Table Of Content‘I really enjoyed Paddle – a genuine adventure story with nothing
gimmicky and dangers understated. I especially enjoyed the
affectionately shrewd vignettes of life ashore, the swift changes of
mood, the neat little parcels of unexpected information and, best of all,
the laconic descriptions of the power and the glory of the sea.’
DERVLA MURPHY
To my father – closer than we knew
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Part One
1 A Gut Feeling
2 Out of My Depth
3 A Landfall a Day
4 Mizen in Action
5 Winn, as in Penguin
6 Dangling in Dingle
7 Blaskets and Baskers
8 Colonic Variables
9 O’Connor’s Bar
Part Two
10 A Quarter Down
11 Thinking about Thinking
12 Freeriding
13 Seeing Sharks
14 Reading Melville
15 And Now Crusoe
16 Donegal Bay
17 Earthly Delights
18 Companions
19 Malin Head (without a donkey)
Part Three
20 Coast Preventive
21 Charybdis
22 Coney Island
23 Beware Shallows
24 Not So Draoghaire
25 Indian Summer
26 Tunnel’s End
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Part One
CHAPTER ONE
A Gut Feeling
T
HE GREY, SWILLING WAVES that I’m paddling through are, what? – a foot high?
– two feet? – six feet? Or, maybe, they’re just uppity ripples and better
measured in inches? Even here, right in amongst the waves, I realise that I don’t
really have a clue as to how big they are – and abstracts like feet and inches and
miles per hour, and their metric equivalents, and even the more nautical fathoms,
knots and Beaufort speeds, are not much help in getting a grip on confusions of
water and air.
Wet stuff, especially when it’s moving around and being frothed up by a stiff
breeze, as it very nearly always is in Irish seas, can feel very big. And many
times it is. Other times, you take a look and think it’s on the benign side, not
worth taking seriously, and discover too late how wrong you are. Like jostling a
small, mild-looking guy at a bar by mistake, and finding him full of close-wound
anger and quick with his balled-up fists. Then – at a bar or at sea – there’s the
shock of sudden blows and struggling and being thrown round and fighting back
and coming out the far end with heart racing, wondering how you could have
missed all the signs, and how lucky not to have got badly hurt.
Right now – day one of my kayak trip around Ireland – the waves are looking
and feeling, well, quite big. And the sky doesn’t look so great, either. Everything
I see in an arc southwards from the west back to the east is either sea or sky.
Even the coast far to the north is no more than a thin, dark haze squeezed
between more water and air. Everything in my long vision is monochrome grey.
Close up there are splashes of bright, plasticky yellow, blue, orange and scarlet;
the kayak, my buoyancy aid, the sleeves of my cagoule and the paddle blades.
And if I don’t have the measure of the waves, then I have even less idea of
the size of the smooth Atlantic rollers rising under the kayak and lifting it slowly
up and up and then slowly dropping it again. The waves are sharp little peaks
knocked up by the local winds here and now. But the swell is a powerful
heaving. A storm shadow rippling across the ocean from some long-past
hurricane off the coast of the Americas that pushed millions of tonnes of water
up into towering hills and then left their subsiding energy to oscillate through
subsequent days and across thousands of miles. And as it travelled, the swell has
picked up the earth’s own resonance from its out-of-kilter orbiting, and from the
pull of the moon. Here, in the Celtic Sea, just off the coast of West Cork, where
the sea bed is shallowing from thousands of feet to a few hundred, the rollers are
running out of depth and so lifting even higher to corrugate the surface of the
zinc-coloured ocean. Inshore, against the dark suggestion of the cliffs, I can see
them running aground, but under me the rollers are silent. There is only the odd
sharp splash sound as wave peaks of similar bulk and height smack into each
other. Or into the kayak. It’s all just so much more stuff that I can’t measure.
The wind, though? Well now, that’s definitely blowing a force three. Unless,
those are real white-caps and not just scummy foam streaks coming off the tops
of the waves (the waves that I don’t know the height of), then it’s somewhere
around a four, maybe gusting five. Of course, if only I was closer to the land –
which would be about two miles distant, I suppose – then I could do some
Beaufort Scale checks to see if the leaves are barely shivering on the trees, or
smoke is being whisked sideways from chimneys, or escaped hats are bowling
down streets.
I keep paddling. The kayak stretches fore and aft of me, so it’s like sitting up in a
yellow coffin. The feel of its hard plastic under my arse, as well as the heft of the
paddle loom as I dig the blades in one side after another, are the only solids
amongst these shifting, immeasurable elements.
I’m still trying to make sense of my surroundings. Most of the waves
muscling in on me look, I now decide, about the height of a coffee table. The
bigger ones, every now and again breaking over the bow, are pitched about the
height of a kitchen table, while occasionally one rises as high as a fairly
substantial breakfast counter. The swells, meantime, I chart at the height of
plump sofas, with their white surf flapping over the heavy waters like linen
loose-covers.
Calibrating the seas in terms of furniture and upholstery helps them seem
familiar. It makes the waters seem domestic and indoorsy, like paddling through
an IKEA catalogue, rather than the threatening reality of cold and wet. I’m
wrong about this, of course, but reassuringly wrong. Kayaking amongst these
furniture-sized blocks of water I picture myself as a drunk making his way
across a large room booby-trapped with dancing armchairs, scuttling three-piece
suites, wobbly occasional tables, scattered bolsters and ruckled carpets. I’m
likely to fall at any moment but, with a drunk’s confidence, I’m pretty sure I can
make it from, say, the door to the drinks cabinet with no more than the odd
lurch. In terms of what I’m doing now that means paddling from the Stags
Rocks, which I’m just passing to seaward, and then onwards some twelve miles
further west to reach Roaringwater Bay – around which there are, appropriately
enough, a number of drinks cabinets, so to speak. MacCarthy’s. Bushes. The
Jolly Roger. Caseys. The Algiers Inn.
Hello! He-llo! How are you? Lovely day, isn’t it? A bull grey seal is flopped
out on a narrow ledge on the Stags Rocks, high above the splash of waves. He
raises himself into a ‘U’ shape, his head peering down at me, the furled bunching
of his tail flippers twitching skywards.
Don’t mind me. Just passing through. No, no, no, don’t get up, please, please,
don’t bother, really… I greet him politely, aloud, glad of the company, feeling a
little less alone to find him so at home out here, a couple of miles offshore.
The seal, exuding bad temper and bad breath, gets up anyway and undulates
heavily across and down the sharp blades of rock, putting me in mind of a plump
slug. He tumbles into the water with a surprisingly light splash and disappears.
His head pushes up through the waves beyond the rim of rocks, stiff whiskers
bristling. He gives me an irritated look. I provide him with a gruff, disgruntled
deep baritone voice to answer me in.
Sod off, you yellow weirdo… I’ll come over and tear your nasty pointy little
Description:One summer, writer and musician, Jasper Winn set himself an extraordinary task. He would kayak the whole way round Ireland - a thousand miles - camping on remote headlands and islands, carousing in bars and paddling clockwise until he got back where he started. But in the worst Irish summer in livin
