The Canoe Boys

by Alastair Dunnett

  JOURNEY WITH A MELON

  Let the end come, if it will,

  In some dour place apart

  Not at the foot of the hill,

  Not in sight of the start.

  Packing was a lighter task the next morning. Robbie and John loaded the bundle of our discarded equipment into their boat, for the delivery of these effects to our homes. The wind was higher from the south-west, driving sizeable waves on to our shore. By early afternoon, when a start could no longer be delayed, it had not slackened. Dressed this time only in singlets, shorts, and jerkins, we got off by lifting the canoe bows high into about two feet of water, standing with one foot in the bottom of the cockpit, and pushing with the other on the shingle as if propelling a scooter. Later we became very expert at this. The trick is to keep the bows high so that they do not pierce the oncoming waves and so allow the gaping cockpit to gulp a mouthful. Eventually our small flotilla was drawing a wet course into the wind along the shore towards Kilcreggan at the entrance to Loch Long.

  Canoes are never happy in the short steep waves of firth water, but we took this weather much better than the rowing-boat. Robbie and John were getting it very wet in bursts over their bow, and soon they decided, for their time was up anyway, to turn and run back for Helensburgh. We shouted an inarticulate farewell back and forth, watching them for a few seconds enviously as they stroked expertly downwind out of sight behind us. Jim, still anxious to try another trim in the disposal of our gear, paddled on with us for a mile or two until we went ashore with him on a small beach beyond Portkil.

  He fussed with us there for a few minutes, in a manner which betrayed, as he admitted later, that he did not expect to see us again. He said ‘Watch yourselves’, and again ‘Watch yourselves’, and looking vaguely down the south horizon towards Arran: ‘Don’t be afraid to give it up’.Then he shook hands with us brusquely – a gesture rarely resorted to among us – and got into his own cockpit. We waded in with his canoe held sideways like a stretcher, and launched him vigorously beyond the backwash. He was good with boats of all kinds, and knew more about canoes than any of us, having led our Claymore Hebridean expedition. A few paddle strokes put him in position to exploit the wind. Up went his rag of sail, like a half balloon, and with his bamboo mast whipping in an archer’s bow he was swept away from us round Portkil Point. ‘On our own now’ is how the log records this moment.

  A few Sunday afternoon strollers had by this time arrived on the beach, and took up stances to watch the experts put to sea. We scootered off the shore with indifferent skill. My open cockpit swallowed a solid wave-top, so that I crammed in at last to sit down in a rocking douche speckled with seaweed. Seumas had quit the shore more cannily, but was flung broadside by a comber and came bumping in again. By the time I could turn round to watch him he was completely aground lengthways, high but far from dry, and getting every wave over him as it hammered and exploded on the canoe’s flank. While his inshore paddle scraped the shingle ridiculously, seeking an oarful of water on the land, a splendid lassie ran down from the group of spectators, stripped off her shoes and stockings in a motion, and pushed him off, wading out with him until he was clear. I joined Seumas’s abashed and chagrined courtesies, and the two of us then bent to a face-saving violence of paddling until we got out of sight towards Kilcreggan.

  We camped that night in the back garden of our old friend John L Kinloch at Kilcreggan. This bearded Greenock dominie had already taken a boyish delight in our Claymore efforts. The canoe trip was precisely the kind of seriously-intentioned escapade which he understood. His school-teaching career had been milestoned with a series of exuberant outbursts, big with prestige and Scottish patriotism, including the formation, at the time of the Barra land raids, of a triumphant Highland Land League on a capital of 30 shillings. It was good to meet him at this brooding initial stage of the trip. The next few days, whatever the weather, would mean a slog of paddling among the waterside suburbs of Glasgow which had little meaning for our story. Not until we were in Loch Fyne, or even beyond the Crinan Canal, would we reach the Highlands and the mere beginning of the journey’s significance. Yet it would be easy to meet disaster in the Firth of Clyde, in this weather which was now driving a cold body of sea upon the shore and scourging our world with lashings of rain.

  After a heartening meal we strolled a mile into Cove village, where I had passed much of my boyhood, to pay respects to my old Aunt Kate and Aunt Mary Gordon. No one that I remember ever left their home without bearing a bouquet of flowers from their old-fashioned garden, but Aunt Mary recognised that such trophies would ill match our voyaging, and searched for some time in her cupboard after a more practical donative. We came away bearing a superb melon, as obviously the largest and most detachable section of her kindly store, and the most manageable addition to ours. The homeward mile was beguiled by rugby-passing the melon from hand to hand across the breadth of the road.

  That melon brought our packing problem to a head at once. It enabled us to simplify in a single session our whole future technique of kit stowage. Every morning thereafter when we struck camp each man packed into his canoe his own personal gear and such common chattels as he could lay hands on. As the stuff disappeared in an atmosphere of wary haste, the time would come when one of us would announce levelly: ‘I’m full’, and proceed to lace up his deck, leaving the laggard to find space for the odd items – indeed helping him to cram them in. This method imposed a discipline of speed upon the expedition. It was purely the invention of Seumas, who first made the announcement in an understandable mood of self-defence, some time about midday on the drenched Kilcreggan beach. We had both avoided the melon. Into my own craft I stuffed the other extra things, and even then the exotic item lay unclaimed. I lobbed it into my cockpit, bitterly aware that I must shortly joust with it for hip-room, and we set to the slippery task of launching.

  The tide was far out, with the low-water rocks large and weedcovered. The Rosneath constable, slanting into the wind as he cycled along the empty road on his way to Cove, was hailed by John Kinloch to our aid, and the four of us floundered with the canoes in two trips to the uproar at the tide’s edge. Canoes out of water are, like seals, awkward in transit. But we got afloat and pushed off quickly through the inshore disturbance, myself wriggling to a sitting posture like a nesting bird, in conflict with the melon. The wind, filled with solid rain, was still stiff from the south-west, and our route was straight into its eye down the Firth of Clyde. As our first goal we headed for Dunoon, a four-mile passage which would be our longest open-water jump so far. There we could expect the shelter of a weather shore for most of the way down to Toward Point. This stretch was a very hard pull of an hour and a half, but we were now weathering well, and no longer flinching before the solid thrown wave-tops which struck our faces. Ahead at intervals we could see the black ruffle of heavier squalls coming down on us, to hold us stopped, forcing a harder stroke from us even to stand still. In the more open part of the Firth, although the weather did not rest, we delighted in the longer and higher waves over which we could ride the canoes dry and comfortably. A six-metre yacht, gloriously handled by a solitary man in yellow oilskins, came up on the wind like a pillar of spray, with hard-filled jib and mainsail, running for the Gare Loch. We shouted a greeting or two as he drove past a few yards away, a swan dwarfing two water-beetles.

  By the time we reached the lee of the land off Dunoon the slashing rain had dwindled to a drizzle, and we could raise our heads from the flog of wind and water. At this stage Seumas sportingly agreed to take over the melon, which had been resting like a gross wen upon my right thigh. Crowds of people gathered thickly along the promenade railings, as if awaiting some grand event sea-wards, and in a moment it became clear from their shouts of welcome that they were waiting for us. We had already become celebrities. Recognising the obligations of this role, Seumas gave the crowd of a thousand or more its money’s worth by paddling inshore below the statue of Highland Mary and baling out his canoe. I
t was a gratifying sight for all as he hitched himself up in the cockpit repeatedly and flung canfuls of water back where it had come from. This was carried out with a flair, although he was having a running fight below decks with the melon. Every time he raised his hips to get at the plentiful seawater the melon would roll below him, and have to be bowled back. In the end, during one of these conflicts, he sat on it heavily. I heard the squash from 20 waves away. It was now disc-shaped, but immobile, as he stuffed it behind him and flourished on with his pannikin to the plaudits of Scotland on holiday. Cheers of genuine appreciation were rising.

  When we paddled on along the shore the crowds moved, following us, and the younger among them ran ahead to hire rowing-boats and share with us the now ennobled waters of the bay. I confess we were pleased about this. It seemed to announce an encouraging understanding of what we were up to. Also it emphasised again the value of that first Daily Record story, and what we could do with well-timed reports, if we could get them published. The Sunday papers had described our departure scenes at Bowling, inaccurately but at length, and a little farther without mishap would bring us to the real action phase of our story-telling.

  At the far end of Dunoon Bay we had a mighty reception from the boys of the Orphan Homes of Scotland, as they played bare-legged on the sand below their holiday camp. There was repeated three-cheering, and when a treble voice shrilled above the rest ‘Come in here, mister!’ we turned inshore. They lifted their small breeks to a man and splashed out towards us, leaving their teachers on the edge of the surf. We floated low in a foot of water, with the smallest of them towering above us – chattering, bursting with delight, patting the canoes:

  ‘Are you going to the New Hebrides?’

  ‘We’ve been watching for you.’

  ‘We read about it in the papers.’

  It was some time before we left them, for they were of an age to keep, longer than adults, the taste of second-hand adventure. They cheered us in a receding chorus, a hundred eager bairns, not one with a mother or a father to his name.

  The next stage was a straight paddle down the eight-mile stretch of shore to Toward Point. We dipped and swung into this in good style, the motion now coming easily. Holding well in to the shore, we were on a middle course between the comfortable cars which passed on the road a hundred yards to our right, and the passenger steamers of these well-served waters a hundred yards to our left. Rowing-boats stood off the shore so that their occupants could stare at oar’s-length. There is, unfortunately, none of the casual exchange of greetings among seafaring passers-by to which one is accustomed in hill and moor encounters, and few of these onlookers spoke to us directly, although there was a good deal of nautical muttering in every boatload as we passed. So we progressed on the flank of the steamer track which leads to Rothesay, past Innellan, and down towards Toward Lighthouse, where the wind hit us again suddenly. It was throwing a formidable sea upon the Point and into our teeth. For the first few minutes of it we made almost no headway at all, although paddling in an effort that tore at our chests, while the broken inshore water lapped over and into us and the waves on our weather side punched us off our line.

  A welcome from the boys at Quarrier’s holiday camp.

  In the long half-hour fight that took place among the rocky backwash on the Point we learned a good deal about canoeing and the individual malice of waves. At this time we knew nothing at all about how to deal with breakers, but our apprenticeship was now well begun. Emerging beyond Toward Point red-eyed and sitting in three inches of water, we turned to the right westwards for the Kyles of Bute, where we had hoped to camp for the night. An early dusk was coming, and the rain with it. After a few hundred yards farther, with heavy but now regular waves on our beam, we decided to turn in to land and find a campsite on Toward. It meant another landing on a lee shore. Fortunately we struck a sand beach, towards which we went rolling very sweetly with the stern seas running under us. This time we had an idea of what should be done. As the bows touched we were overboard running the canoes up the sand before the next wave could hit the stern and fill the vacant cockpit.

  The tent sprang up like a peaked mushroom beside a fence which bordered farm fields running inland. The two stoves roaring inside dried the sodden grass and our stripped selves. On the spread groundsheets we then pulled into our sleeping-bags and, lying on our elbows, cooked and ate the historic Toward Banquet, which consisted of pease brose, oatmeal brose, the melon, stew, canned fruit, a loaf and a half, a pot of jam, cheese, oatcakes, oranges, and lashings of tea. In the intervals between courses we lifted the storm-bulged door-flap to watch the lights and neon signs of Rothesay three and a half miles away across the water. Out of the black sky above the town, which delights in calling itself ‘The Madeira of Scotland’, the best part of a full gale was punishing the Firth.

  The tent stood up to it well during the night, although Seumas was out twice double-pegging the ropes and walls. By the morning the wind had blown itself out, leaving only a dreary rain absently falling. With sodden kilts buckled on again, to play a shore role, we took the bus to Dunoon. There we tramped incognito the rain-lashed streets which yesterday our arrival had emptied sea-wards. Our search was for some truly reliable packing material to contain our gear, as it was clearly doomed for the rest of the trip to be awash during the daylight hours. The rubber and oilskin swathings of the present arrangement had by a treacherous combination of condensation and leaking delivered up our clothes and sleeping-bags in a progressively damp state over the past days. And heavens! we had hardly reached Rothesay, which is about as far into the Highlands as Maryhill.

  A knowing girl in a back-street draper’s shop produced the right thing without a trace of fuss – American oilcloth, which we had hitherto seen only as a covering for kitchen tables. We bore away a roll of this stuff, leaving behind a great deal of money by current standards, and from that moment our packing troubles were done with.

  A call on the kindly Mr and Mrs Lowe at Toward Point Farm also solved our accommodation problem for the same night. When darkness fell, and the skies with it, we were in an empty hayloft festooned at all points with raftered sleeping-bags, groundsheets, tent, canvas decks, and every garment we owned. Cooking the evening meal was a spacious affair after the crowded quarters of the tent. Later, with a tea-box for a table and two candles going, we wrote up our logs portentously – but never a word for the newspapers. They would hear from us when we got to the Highlands, and the sooner the better.

  At last the next morning was almost fair, and improving, with the sun coming as we heaved all the stuff back to the beach again. Two girls and two lads in their teens scampering on the sand before bathing were the first to benefit from our determined policy of sharing our ploy with the local people wherever we might be. Some of our happiest hours came from the times we spent giving practice trips to anybody who asked for them.

  Hundreds throughout the West of Scotland will remember their first rocky paddlings in our canoes. These youngsters on Toward Beach were the first, and they made some delighted circuits of the bay.

  Then we got away. This was an easy day, with a little northerly wind which dwindled through the Kyles of Bute until, when we camped near Tighnabruaich, it was in the midst of a calm and midge-infested evening. Joy followed in the morning with a northwest wind at our backs down the second leg of the Kyles. With our absurd sails set like galleys on souvenir brooches, we drew off among the distinguished yachts crowding the bay. Many of them enjoyed a much closer look than we had intended, for the full spread of our canvas obliterated our view forward, and the only method by which we could see ahead while sailing was to lean forward and lift the bottom of the sail temporarily like a window-blind – a far from nautical manoeuvre. We had by this time, however, assumed a noticeable nonchalance, and found time to offer passing greetings to the largely unresponsive yachtsmen as we scraped a way through. The more boat-proud among them made unnecessary moves towards fenders and boat-hooks, although they were in
considerably less peril than we. These scenes of superior life afloat were soon left behind.

  It was a delightful run down the Kyles, with only intermittent paddle strokes urging the canoes on. This wind, taking us along busily, promised trouble when we got to Ardlamont Point and turned north into Loch Fyne, but that was still miles and hours away. It died occasionally, and then built up with more force. By the time we were abreast of Blair’s Ferry we were happy in our proved sailing asset, and we went ashore for a time to celebrate by cooking a considerable lunch. It was a luxury we were not again to permit ourselves. We never again had a cooked meal in the middle of a travelling day.

  And so on to Ardlamont Point in the afternoon, with the wind strengthening behind us. The sun went, leaving the day gurly. A sea was travelling with us, hoisting the stern points and running alongside at deck level until the passing waves escaped out from below our bows. The island of Bute fell away east to our left, and the view ahead was immense, with Arran a huge and remote mass, which might have been ten times the seven miles our splashed chart told us was the distance. Inch Marnock huddled under a drive of spray and rain belching from the black heart of Loch Fyne, whose entrance we could now see opening inwards from Skipness. Mile-wide dark waves with their tops bursting were galloping out of the loch and fighting with our own Kyles sea on Ardlamont’s shoals. Near the Point a black buoy span and bowed, its clear flash a reminder of the diminishing daylight.

  Hereabouts, as the land on our right dropped lower to the Point, billows of wind poured over from the West and met in conflict with our steady stern breeze, so that squalls and swirls hit us and we zigzagged, but still onwards. On one of these blasts I drove a sudden course off-shore, and ‘Mind that buoy!’ shouted Seumas. ‘I’m watching it’ – I heaved at the stiffened sail in the hope of a forward view, but couldn’t raise it for a moment against the pressure of wind that kept it spread and straining. ‘Right! Paddle right!’ came from Seumas, and I scooped three heaving oarfuls on the right. Then the buoy blotted out my shoreward vision, too quick to get my paddle inboard. The blade gonged the metal tank like a knell, with Seumas laughing along his wiser-chosen course on the other side.