think over such things. And doze. And get woken by a shout of ‘Jasper!’

Sam Crowley, round Ireland paddler, had done a huge trip over from Valentia and purely by chance had landed in Brandon Creek and so – Jasper, I Presume – finally met. Local knowledge produced a pub at the top of the hill and fine feed of fish and chips and pints, and the gratifying doubling of the incredulity of the land lubbers who looking out the window at the dirty night outside and thought it unlikely or least unlikely for the sane to be pootling around outside on the waters in bits of plastic and – in Sam’s case a very nice piece of Nigel Denis’ – fibreglass.

The next morning cleared and looked hopeful. I set off first – though not that early. Rounded Brandon and set off on the open sea crossing to the Hogs/Maghree islands. And the sun burst through and the tide was with me, and the breeze from behind and all was well with the world of a jolly jack tar. And then it got better. A sudden black triangle followed by another in the high swell and suddenly I was amongst a pod (a juggernaught, a truck-jam, a herd) of basking sharks – world’s second biggest fish and all that. Right amongst them. One swimming a few metres from my paddle end and clearly visible in all its bulk below the water surface. Then a further one breaching – very rare basking shark behaviour – heaving itself right out of the water bar it’s tail and sliding back, all several tonnes of it, with – surprisingly - hardly a splash. I was poking cameras around under and over the water and feeling sorry for Sam who was missing all this, when I suddenly saw him on a peaking swell, also right on top of a basking shark. I was so on top that one swimming beneath me turned suddenly and passed right below the kayak, its dorsal fin thudding into the kayak and then sliding down as the kayak slid away. There were terns and gulls wheeling around too, and generally it was all like a wildlife documentary.

A bit further on I dropped a line and pulled up a mackerel on first drop – a case of see the nature documentary, and then eat the extras.

We landed on the end of the peninsula of Castlegregory. Sam has cool kit – all the right stuff, neatly packed and with the skill to use it, as well as a small dolly pair of wheels so he can just wheel his craft up the slip, unlike my dashing back and forth with armfuls of stuff and having to carry the kayak up on my shoulder.

Another pub, with a huge shank of lamb. Talk about kayaks and such. Then we put our tents up onto a small promentary in a glorious ‘red sky at night….’ Sunset. Which was a complete lie; sailor’s delight? The next morning bought unstable weather and no encouragement to head off into a small craft warning and possible high winds. On the forecast these periods are due to ‘cyclonic variables’ which I’ve renamed ‘colonic variables’ or in other words shitty weather.

I lay in my tent and read a four day old paper and listened to the radio as the rain poured down. Then made my way up the road to the pub for lunch and a long warm afternoon wasting time. So passed Friday the 13th.

Sam was off early the next morning. All other things being equal his fibreglass boat is about a knot (a nautical mile an hour) faster than my wider, plastic boat, so I figured that I probably wouldn’t see him again. But when I finally got off – a bunch of divers heading off reported that orcas, killer whales had been in the bay recently, so I was looking forward to more big fish/mammal safari thrills – the weather was so good that I cancelled ideas of a medium length day and headed around Loop head, having crossed the Shannon. Once again the expected horrors of rip tides, miles of cliffs with swell and no escape routes failed to materialise, and the worst I got was some chop around Loop and a bit of spray going over my head. The cliffs were spectacular; dark and brooding, beetling (whatever that means) brows on the forehead of Ireland. And puffins and guillemots and razor bills parachuting off the cliffs and into the water, or bobbing around in the waves dipping their heads under the surface every few seconds to look for passing sprats; the successful ones had little silvery moustaches of fish begging the question as to how they hold a beakfull of fish whilst snapping up another one under the surface – answers please to….

I camped in Ross Bay. Sam was about a km on in Bridges of Ross. It was a glorious sunny evening – it was tempting to follow the advice of the farmer who I asked for permission to camp who said that there was a social and dance on in the village hall. Best of intentions towards going but lay down for a few minutes and next thing it was the middle of the night.

The next day – Sunday 15th - was a poor looking specimen. Tides wrong, and a head wind. But pushed off anyway along the head. Big cliffs. Spectacular. Torrential rain that was so strong it ironed out the waves and pocked the surface into a gravely texture. This had cleared by the time I’d got to Kilkee – a bustling resort on a huge bay. Oh the joys. Bought food. And a newspaper. And an amiable guy running the dive centre printed me out Galway tide tables, which were gratefully received. Then a coffee and I pushed off and left the packed beaches and quays (the cheap wet suit has totally changed the Irish approach to beach holidays and swimming and jumping into the water) and headed out to sea. One of those delicious contrasts from bustle of people to seabirds in a twenty minute burst of paddling. Headed along the coast into the night looking for a place to camp, but the tide now in my favour so I kept going and kept going and finally turned inland and pulled out over a storm beach and into a bog field full of cows; amongst which the kayak merely looked surreal.

Sam was a good chunk ahead of me he texted (ah, modern communications). I slept the sleep of the just. Woke at 6 for the weather forecast which as often/always was inconclusive though the thunder storms sounded ominous. Pushed off for the long open sea trip past Mutton Island (which I could have reached for about the same amount of effort as going inland) and towards the cliffs of Moher. And once i’d fully committed myself – ie was several hours of land in any direction – big black clouds rolled in and then there was the ominous roll of thunder. I did some elementary science mulling and realised that I would undoubtebly get fried; tallest thing in tens of square miles, wet and with metal bits here and there. Not much I could do about it though apart from chucking everything metal overboard, so just kept going. Every now and again there would be a fresh rumble of thunder or a plane heading out of Shannon to America and I’d get anxious again. But still stopped for lunch bobbing around ahead of the storm in sun and blue seas and with land just scribbles on the horizon. I suddenly saw the fin of a blue or thresher shark lazily arcing through the water – not big, four or five feet I’d guess, so rather thrilling rather than anything.

I hit the Hag’s Head and realised that as I hadn’t been electrocuted or eaten by a shark I might as well continue along the cliffs and to Doolin. Which I did. And will tell you all about another day. Because right now I have to get something to eat and catch a bus back to Doolin. Suffice to say that I reached Doolin, where I met up with Sam and Finnish and an American kayaking friends of his, and I had a long hot shower and made camp and spent the evening listening to good music and feeling generally that it had been a good day and good week.

Today’s forecast was again ambivalent – but didn’t care as wanted to come into Galway and restock on various things and write this and that. So will head out to the Aran Islands tomorrow. Or the next day. Or sometime….

2007-07-10T05:03:00.000-07:00

Shuuuush, Weather Gods Won’t Notice.

Slipping away quietly here. A bit tooo hubristic to trumpet that I’m finally leaving Dingle and heading on but that’s what I’m hoping to do. Every chance of getting stranded on one of the Blaskets if I paddle out this afternoon and the weather forecast for the coming days turns out to be wrong; but that’ll make a change.

Have, too, just learnt that Galway Arts Festival starts in about a week and with some dedicated application to the paddle I could find myself around Galway in a week to ten days, and though it wasn’t actually on my itinerary (but then what, so far, has been) it’s tempting to nip ashore and find some culture, some music and – call me weak – a roof or two.

News today. A largeish basking shark tangled in a monofilament net washed up on beach in Brandon Bay. Irish papers report this in different ways. The tabloid story I saw screams something about giant shark, huge mouth etc and gives every impression that the 3-metre plankton eater is a massive, flesh tearing killer. The Irish Times soberly points out that it’s harmless but big. On the bright side a few tonnes more of plankton will live to drift another summer.

Highlight of Dingle, amongst many is the retro-vinyl record shop, Off The Record, www.oftherecord.ie which has brought me a bit of pleasure and much temptation. It basically deals in my personal back catalogue of meaningful music; all the stuff I used to - and oft times still – play, including Dylan (Nashville Skyline prominent in window), early Stones, American white blues, Dead and other Garcia guises like Old And In The Way. And tonnes of Blue Note jazz. The temptation, of course, was to spend money I didn’t have on albums I couldn’t play to be carried in a kayak that has no room. But still the idea of a sea kayak with a wine cellar, and wind-up gramophone is just too delicious. Especially if it had a roof, as well. (Could be that I’m subconsciously in need of an actual yacht).

Right, time to push off. No idea where the next internet possibility might present itself. Not too near in distance, but fairly soon in time would be a good combination, as I’d like to put some nautical miles under my keel. Even getting out of country Kerry would be a bit of an achievement. Or actually leaving Dingle.

I trusting that the blubbery dolphin will give a better show as he waves me goodbye than he has on the two occasions when I’ve come into Dingle.

2007-07-09T08:24:00.001-07:00

Dublin Back on Myself

Ah, where was i? Oh, yes, kayaking. I think…it all seems so long ago.

Feeling retrospectively smug. I rather thought, a week ago, that the weather was looking lousy piled on lousy till it threatened to become one great solid steaming heap of lousiness. Mainly because it had been lousy for the two weeks before (just in case anyone hadn’t noticed) and I’d lost track of what non-lousy weather might be like. Anyway, my pessimism paid off; I headed of to Dublin to meet a friend flying in for a few days holiday and to revel in a world of roofs, dryness and indoor activities and where getting soaked entailed actually going into a bathroom and turning a shower on. And all the time we were there it rained outside and it galed and stormed and blew and was generally nasty in the great outdoors, and I wasn’t there huddled in a tent, or being tossed around by the wind but – as I've rather smugly pointed out – was INDOORS.

Isn’t civilisation great – mainly in the roof department. Art galleries – yep; did ‘em. Bars. Yes indeedy. Restaurants – an unfeasibly large number of Korean eating houses as it turned out. And all had roofs. As did the hotel. And David’s house. And all the shops. And the buses. Roofs!

And by chance – the kind of Irish chance, that one can pretty much rely on - Dublin turned into a bit of friend fest over and above Erika arriving from Sweden. So there was Joanna in from Australia, Jonathan from Brazil en route to Turkey before continuing to Molodova and Kyrgyzstan, and Tom in from Denmark, and David and Bridget en route to the Cevenne, and various other excuses for a drink. So I felt really smug that I wasn’t sitting under my damp bit of nylon tentage but had all these roof opportunities.

And, then, when I wanted to feel even smugger, I’d nip into an internet café and check out the shipping forecast. Invariably it was some variation on too much wind. Mostly strong, but quite often gales. Going nowhere winds. Winds that were not only inimical to round-Ireland paddling, but as the news stories that you might have seen a pretty poor weather system for trying to smuggle well over a million euro worth of cocaine.

Did you see the news? The footage of the waves and wind off the Mizen – and the lifeboats bobbing and bucking around and the wrecks of what the reporters kept calling dinghies but which were in fact RIBs and pretty much unsinkable - were a strong indication that I had done well to stay off the water. And that the drug smugglers had rather cocked-up. I tend to think that the tonne or so of Peru’s best was en route to Fungie to buck him up a bit and put a bit of vim and vigour into his performance – a lot of coke I know, but have you seen the size of a dolphin’s blow-hole. So I won’t expect much of a performance from him when I paddle out of Dingle tomorrow…or the next day or the day after that, or the one beyond, or next week, or month, or year, or lifetime.

Because I came bustling back from Dublin to Dingle yesterday, Sunday, in mostly pleasant but importantly not particularly windy weather ready to set off on the forecast’s promised calm period. Except by the time I got to Dingle the forecast for today had changed to a gale at some point. So, I’m back in the ‘office’ doing a bit of writing and checking the weather forecasts (new obsession is the wonderful www.magicseaweed.com that has streaming wind maps that flow through the coming days in a blizzard of arrows and swirling colours) and planning to head off tomorrow or on timetable as noted above.

Whilst I was up in Dublin fellow round-Ireland kayaker, Sam was sitting it out in Black Ball harbour and putting a brave face on what turned into a ten day stint on a rain-lashed and storm bound beach. But he’s off again and is now out on the Skelligs, and there is every chance he’ll catch me tomorrow or the next day, or the day after that….

The three lads from Dungarven finished a week ago, in fine time despite the weather – actually in a pretty bloody amazing time whatever weather there was. So that’s inspiring; it can be done, even if it’s a bit less risky to keep piling along through marginal conditions if you’re a team rather than solo. Equally Marcus Demuth has also kept going – his blog from a week ago had him on Inismore in the Aran Islands, and rather racing to get around before he runs out of time.

On the time front I’ve just adjusted my own trip onwards; Sept and October can be lovely months and if I’m still paddling then, well weigh heigh. I’m a little less sanguine about having to finish the trip from whatever point I might get stopped at this year sometime next year; not in the original plan and not the kind of test of my commitment that I wanted, to be honest. And one I’d rather not think about for the moment.

No, no, tomorrow will be lovely – I just know it, and I’ll be basking on the white sands of the Great Blasket in the evening sun. Or in Dick Mack’s having the usual and reaching for a guitar. Whichever, it’s all part of the trip.

Dylan Weather: You Ain't Going Nowhere

2007-07-01T11:14:00.000-07:00

Well, that's it. Enough. More than enough. Anybody been looking at the weather maps? Or just out of your window. Pretty rotten, eh? Even for ducks. And far from great for sea-kayaking. So, as trumpeted i left Dingle, prepared to start kayaking what ever the weather and and how ever far or un-far i'd get. Schleped all my gear over to Ventry. The kayak was still there (mixed blessing, i thought bitterly only a day later) and Mrs Shed-man handed over my bag of kayaking kit which they had so generously stored. I packed everything in - seemingly having forgotten everything i'd learnt on the first week - taking a long time so to do. And the sky greyed and blued and the wind went up and down, and generally it was all a bit changeable. Finally, i was all geared up and dressed up was just about ready to push off as the VHF coastguard shipping forecast came on. And - there was much cursing and i may even have thrown my hat on the ground in frustration - it seemed that the earlier forecast that had given hope that there would be enough time to get around Slea Head and through the Blasket Sound, a rather jiggly bit of water at the best of times, had been superceded by the incoming weather which was now looking like fresh winds coming in almost immediately followed up by an indeterminate and brief period of light winds, probably in the middle of the night and then a day, or perhaps two days, or, hell, why not, a week of gales and squalls. You know i did throw my hat on the ground, and i may have gnashed my teeth, and wailed a bit and given vent to some salty, un-Jolly Jack Tar quality oathing. (I've just noticed that oathing is loathing short an 'l,' which seems apt enough).

Somewhat fed up i set off out up/down/out Ventry Bay anyway and into the wider bay beyond. I still had hopes that i might get around Slea Head and to either Dunquin, or to the Blasket islands, and at least be on my way again before the winds came in. But out in the swell and waves this seemed less than a good idea, as the wind was freshening fast and the sea getting up. And given that - in another proof of my non-expeditionary approach to paddling my way around Ireland - i had to be in Dublin early the following week it seemed even less sensible to make it safely around the head and then get storm bound on the Blaskets. But i still wanted to go paddling given i was in the kayak. So i decided to go and see the dolphin. I paddled down to Dingle amongst puffins and fulmars and under the great dark blocky cliffs with their slopes of green sliding down from the hills. I came into the narrow mouth of Dingle Harbour at the height of the ebb with a gusting wind in my face and with dull, leaden waters. Despite everything i wrote about Fungi a few days ago i was rather hoping for some kind of memorable meeting with the lad. Naturally enough i thought he'd be absolutely thrilled at the idea of similarly sized but yellow seacraft - a sort of sex-toy plastic dolphin. I primed my cameras ready. Despite my earlier cynicism i was prepared to be thrilled as hundreds of pounds of sea-steak heaved itself high out of the water to frolick and jump and spy-hop and tail-slap and the rest. I stopped every now and again - being blown and dragged back at a rapid rate by wind and tide - to bang out some cetacean-seducing rhythms on the hull with the palms of my hands. And narry a sight of dolphin did i see. I did though note two dolphin-spotters up under the lighthouse, and then see them raise their binoculars to their eyes and then one point and both keep binning a spot of sea ahead of me. From their height they could see a fin knifing through the waves that were high enough to hide it from me. Then i was raised up on the crest of a swell and could see the fin and a heavy chunk of black back coming straight at me, thirty or forty metres away. Much bigger than i had expected. I could hear the big, breathy exhalation. More a wearied sigh, to my ear. Fungi dropped back out of sight. I stopped paddling and looked around. And a few minutes later he rolled up to the surface again and disappeared again. The third time he came up he popped his head up and gave me a beady eyed look. And apparently wasn't that thrilled at what he saw. He rolled up to breath a few more times as i paddled up the harbour and then turned and headed back out to see. In the amusing synchronicity that is an MP3 on random play my last view of Fungi came with an earful of The Greenland Whale Fisheries, a fine rollicking song about whale hunting.

With the turn of the tide the clouds rolled back, the waves and the swell died down and the wind calmed. As i paddled back to Ventry as was well with the world and i began to think that maybe i just could squeeze my way past Ventry and get around Slea Head and at least have got somewhere. Like so much of the past ten days' weather it was a mere caress of the cheek to measure up the distance for giving a good slap in the face. After four miles or so i came out from under the lee of the cliffs and found the wind even stronger than before. Meanwhile the sun had disappeared behind leaden clouds and the waves were getting up and slapping over the bow whilst i paddled into both wind and tide. I was happy enough to get into Ventry and set up camp above a small beach on the south-west side, about half a mile from where i started off a few hours earlier.

The forecasts through that evening and again early in the morning tried to keep up with weather developments. When i went to sleep at midnight, full of steak, onions and with a shot or two of Jamesons' it seemed that there would be a let up in the wind the next morning and i could grab the last of the ebb to then catch the slack before riding the gentlest part of the flood up through the Blasket Sound. At five-thirty the next morning the air was dead still, and the sea flat, but the Radio 4 shipping forecast was promising a rapid increase in wind to a force 6, followed by a gale that might or might not last through the next day. The coast guards roughly agreed an hour and a half later, and the RTE radio forecast in between the two wasn't very optimistic either. I made some coffee as the rain rattled on the tent and i lay in my sleeping bag and wondered whether to go or to not. Inertia won the day and was the right decision. Within an hour or two the wind was slapping away at the tent and the rain peeing down and the tent skin began cracking and pulling and i pulled out a book and settled in for a day ashore and indoors. Reading? Um, Moby Dick. Call me Ishmael and all that. When things not right with the world take to the seas. Well, in my case, as a seapaddler, when things not right with the seas take to the land. Too wet to get outside and fire up the stove i lunched on - sensitive readers turn away now - rice cakes pooled with tomato sauce, dates and tuna with a mug of cold coffee. Nice.

The wind and rain dropped a bit in the evening and i set off to a nearby caravan park to find water. Nearly all were summer caravans and empty, but a few were being lived in year round by tough types who were making the best of the wintery and exposed position; the couple who gave me water from their own barrel of spring water in their im-mobile home had planted a maze of willows around to break the wind and their garden was a blaze of flowers (looking a bit sad having bloomed in the expectation of summer back in the April heat waves) and herbs. I met a man walking a pack of small dogs on my little beach who looked over to Brandon in the clear evening sky and told me that when you can see Brandon without a hat of clouds the weather's going to be fine. But in the new climatic world order it merely means that the weather is fine at the point when you can see Brandon hat-less with no promise of it staying that way.

Another wet and windy night. And evening and morning forecasts were even less cheery than the dire predictions of the night and day before. The gale was still on its way in, and fresh to strong to gale force winds were the likely pattern of weather for the following week. Sod it, i thought, there's no point in clawing a few miles further round the coast when i have to be in Dublin a few days later. I packed up and set off - to Dingle. And another chance to poke fun at the portly dolphin. The sea was fine - a medium swell, tail wind and following sea allowing me surf along a good old rate. But it was a grouchy sea and when i took a short-cut between an offshore rock and the base of the cliffs the clapotis (where waves bounce and 'echo' of the rocks and head back into the incoming waves and swell to create a bobbling, hard to predict jerkily moving surface - clapotis, have i said this before, always sounds like a mix of bad breath and venereal disease) threw the kayak sideways in an unexpected skid that pulled me in close to the rocks as a wave dropped away and then another rolled in over the top and pushed me the other way. It was so much fun roller-coastering the waters that having got through i turned round and paddled my way back into the confusion of waters and then turned and slid through again. Which buoyed me up hugely.

I arrived in the mouth of Dingle Harbour abreast of a three-woman curragh coming in from a training run who pulled ahead of me after a few hundred yards, the bow of the black, canvas skinned boat lifting to the waves and sliding back into the water in a sort of negative image of Fungi's slipping up and down between water and air. Except Fungi wasn't around. Until three Fungi-spotting boats came out of the harbour, and two of them lined up abreast and piled along at a fair old rate of knots sending up a double bow-wave of foam between and ahead of them. At which point all the passengers lurched over to the inside rails to look on as the dolphin lumbered to the surface and rode along on the wave. The image that came to mind was of a obese and aged man being pushed along in a bath chair. There certainly weren't any tricks, or flashes of vim and vigour. And indeed why should there be. He's a dolphin for chris-sake, not Michael Barrymore. It did strike me too, as i watched the boats push their wave, with the dolphin lolling atop it, that Fungi watching isn't exactly a 'green' activity; the only tourist attraction that uses more diesel is one of those places you can go and drive tanks and bulldoze piles of earth around with JCBs.

But a further and conciliatory thought re the cranky cetacean had entered my mind the day before when rain-locked in my tent i'd spent hours with my binoculars watching the activities of a few oystercatchers, some\gannets far out in the bay, a pair of grey wagtails and a few adventurous swallows hawking black fly between the rain drops. Like Fungi i was well fed, fit and comfortable but i was bored and alone and my brain was willing to be engaged by the antics of another, any other species. If a couple of mullet had come along and offered to pull me in my kayak around the bay for twenty minutes, i'd have been off like a shot. Perhaps, as so often in ones life one attacks in others what one resents or regrets in oneself. My finding fault with the dolphin that's going nowhere and which is through necessity easily amused is perhaps a searing indictment of my own self-view and trip. Or - currently - non trip.

In Dingle i found a berth for my kayak, parked myself in the Rainbow again and set off into town for a wander round. The next morning in more rain i took a series of buses to Cork.

The last ten days of paddle progress amount to a minus amount. I'm around ten miles further back from when i arrived in Ventry quite a while ago. The weather forecast for the coming week is still unsettled with high winds. I'm taking a week off. Why not? I have time. And can't even spell masochist (oh, apparently i can), let alone be one.

Meanwhile, of the other round Ireland kayakers, the Dungarven trio should be home by now - log on as i'm going to and find out if that's so. Marcus Demuth in an amazing feat of perseverance and kayaking confidence has kept going through the bad weather and is now pretty well up the west coast and beyond the Aran Islands. Sam Crowley made a dash to Blackball Bay on the Beara Peninsula and then got weathered in, but comfortable. He's got Dursey Sound to negotiate - which is a reasonable weather proposition rather than a take a chance blast. He's showing true stoicism and a commendable philosophical approach to the vagaries of life and travel whilst waiting for a window to get across to Kerry and then over to the Skelligs. His time constraints aren't as severe as Marcus, whilst my open-ended paddle-in-September-if-necessary tide-table means i can take another week or so off and wait for reasonable weather in Cork and Dublin, where they have roofs and other comforts.

As Marcus has proven it would have been possible to keep going, but as the farming forecast on RTE showed last night with some telling and simple graphics, the north west of Ireland had more than a hundred percent of the average June rainfall, a band across the centre had two hundred percent plus and the south had well over 300 hundred percent of 'normal' rainfall. Basking sharks? Lousy weather forecasters, apparently.

I Must Go Down To the Sea Again…

2007-06-27T05:07:00.000-07:00

The high SW in the Atlantic must be flexing its muscles a bit, or the lows are just getting more confused; whatever it seems that the moderating and SW winds are already coming in, so I’m preparing to leave. A final – well, not an actual final, hopefully - entry here. Everything into bags. A taxi to Ventry, then the almost forgotten art of packing the kayak before paddling out of the bay just as the flood starts which runs northerly, which is happily the way I want to go. If the wind moderates as much as the shipping-forecast suggests I’ll be on the Blaskets tonight, or even as far round as Brandon Creek. Or – let’s be realistic here – quite possibly camped out on the pier in Ventry.

To be honest, even if I go nowhere tonight it’s about time to leave Dingle town. I’m heading off with two tellingly shrivelled, empty and leathery objects to my name: my wallet and my liver. It’s been great here – too great at times. New and old friends, plenty of music, and a couple of pieces written within deadline and the last unrelated journalism of this trip, which gives an end-of-term feeling to my leaving.

nother session in Dick Mack’s last night with Mike, Alison, some guy on octave mandolin, and Nancy amongst the usual suspects. But found myself drawn back into the sphere of paddle magic; met two Vermont kaykers, Gary and Linda Rudin and got more interested in talking about lake Champlain (I heard it as Lake Champagne, which perhaps coloured my views on this wonderful sounding waterway) than singing John Prine songs; proof that when it’s time to go, then it’s time to go. Though now I think about it, we only got talking because I saw them singing along to my Grateful Dead Medley.

There will be an update to this early next week when I anticipate being back on dry land again.

every picture worth - roughly - a thousand words

2007-06-25T12:46:00.001-07:00

As will be very apparent i have just discovered how to upload pictures, and oh what funs it has been. Next i might work out how to caption them. So a mixed album here. Sea, wind, camp sites, amusing dolphins, and the extremely out of focus seascape with land border and what might be a buoy afloat mid-pic is the basking shark in Dursey Sound.

2007-06-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

2007-06-25T12:35:00.000-07:00

2007-06-25T12:34:00.000-07:00