Category: sea

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becalmed

“Force 0. Calm. Sea like a mirror.” (Beaufort wind scale)

The sea is like a mirror, although it’s not flat. There’s a steady swell coming in from west-north-west and we rock back and forth on it for hours until we decide to start the engine and move.

Even then, creating a small wind above and a small wake below, it’s like moving through a rippling of the finest fabric: the sun is out and the sea is as silken as the smoothest cliché.

Soon it gets so glassy that it no longer even looks like silk, like anything substantial, but like billowing air. It’s as if we’re sailing through a dream of sea, the unreality enhanced by the effect of moving by motor as its drone and throb drown out the subtler sounds and sensations of being on the water.

Where are we? And how long have we been here? Foula sits like a great cake on the horizon but we could be anywhere – anywhere in this floating, blue-shining world.

West of mainland Shetland
3rd July 2015

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The Minch

A grey afternoon and a blue evening slowly turning to gold. Out on the Minch, the sun has set behind the highest hill on Harris and, with its heat withdrawing, I climb inside to escape the twilight chill.

The wind is fair but the waters are choppy. Outside, I sat on the sunlit sidedeck and rolled with the boat as it lolled and leapt in the waves. Below deck, the motion feels less kind and I keep a low profile to keep my nausea down, lying out flat on the port-side berth.

I feel the loss of the sun, our companion star, sunk to starboard as we sail south. It’s when the sun goes down that I feel lonely on the sea. However, as the darkness thickens, my eye is caught by a streak of light out of one of the starboard portlites. A shooting star? A satellite? No, it’s Venus diving down the night, or seeming to, as we lurch up and down the waves.

All stars are shooting stars when seen through the portlites – veering down, and shooting back up as the boat rises and falls; pinpointed lasers tracking the brief windows of sky before the waves rear up to engulf the view. We’re rolling in wet hills of water but the stars fly up and stream around the peaks.

The Minch, North-west Scotland
13th May 2015

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rowing

I go for rows most of the days when this loch of the river mouth is relatively calm.

I row partly because each day I need to look at the horizon. Some days I want the height of the headland or the boulder-piled breakwater and the prospect of Harris and Lewis rising a little higher. However, other days I want to be on the same surface as the horizon, to be level with its elongating distance, the flat bottom of our tender licked fast to its constituent sea.

The rowing also has the purpose of holding my nerve. Since we’ve been docked on pontoons all summer, indirectly land-tied, I miss living at anchor and fear I’ll lose my hard and slowly-won ability to row solo on the sea.

My rowing ritual isn’t grand. I untie myself from our floating dock, push myself out from the sheltered pocket of water behind Ara’ Deg, slide the oars into the oarlocks, plash quietly round the last finger of the pontoons, and ease out alongside the breakwater. I keep an eye out for any large fishing boats that look like they might be about to head out, or fast ribs, which make big wakes which scare me. But all the same, while I’m still in the harbour, I am in man-made shelter – until I work myself round the end of the breakwater and into the pull of the open horizon.

This is the turning point, where I feel us – the boat and I – rock as the ripples of wave or rib or fishing boat reach us, where I feel the breeze rise and ruffle, feel the tide ease us back or on.

I adjust our direction and pull straight out to sea for a few strokes, veering slightly north-west or south-west to be riding directly into the wind, if there is any, keeping perpendicular to the line of waves to take the rise under our bow and avoid being rolled side-on. Then I steer us round the back of the breakwater, out of sight of the visual security of the harbour.

Now I am alone with the horizon, held between the long-ridged arms which hold it out afar. A couple of small humped islands hover at the mouth of the loch and beyond those Harris and Lewis sometimes float on the other side of the Minch. I stare out and attempt to read the horizon, attempt to absorb and understand whatever lies upon it. And then I just sit, or bring in the oars and lie back on the steady lilt of the water, closing my eyes or gazing skywards, letting myself drift in this rolling sheen between the sea surface and the underbelly of the sky.

I never rest completely, my mind taut with watchfulness and fear of the water. And after a little time I rouse myself, rise, dip the oars back in, and turn us around to row back, watching the horizon close gradually with each small stroke, relieved and sad to be returning.

This ritual is always the same and always different. Sometimes the whole sea is sunny, like an open blue field. Other days it is closed, distant and grey. Today it was cloudy where I sat and swayed and drifted but the clouds were shifting and splitting and, further out, a bright patch of water lay under the sun, broken by the wind into shimmering speckles of light.

Looking at it filled me with an acute longing. It was irresistible: a glad glimmering, a golden gleaming, a meadow of heaven cast to the surface of the sea… so I rowed towards it but it was impossible to reach. As I approached, the scattered glimmers widened to slim liquid lines, sliding along the ridge of each rippling wavelet. Even as I felt the sun on my face and arms and knew I had arrived, the flickering shimmers receded and receded.

It’s always further on, you see; it’s always further on.

Loch Inver, Assynt Sutherland
2nd August 2014

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the summer

Assynt seen from the Minch

The summer was blue; blue and spreading, blue and rising, blue and stretching.

The summer slid out onto the sea, gliding through it, when the sea was silken; riding upon it, when the waves swelled cut and grey.

Summer streamed out and lands rose from the sides of it, low and lumpy, tall and hard. We sailed among their fingers, which reached out, raking the waters and holding them down like huge paws of an old stone beast, and we clambered out on their rocky knuckles, stumbling among the feathered grass and fallen walls.

Some lands greeted us with longer arms, which curved around and drew us in gently, with welcoming hills and pale beaches shining like soft promises through the thin drizzle; and when we rowed ashore, the sun flooded us and myriad wildflowers danced behind the sand in the multi-coloured machairs which are the true meadows of heaven.

One group of islands was made of walls – high columns, stacked with seabirds, which stood in a sheltering arc around us, and we spent the night there listening to their story, enchanted.

The summer was blue the day we left the spell of those islands and sailed back over the Minch to the northern mainland. The sun rose early and the wind blew us steadily east until, close to the coast, it dropped beneath the glassy water – and there we were with all the mountains of Assynt arrayed around us – solitaires, circling – rugged and red.

We watched and waited, in the blue bloomed sky, in the pure afternoon, floating on our own reflection, until eventually a small breeze arose and, nudging our sails, blew us quietly home.

It was slow, was fair, our passage through the summer: araf, teg.

Ara’ Deg.

Easy does it, she said.

The Minch, Scotland
14th August 2013