The Canoe Boys

by Alastair Dunnett

Crinan was dwindling astern; the little bays of Kilmartin shore opened and closed on our right as we passed them; Craignish opened to the north, but its soft harbourage was not for us, and we knew it without regret. We scraped the little Island of Dogs, and felt ourselves to be on the actual threshold of the open sea. After the first well and surge of this sentiment we set to paddling, and pushed ourselves forward at what seemed to be the most perfect of all speeds, which is fast enough. The waves were growing now behind us, lifting us and running along beneath to escape from under the bows and leave us in a trough, which also travelled with us part of the way, until a new wave was elected to rise astern. We took to racing these wave children, going with them in little bursts, and laughing as they did. For this was innocent water. In the full opening of Loch Craignish we appeared to be hastening even more. Bigger waves now lifted and carried us briefly, and although we did not guess the force of it then, the tide was urging us onward faster.

  The doorway of the Dorus Mor was widening and nearing, with a black line like a step across the entrance. This line appeared at first to be merely our normal horizon, which was unusually limited because of the low level of the canoes. But as we approached, it did not appear to recede. Indeed, it thickened and rose markedly above the normal height of the horizon water all round – a phenomenon making for sudden unease. Our approach was swifter now, and, straining towards the forbidding dark barrier at the gap, our closer vision decomposed it into a sudden moving turbulence, as if mighty fish were distantly shoaling in the Dorus. From a mile off we could see the separate spouts and breakers which, in extreme miniature, would have been a sign of mackerel. And as we peered and pondered, borne along, a lull in the wind sucked back to us the noise of a sea tumult.

  We hauled down the sails and bundled them at the foot of the masts, slowing our speed. But by this time we were fairly in the race, and the noisy thresh of it filled all our hearing for the minutes that were to intervene before it cast us out beyond Craignish Point. The water changed in colour from a pleasant green to a sudden and sullen black, in which writhed streamers and trails of spent foam. And with the colour went the one-way rhythm of the water which had taken us here. The lifting waves that had followed and passed us in reliable attendance were drowned in a jauping popple. These separate wave-peaks reared individually and fell on us, punching at our sides and canvas tops, each one jerking us as solidly as a thrown bucket of stones.

  ‘Keep paddling!’ we shouted, although we had probably better have shipped paddles and given ourselves to the flood. Yet at that moment we had not realised that we were still travelling at the full speed of the tide. Dipping paddles, and tugging and staring at the near water, we appeared to be fixed and struggling in a static maelstrom. A glance farther ahead corrected the impression, for onwards, and approaching, was a low wall of water, higher than the level we were on, where the two irregular tide forces were heaving up the sea between them.

  The wall seemed to dart and strike us, although it was we who rushed on it. Here the paddles felt new forces that made them kick in our grip as if hands in the water had seized to wrestle them from us. We were now in a moving group of whirlpools, and the noise was a hissing thunder. On the other side of our hulls of cloth and slats the sea gathered below our thighs like a horse bunching for the gallop. I struck the perimeter of a great swirl, swooped half round it and rammed Seumas with my point on his bow, remorselessly, although we were both stroking fiercely apart. We clashed together for a moment along the length of the hulls, and parted on our ways again. Several times there would come a sudden subsidence of the near water, leaving one or other of the canoes sliding on the surface of a smooth bubble platform of sea, 20 yards across, pressed inches higher than the surrounding level like a lily-leaf adrift. Then this would burst and rip across and the spouts would storm at us, and a force below would seem to twitch the canoes deeply down below what buoyancy still ruled them.

  By this time we had ceased to fight with our paddles, using them more as balance against the rocking, which was too extreme to control. So, looking up, we had time to notice our onward progress, and to wonder why we still floated. As if to emphasise the movement, I was plucked round in a swirl like a giant circus roundabout, and found myself sweeping past the little cliffs of Craignish Point. They were only a few feet away, and they seemed to go past my face like the wall of a railway tunnel seen from a carriage window, the stuck limpets appearing like blurred white lines.

  This was the last kick of the race, for here we burst through the narrowest neck of the channel and were disgorged into freer water, leaving the noise and threat of the Dorus Mor gradually behind us. There was still enough press in the flood to send us, spent and swirling, close up the rocks on the far side of Craignish. This entry we made to the Sound of Jura had surprise for at least one citizen of that sparse landscape. A kilted man was standing in a seaward-looking pose on the very point of the land – ‘Long Looking to Jura’, as the Gaelic song says – when we came surging up on him from behind and were vomited out of the tide race almost at his feet. In the polite county of Argyll, it must have been shock, and no lack of grace, which made him unable to return our drenched salute. He stared and stared after us as we drifted out of his sight up the fringes of the Craignish rocks.

  There is an elation which follows novel perils, and we savoured it as we sang and laughed, or called down wet curses on the fishermen who had advised us to take the Dorus Mor on the flood tide. Later we were to come to know full and open seas, and to feel trust in their directional rhythm. But we had been into a brew, where the twisting and clapping together of the erratic water could easily have sunk us. It was on that day we lost a large part of trust in local knowledge, and were made to take our own judgments, for our own needs at least. In spite of these heavy considerations, we were very pleased with ourselves for this progress and experience. Baling and sponging out the several inches of water in which we sat, we ate sandwiches and were merry at our ease for a time, while the tide swelled steadily north and took us with it. Some miles farther to the west, choked between the ramparts of Jura and Scarba, the feared Gulf of Corrievreckan, with its whirlpool and over-falls, was settling in to its incessant tidal torments. But although we fancied we heard its renowned roaring, ‘like a thousand chariots’, as the old description runs, we felt none of the legendary force in the sea plucking us towards it. Our route was now due north to Seil Sound, between the mainland and the isle called Reisa Mhic Phaidean, into Shuna Sound and on to the narrows of Seil, spanned by the Atlantic Bridge. We were getting the wind now free again, a little easterly of south, and up went the sails. They grasped the wind into their full little bellies, and we set off darting on our way.

  So we sailed all that afternoon until the light and the tide were done. We felt, and I think we still feel, that there will never be another sail like that. It never happened again in the many weeks more of our travels, and they will be lucky indeed who know of such joy anywhere, finding together in one occasion the wind, the tide, the boat, and the time to take them all. There was never an instant’s slackening of the wind, and as the hours passed its force grew lightly but steadily. Our paddles became mere steering oars. The scraps of sail, straining into galley shape, were golden because the sun was warm on them and us. The land around was in a daze of colour, and the waves were indigo, going with us, swelling and growing in the wider sea and bigger wind, and bursting their tops, first slowly and then often, into incredible white. Soon a fair sea was running, rocking us steeply back and forward, as they overran and pushed past us.

  Shortly an astounding sensation came to us – one of which we had never heard, and which we set at once to master and enjoy. The waves were now breaking heavily all round. Several times they burst just as they were overtaking us, so that the forward spout of surf would throw us bodily ahead on our course, to travel for a few seconds in and with the breaker. We yielded to these urges, and even assisted them by paddling, until a new ecstasy was suddenly born. We found tha
t we could surf-ride on the open sea! It meant keeping a stern-wise eye for an overtaking wave which was about to break, and manoeuvring and paddling so that the explosion came about half-way along the stern point. We could thus lay the canoes forward on the wave like surfboards, and by paddling and sailing stay on the curl of the breaker until it had died away. We were hardly perfect in this trick when an extension came. As the breaker subsided, a new one was born somewhere half a stroke away from its fragments, and with a leap we could get aboard this second comber. There is a fever of the spirit which brings expertness, sometimes, as a quick reward. It seemed a few minutes only when we were riding five or six breakers in succession, each one springing living from the frothy embers of the last, and pausing to let us get astride before it rolled forward. We found that six at a time was the limit, and we were never able to do more in immediate succession. After that number the impetus of one particular wave-stream had died away, and a new phase would start too far off on our beam to let us aboard. In time, however – minutes only – a new phase would work round and be surging up behind us.

  The forward speed was tremendous in sensation. We weltered along, up to the elbows in the bursting surf. As the waves grew steeper and stronger, the forward-pointing slant of the canoe drove the whole bow point under, and the craft would tear the sea apart like the coulter of a plough. One had the impression of watching from its own periscope a diving submarine. The stern points lifted clean out, and the strain on our slender bracing wires must have been enormous. As the wind rose constantly, ripping us through Shuna Sound, our dolphin darts among the rising surf bore us forward on the breakers at the very speed of the waves. Seumas, catching his own series of waves, would soar ahead of me as I merely sailed, his stern point cocked up at the peak force of the wave burst; then his paddles would revolve for a violent moment as he poised to take the next; up he would heave again, and away on the black-and-white roller; and so, jerked forward by wave after wave, when the series died he would be a 150 yards ahead of me. And as he was left, my own clan of waves would sally up astern and rush me towards and past him. As the weight of the breeze stiffened, we reefed up the sails until they were smaller than sheets of newspaper. They still pulled us on, bending over to the streams of bubbles foaming from the sunk bow, or raising their tight arcs to the sky as each smooth wave, its breaker exhausted, lifted the bow to prance free from our straddling as we rode it.

  In this way we were soon into the narrow channel of Shuna Sound, between the island of that name and the larger island of Luing, and the weather still ran us directly northwards. Shuna, on our right, was getting the sun on all its flanks that faced us, and seemed to gather into its park-like variety all the immense ranges of colour which make such a day unforgettable. On our left, Luing, one of the Slate Islands, ran a long tongue of land up to its mate Seil. We came in closer to Luing shore to get a new sight of Toberonochy village, and as we came in view of the houses we were seen and signalled round all the community, glad no doubt to have a Sunday afternoon diversion. People gathered thickly upon the pier, and a great waving and shouting set up, to which we replied with upheld paddles.

  ‘Come in here!’ came a clear call, cutting the wind, and a chime of shouted welcomes followed. It was a tempting moment. But we were (rightly, as it turned out) too greedy of the fortunate wind, and determined to make it carry us to its last gasp. We bucked on past the bay, with parting flourishes of the paddles, and the fringe of white houses crept back into the mass of land. On the whole trip we never left a spot unvisited with more reluctance.

  Clearing the north point of Shuna, we felt the wind backing more firmly to the east, tending to push us westwards and giving us the steering troubles to be expected in a keelless boat with a wind hinting to the beam. It went round only gradually, however, and there were still a few miles of robust sailing to come. We were scantily clad, and the edged wind was chilling our soaked backs. So we paddled most of the time, and moved even faster then before. At Degnish Point we could see right into the heart of Loch Melfort, opening inland, and then we had the mainland close on our right hand and were again in a small channel. A mile or two farther, and Cuan Sound, the favourite yacht passage between Luing and Seil, opened narrowly on our left, leading out to the Firth of Lorne. Only very small craft could continue on the route to which we now held, still north, with Seil Sound closing in on us on both sides.

  Freaks of wind spilled over the lumps of hill which lined our way, and pressed us shorewards on the Seil side. The canoes would heel suddenly to port, and we would have to strike hard with the right-hand paddle to bring them round and let them run more before the wind until the end of the gust. With this, and our erratic riding of the surf as it came, we got widely separated, and I was far ahead when Balvicar Bay opened to the left, with the houses on the south shore, and the road visible as it ran to the Atlantic Bridge and Oban beyond. At the far end of the bay Seil Sound suddenly narrowed to a river width, and the sun was gone. Here a roaring gust hit me and would have had me over into my running wake had I not slipped the cord holding up the sail. The little rag blew straight out like a banner, and I lost way and got my balance. There was big force in the wind now, and I pulled in the sail and bundled it, cold, but gloating at the ceaseless run from Craignish. I turned to wait for Seumas, and he wasn’t there. There was no canoe on the mile or so of water I could see clearly astern. In the hope that he would be sheltering somewhere, to take down his sail also, I waited in the small congested rollers, dipping paddles enough to keep me from losing ground to the tide. After ten minutes there was still no sign of him, and I started back, with the chill and the fear of disaster making great play on my nerves, already taut with the tension of the passage.

  The Atlantic Bridge at Clachan, linking the mainland in the foreground with Seil.

  The larger building on the left is the hotel.

  I heaved a desperate course back for a wet half-mile, and it took long, with the wind and the tide ahead. There is nothing in the world emptier than water from which a boat has vanished. In despair, and tired, I heard Seumas hail from a tiny entrance ahead, and he came out paddling and beaming characteristically. He had been struck by the gust which had heeled me, but had plucked in vain at his sail sheet. The elementary slip-knots we employed could not deal with saltwater-soaked blind cord, and with the sail jammed aloft, and pulling its fill of gale wind, he had had to turn away before it. The gust drove him planing up a lucky creek, and ashore – not, fortunately, on the rocks, but bedded fast in a swamp of rushes. He could neither paddle nor sail out of this refuge, and had spent some time plucking himself forth, rending loose a whole harvest of rushes in the coming. He talked with gusto of the final burst of speed he had achieved before the landing, with the canoe standing on its side-boards and leaving even the speediest wave behind.

  Now it was a deep dusk, and the wind was painful to hear in the narrows. We left the sails down, paddling along easily, borne by the tide, and even sailing before the wind that caught at our backs. The Seil houses grew more frequent on our left as we passed the separate hamlets, and lads ran for their bicycles and pedalled along the shore road on our level, hailing ahead of us like an advance guard. In this way we accumulated a following, and when, in a mile or two, we saw in great eagerness the high arch of the bridge, it was battlemented with the heads and shoulders of the people.

  The last of the flood-tide swept us up to the bridge, and as we turned in to land by the hotel, almost the only building here, men ran down the grass towards us. As a last rocket of wind shot us abreast and bumping on the shore, one put a large hand on each bow and pulled both canoes clear, saying levelly: ‘Well, you’re here!’

  Shortly, while the hotel cooked a meal we would remember, we bathed. Longer than the meal, I shall have a recollection of Seumas, sitting in the bath with scalding water to his neck, and his emergent head (indeed, all of him) as red as a lobster. He simply sat there, and wallowed, and grinned with salty bleariness through the steam; and w
ould not come out of it, until the cook, pounding on the bathroom door and crying kitchen havoc, almost broke in.

  And all night, whenever we stirred, it was to hear the air full of the noise of the gale. Close by our bedroom window in the hotel ran a cluster of telephone wires, from which, incessantly, came a vicious and malevolent harping.

  Easdale seen from Dun Mor on Seil. Lunga and Scarba islands are in the distance.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE ISLES

  With days at their worst to hinder and harry me,

  Summerland calls, and naething shall tarry me;

  Wind from the dawning sun westwards shall carry me

  Back to the Islands of Glory.

  There’s glory of sun and glory of thundering,

  Glory of storm that I worship in wondering;

  Glamour of cities will no more be sundering

  Me from the Islands of Glory.

  Seil is an island, but only just. It is separated from the mainland of Argyll by the Sound, which for some miles of its length is no wider than a hard-running river, betraying itself by the salt smell, and the seaweed below the tide. A century and a half ago, the high arch of the Clachan Bridge was flung across at the place which was an ebb ford, and, spanning an undoubted arm of the ocean, it gathered a tourist renown as ‘the only bridge across the Atlantic Ocean’. At the time of our visit the plans were well ahead for the bridging of the Hebridean South Ford between Benbecula and South Uist, and with the building of that second span there are at least two places where the picturesque claim can be made, to say nothing of Achill Island in Ireland, a footbridge at Canna, and some modest projects of a similar kind in Canada. The Clachan Bridge was, however, undoubtedly the first, and intends to stick to its proud label, if the local postcards and the bus tours from Oban give any clue.