Paddle by Jasper Winn

Author:Jasper Winn [Jasper Winn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780956308672
Publisher: Sort Of Books
Published: 2011-10-08T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

Seeing Sharks

THE RAIN IS SLUICING down persistently and the wind is howling, but I decide to launch and see how things feel on the water. Launching means half-jumping, half-wriggling into the cockpit as it bucks and twists in the swell and shears up and down the rocks. Actually paddling out into the waves seems easier. They’re big – fridge-freezer height – but in regularly spaced blocks coming straight on the bow, so the kayak feels stable under me. I’ve got my hood cinched around my face and am getting the rain full on the nose. My bearing is towards Kid Island, a huge block of rock marking the southernmost edge of Donegal Bay. East from there, past two more stark, lofty, rocky islands, the Stags of Broad Haven bay, the cliffs march along the coast of Mayo into Sligo.

Far out into Broad Haven I decide to go on. It’s hard to know if this is a logical decision or a gut feeling or the start of a mistake. The wind is far stronger than any I’ve ever chosen to go out in. Great rushing gusts. Force five rising to a six and even stronger for minutes at a time. The sea is grey and surfing, the distant cliffs black and forbidding. The rain is so cold and stinging, it makes me narrow my eyes. And the coast line from here has only two possible landing places in the next twelve miles. The wind has increased but it’s actually flattening the sea and it’s in my face which is good; slow going but stable. With the wind noise and the waves sloshing over me it feels brutal, but all my time on the water has changed me. I feel I can handle this.

I’m under the cliffs. Great Gothic cathedral walls with flying buttresses of rock, and towers and caves like huge doors into darkness. There are winds punching down over the cliff edge – katabatic, they’re called – which are like an avalanche of pressed, roiling heavy air; an unexpected gust can push on the paddle blades and twist my body almost round on itself. To avoid the worst of them, I move in closer to the rocks but now I pick up a second evil – clapotis – as the swell deflects off the dark rock walls and back into the waves. There is nowhere to bring the kayak in. But my eyes run along the cliff face at sea level, spotting a ledge here, a knob of rock there; I’m just noting handholds, escape routes, the slivers of salvation if things go wrong and I come out of the kayak.

There is a touch of Zen about paddling at the very edge of one’s ability. Like any other edge one’s stumbling along, it concentrates the mind wonderfully. The sense of loneliness I’d paddled with all the previous day has been quite literally blown from me, and instead I’m allowing myself to travel rather like a fulmar, riding the thermals and responding moment by moment to the elements.

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