It was a sheltered shore, and pleasant when we paddled on northwards. There is a lighthouse which is a memorial to William Black the novelist, much less a Victorian figure than he is now considered. On the corner of the point stood Duart Castle, seat of the chief of the MacLeans. It rose triumphantly from its ancient ruins only recently, because the determined previous chief made it his life’s work to earn the money with which to rebuild. He did so, and lived in his new-born castle until he died there shortly before the war, aged over a hundred. That evening, as we rounded its promontory, the castle stood up for us proudly, and a man on the lawn, an undoubted MacLean, waved eagerly towards us in a salute of welcome. We had a brief thought for the symbolism of this Highland clan’s resurgence in its own rights, by making battle successfully with the modern world, and we were bold to trace some distant parallel to our own vision of what might be in these places. A pleasant evening sun burst in to warm this thought, turning the world in a moment to a coloured delight.
Now we were in the Sound of Mull, close to the island’s shore, and moving northwest along past some of the small hamlets in their bays, expecting to make our camp for the night at Scallasdale. This was a sheltered route, and our weather was now harmless, but mischievous. Past Duart, and another mile or two of rocky shore, Craignure Bay fell away to our left and opened up the wind to us. Tiny strong waves, packed together like plough furrows, rippled out of the bay. These were too close for us to ride. Each of them skelped us on the side of the hull, and flung up and into our faces, so that we were soon a-drip. Beyond the bay we hung cosily to the shore, among the reefs and well away from the navigable channel. This cheated the wind until we pushed in between the little Goat Skerries and rounded a small point to beach near the mouth of Scallasdale River.
It had been a troublesome day and we were glad to be on land. Although neither of us had been on this part of Mull before, we knew the feel of the island and this seemed a good place for us. The steep shore which fringed the waste of moor and rock led up to a small turf plateau above our heads. This looked like a splendid campsite, with a view through the Sound of Mull on both sides, from Lorne to Ardnamurchan. Distant scattered farm and croft houses seemed to promise the comforts of milk, eggs, and butter – possibly scones, and a yarn at night by a kitchen fire. It was a prospect which appealed to our chilled condition. And there was always the likelihood that some unexpected adventure would come, for that is the way in the islands.
So we grabbed the tent gear and scrambled up and over the edge of the plateau to our camping site. As we had expected, it was a glorious little stretch of turf. But we paused, for there were people on it, and something like a tall flagged lance planted and quivering medievally in the middle of it. Other, distant figures were approaching. We sank down on the edge of the grass, feeling the inadequacy of our sodden rags, our holed sandshoes, our scratched and streaming legs. A man and a woman, standing a few yards from us, turned to stare, but politely, at what had emerged from the sea.
Before our vision settled, we had a glimpse of them as god-like creatures, their coloured garments made glorious by the evening sun; weapons in their hands and their youth dazzling.
We had disturbed them as they were holing out on the fifth green of a handsome golf course.
CHAPTER 8
SEA CANOEING
The sea wants to know – not the size of your ship,
Nor built with what art;
Nor how big is your crew, nor your plans for the trip
But how big is your heart.
The modern kayak or decked canoe was first designed in the 1860s, by an energetic Christian called John MacGregor. He adapted the design from the craft used for open-sea work by primitive peoples on the edge of the Arctic, clothed its framework with rigid planking instead of skins, worked tirelessly to devise handy suits of sails, and called the craft Rob Roy after the most dashing member of his clan.
In a succession of Rob Roys, MacGregor canoed through most of the rivers and lakes and along most of the coasts of Europe, leaving excitement and an outbreak of canoe clubs in his wake. The books he published about his trips are still the wisest and the most adventurous of their kind. With the coming of the small power boat, canoeing fell into a decline, until the Rob Roy design was rediscovered, and eventually made portable by folding its hull, in a great enthusiasm for canoeing which took place in Germany between the wars.
Boat designing and building is still one of the personal fine arts. A ship of any size can have no personality unless she is built as an individual, conceived in her own right on the drawing-board and built from the keel up as a separate thing. It is always interesting to note the prejudice which exists in the Clyde area against mass production of ships, and the insistence, in that laboratory of skill, upon the creation of a new ship for each new job or purpose.
The motor-car industry, for example, by the simplifying of its production into a mere factory task, has stultified its own technical development, although it has fulfilled its economic destiny.
Sailing, or any form of boat-work which does not depend on engine-power, has become largely a leisure occupation, and has therefore been able to remain personal. Occasionally there appears in this world of uncommercial boat-work a genius able to combine the skills of the sailor and the designer. MacGregor was one. Slocum and Uffa Fox are other undoubted names in this list. John Marshall had the gift, and would have gone far. To read the writings of the first three is to hear a blueprint think.
Packing up a canoe: John Marshall has just picked up one bulkhead on the right. Seumas, on the left, is about to unship the other one. The picture comes from Marshall s Canoes and Canoeing.
MacGregor held to the belief in his successive designs that a canoe should be built actually to fit the owner, like a suit of clothes. The standard of canoe-building has probably dropped since his day, when enthusiasts were forced not only to be their own designers, copying and adapting the best models, but often their own builders. MacGregor’s story is one of unremitting supervision of the firms who produced all his gear, and he records bitterly, naming the firms concerned, that not one of them (in that age of craftsmanship) did the jobs properly.
We were spending so much of each day in the canoes that we had to study, at the outset, methods of doing our travelling in reasonable comfort. We anticipated that, to begin with, our hands would blister badly with the ceaseless paddling, and among the items in our departure equipment had been light skin gloves. The genteel gestures which accompany the drawing on of gloves caused laughter among spectators at Bowling and other points along the route. But by the time the gloves had worn and fallen off our hands in strips, the hands themselves were as hard as the paddles and the gloves were no longer needed.
This proved to be the case also with our inflated cushions, which we had thought should be inserted between ourselves and the bare floorboards. When inflated they perched us too high, and wobbling, and disturbed the balance of the canoes, apart from greatly reducing our paddling thrust. By the time we learned that the most efficient seat was on the firm floorboards themselves at keel height, with the cushions completely deflated to act as a flat thin mat of rubber, we had hardened appropriately to find this arrangement comfortable. On later occasions, while waiting to harden on a new trip, we found that the best temporary seat was a flat rubber kneeling-mat as used by floorwashers.
For clothes we wore only singlets and shorts, with our zipper jackets on very cold days. When launching away off a beach we wore canvas shoes. These came off once we were afloat and were wedged in below the stranding wire on the deck of the after-section. Coming in to shore again, we could get at them easily and pull them on, so that our feet were not too sorely battered by the stones as we got out to run the unmanned canoes clear up the beach.
Travelling in a canoe among our coastal waters can be done only by the grace of the tide and the wind. One lives and moves in a constant awareness of these mighty natural forces, and is engaged always in studying how to e
ngage them as allies, rather than to encounter them in conflict. On our west coast, when the tide is flowing (that is, when it is ‘coming in’), the stream of water moves north. When it ebbs, the water runs south again, draining off towards the equator. High water is about six and a half hours before and after low water, so that the tide is full ‘in’ and full ‘out’ twice in every 26 hours or so. For an hour or two around high water, on either side of the precise moment when the tide ‘turns’ and starts to ebb, there is a period when it is doing nothing very definite, and the tidal movement in a stretch of sea, or even in a narrow channel, is hardly perceptible. There is a similar period of ‘slack’ water at the bottom of the ebb.
These conditions have all sorts of local variations, caused by the shape of the coast, and the sea-bed, and a great complication of other factors. So well, however, have our coasts been surveyed, and the surveys constantly revised, that most of the smallest local vagaries are known and recorded in the nautical almanacs, Admiralty and other official navigational publications, as well as in the useful little tide tables handed out by the yachting firms. By a ready-reckoner system laid out as simply as the multiplication table on the back cover of the old Shorter Catechism, you can find out the time of high water at any village, harbour, or prominent navigation point on the coast.
In addition, the detailed charts of the coast are sprinkled with information and warning advice, particularly about any unorthodox set of the tide. Where a channel does not run clearly north and south, the flood-tide coming up from the south must go in to the channel by the handiest entrance it can find, and go out by the other. A novice navigator may not have the experience to tell from the other conditions present whether the flood stream will arrive from the east or the west. Do not let him worry. Sailormen have been here before; the information has been gathered and noted down in the charts and sailing directions.
Broadly, however, the flood-tide flows north, and the ebb-tide south, and if you are going north you will go when the tide does. According to the district, this will mean a stream running at from one to several knots in your favour. With a canoe, you have to adjust your entire time table to that of the tide, and if the stream starts flowing an hour before dawn, you will require to be up in time to go with it, and so enjoy six hours or so of positive travel – a good day – before it turns against you. You can also travel in the short period of slack water, and also, of course, against the tide, if you must move on, but this will cut your pace considerably. Anything above three knots will be very tough work, while there are certain main coastal channels where the tide runs faster than you paddle. These tide factors scarcely affect power-boats or even the larger sailing yachts with auxiliary engines, but the canoeist’s first lesson is to learn to be friendly with the tide.
And with the wind. Unlike the boat of normal design – even the rowing-boat – a canoe has little grip of the water. Only a few inches are below the surface, and the rest of the hull, with the figure of the canoeist, offers to the wind what is in effect a large proportional sail area. A wind on the water can blow a canoe before it like an inflated bladder. On our coasts the wind blows almost constantly. It is true that, in a sultry summer, calms may occur, but these are rare. During the three months of our trip we never happened to be afloat on a calm day.
The wind, which is the heart of the weather, is largely unpredictable. It has wild, unexpected local variations, and may squall and whisper its way round the compass in a few hours. Here it differs from the tide, which has at least a regular rhythm, although it held fast to the long-term secrets of its predictability until Lord Kelvin unlocked these only a little time ago. The best meteorologist I know is certain that the wind and its weather have a purpose predictable in terms of scientific practice: that it will, perhaps in our own time, be possible to display the rule by which the wind is made, saying where it will blow, and for how long, a week on Tuesday. And what will happen to the sailor-man then?
A canoe may be paddled against a head wind, but it is work. The cunning voyager about to make an open-water passage prefers to wait until the wind is favourable. A favourable wind is one which is going his way, although he may have to be content with one which does not blow farther ahead than either quarter. A beam wind or anything ahead of that will bring up the muscle and cut down the rate of travel. Square sails, such as we used, blossom in a following wind. A fore-and-aft rig requires more elaborate gear, and is better with some drop-keel device to reduce leeway, or sideways skidding down the wind.
There is a good deal of fun still to be had by some suitably tough group prepared to investigate the whole range of canoe sailing possibilities. John Marshall used to experiment in the Firth of Forth with a box-kite flying aloft and attached to his bow. To follow up this inspiration alone should ensure a release from boredom, and if its problems of remote control were to be overcome, the sea-canoeist could look forward to going with the wind, and at the wind’s speed.
These two, tide and wind, are the chief allies, and they should both be on your side. With the wind and the tide in your favour there’s nothing to stop you. Complications follow when the wind and the tide are opposed. This conflict sets up a difficult sea, and in open coastal water it may be the wet jabbly rhythmless sea which makes misery of travel. That is why, even on a good day with a steady wind blowing, two separate sets of sea conditions will be created – one when the tide is with the wind, and one when the tide turns against the wind.
Whatever tricks he may be up to in the rigging of sails, the main propulsion used by the canoeist will be his own paddling effort. The chief glory of the canoe is the extreme comfort of the rowing position. One faces forward, in an armchair, and sees all that is coming. The paddling action is a leverage between the two hands, and a feathering motion set by a quick wrist movement in the brief moment when neither paddle blade is in the water. The tendency when learning to paddle is to spread the hands too widely apart as they grip the shaft between the blades. With familiarity they come closer together. The novice also feels that the total length of the paddle is too little. This awkwardness, too, will pass, although few will be comfortable with a paddle of seven feet or less, the Eskimo length.
With practice the canoe keeps a much straighter course than would seem possible from a merely mechanical examination of the side thrusts which create the movement.
This paddling is very much simpler than rowing. Results can be achieved from the first stroke, as we found with quite young children and with elderly non-seamen. There is no catching of crabs, losing rowlocks, and falling over backwards. Even the timid beginner feels happy while dipping gingerly and awaiting results. It is perhaps relevant to mention that the action reduces the waistline noticeably and puts bulk and hardness on to the upper parts. At the end of our trip we had each added 14 or 16 pounds of weight, all of it hard stuff round the shoulders; and we could almost span our waists with our hands.
We found that the subtle paddling lever-ages employed by all parts of the body could be assisted. A firm purchase was needed between the soles of our feet and the forward bulkheads. This was filled by the bundle of our sleeping clothes, tightly rolled and waterproofed into a firm cylinder on which our bare feet rested. A similar bundle with our change of clothes was braced in each canoe between the stern bulkhead and the small of our backs. We learned in our daily packing to calculate the diameter of these bundles to a fraction of an inch, so that we were aware of an easy leverage from toes to hips, and a slight stiffening of the physical tension gave us, when necessary, quick extra power in our paddle strokes. This was undoubtedly what MacGregor meant when he insisted that his canoes be made to the measurements of his own person.
A sustained feeling of grip and fit is of high importance in sea-canoeing. Much practice will bring experience to meet in comfort any of the great variety of wave and wind conditions, but from the start it is well to know that canoeing of this kind is a singular art. The canoeist is, in fact, riding the canoe. Braced to hold it to him, and actually
to wield it as a weapon of battle with the sea, he will learn how to lift it, and when, at the approaching waves. He must be as conscious of riding as a cyclist. With a beam-breaking sea, for example, there is a trailing of the lee paddle and then a sudden thrust and lift with it; at the same time the haunches give a flick of the canoe towards the wave, with precisely the movement used by a Hawaiian maiden to swing her grass skirt.
Two people in one canoe will be very expert indeed if they can do this with perfect timing together. Most of the canoeing accidents happen in double-seater canoes which are neither big enough to be boats nor small enough to be solo weapons. We became convinced that the single-seater canoe is altogether safer, and makes this wave jousting most joyous. Whatever the excellence of the folding boat, many of which we tried, it would seem certain that the best canoe for sea and shore work is a rigid model, with some keel protection for the fabric.
Each craft should have its own safety margin. We felt doubly provided for with our rubber-tyre lifebelts and the sealed bulkheads. The canoes could remain afloat with the centre section completely waterlogged, while if we lost them altogether the lifebelts would have been a solace. We never had to resort to the latter test, but the tyres were comforting. A sea-canoe must carry its own buoyancy. The water cannot be kept out except by seaming the canoeist to his craft by means of his garments, a dangerous practice in our beamier European canoes. If the hull is open from end to end without bulkheads, it can fill in a sea and be sunk. Inflated beach balls, or anything of the sort both light and airtight, should be stuffed into the bow and stern points and tests made to ensure that the filled canoe can still float in rough water bearing twice the canoeist’s weight. A picturesque buoyancy device is the installation at each end of the hull of a sufficient quantity of tabletennis balls, penned in by a barrier of net.
The Canoe Boys Page 10