I couldn’t tell what I was dreaming about at night. I was not sure whether I forgot my dreams when I got up, or I just didn’t have any dreams after getting so much tired. Ten hours of continuous paddling were exactly what you might think about it. An annoying ring of the alarm clock in the morning. Half past five at the digital screen..
- Alon?
- Yeah, I’ve heard it.
We were stealing a few more precious minutes of sleep, lying wrapped in our cozy sleeping bags. Day after day, for more than a month, on the same small mattress, within the same sleeping bag, on the same pillow which is in fact a rolled fleece coat.
Precious minutes of piece and complacency pass.
- Shall we get up?
- Yep?
- What about Gaddi?
Gaddi joined me and Alon as an “expedition trainee”. He was in fact as strong paddler as us. His skills were enough to paddle in any seas that me and Alon were capable of dealing with. The main difference was that Gaddi didn’t not have an actual experience of planning his own kayaking expeditions, he needded to realize what his limits were – be able to analyze a hazardous situation vs. his ability to handle it.
We started the circumnavigation together with Gaddi. After 18 days my wife Inna was intended take his place and paddle with us for another 10 days. A kind of relay race. The last third of circumnavigation meant to be completed by just 2 of us, by me and Alon.
“Gaddi?!!!”.
“Yeh…” – a muffled voice answered from the neighboring tent.
“We won’t be waiting for you this time. 7:30 we are on the water.”
Gaddi was taking his time when doing things. But he was definitely getting better every day, organizing himself more efficiently. We were already getting help from him in the daily duties, and not just in making dishes after dinner, which didn’t need to get done very quickly and therefore was assigned to Gaddi almost regularly.
I was also a bit tired of rushing up but somehow in every expedition we ended up pushing forward. We were not trying to break any records. On the contrary, we were paddling for our internal piece and had no intention to show the world how fast we were. We love long paddling trips that set us clear-cut goal. On the other hand, there were obligations that we had for our families, children, our working places. That’s how we found ourselves committed in a way to our continuous daily progress. Thus most of our records were achieved fairly by chance. And Gaddi was just an innocent victim of all those contradictions.
7:45 am. With a bit of delay, we finally got on the water. That day we had a long crossing. We had to cover about 60 km in the open sea waters from Ballidavid Head to Loop Head, on the south-west coast. It was not going be easy, especially because the seas were calm that day. The wind and the waves are those that wake you up, high seas call for all your strength and concentration. This tension and sometimes even fear push the feeling of tiredness aside, make the time flow faster. It’s only when you step once again on a firm ground, you realize how tired you are. The calm seas, on the other hand, can be compared to a straight and boring highway: first you enjoy the speed and the asphalt’s quality, but after two hours of driving you are sick and tired of all the radio channels, and after four hours you already fight not to get asleep. Something common you experience in the calm seas.
After half-an-hour paddle we encountered a fishing boat and received an updated weather forecast. We reconfirmed that seas were going to be calm. The fishermen made their way on, leaving us with a valuable gift in Alon’s hands – he put a bag full of fresh mackerel fish between his legs, to avoid stinking in closed kayak hatches. Gaddi and I could not refrain from bursting in laughter. A festive dinner would be a reward for a long paddling day: Alon would clean the fish and get it ready for cooking, I’d grill it, Alon would cook white rice in a thermos and Gaddi… Gaddi, as usual, would wash the burnt frying pan and oily dishes at the end of the feast and get the dance floor ready. And if someone thinks of accusing me and Alon of tyranny and oppression, let me tell you that our frying pan is big enough to contain a meal for one person only, and Gaddi would be the first one to get the fried fish, while meantime I’d be cooking the next portion for Alon, swallowing my saliva for the next fifteen minutes. That’s why we were claiming to have a well developed set of social rules and regulations systematically controlled by the domestic legal authorities.
We kept ourselves entertained for a while by discussing the anticipated dinner. This was followed by a set of jokes and comical stories from our childhood that we shared for another hour and a half. The land where we set off in the beginning of the day had almost disappeared in the morning mist. But in spite of the calm, almost oily seas, our progress was 6 miles only. The GPS displayed cheerless progress speed for which we should have blamed the current, the one that we were currently paddling against without paying attention to it. This current was marked on the nautical map, however according to the map and similarly according to the tides table, the current was going to weaken and then to change its direction in the nearest hour and to start pushing us forward. The next three hours passed in silence. Lunch break time arrived. We are gathered around Alon’s kayak that hid in its day hatch the so longed gastronomic treasures: tuna cans, Indian pitas, slices of fairly disgusting sausage and a chocolate bar – four bricks per paddler. While we were gulping our food, I took a look at the GPS once again and realized that the current was still pushing us backwards with the speed of one knot.
Five hours later, which made it ten hours all in all from the beginning of the paddle, we were still far from the shore, continuing our endless crossing. The current hadn’t changed as it was supposed to. Gaddi’s face was black as a cold front cloud. It wore an expression of an eternal Jewish question: why is it always happening to us? Alon and I were truly entertained by Gaddi’s mournful state. We were well familiar with this sort of situations. During our former expeditions, we came across the same sort of situations quite often, and with the time we learned to take them easily. We learned to laugh at our hardships rather than gnash our teeth and wear a tragic expression on our face.
The silence was interrupted by Alon’s heartbreaking
monologue made with a deliberately strong
Finally we approached Loop Head that was the end of our crossing. This tremendous rock protruded out of the sea as a falling wall. As we got closer, we discovered the actual dimensions of this wonder of nature. This massive wall looked like a mysterious fortress facade or a huge monster’s face plowed with deep scars and wrinkles. One of the vertical slots cut the cliff in two and formed a sea water passage surrounded by 100 meter walls. We were lucky to have calm seas that enabled us to safely enter the passage which was so narrow that we had to paddle one after another. I was the first to paddle in, and suddenly the world around me looked entirely different. It was dark inside, the sun rays could hardly penetrate through the narrow slot between the cliffs. The dimensions of both cliffs could be compared to those of modest sky-scrapers. The cliffs were not smooth at all - imagine yourself a stone layer cake. Dozens of stores, long sills densely inhabited with birds, a building full of tens thousands of little tenants of all sorts and kinds, sitting at the balconies watching the kayakers’ invasion to their street. Each tenant is eager to express his opinion of the incident. Everyone is screaming, scolding and twittering. They make so much noise that I feel myself part of a protest demonstration. The cormorants decided to put some order and swiftly dashed into the water. They dropped down with heaviness of a turkey next to our kayaks, raising a fountain of salty drops all around. Goodness me, I had never been a subject to cormorant air bombing.
One after another we left the birds’ temple, moving on along
the cliffs, when all over sudden the cliffs’ shape changed dramatically. The
chef who baked the stone layer cake decided this time to roll the stone in form
of a strudel. This massive coil had absolutely flat surface. Still shocked by
what we have just seen, we faced another cliff shaped as Arc de Triumph in
Irish people are the most amiable. They brought us food, fresh fish, invited us to their homes to take a hot shower, gave us a ride when we went hitchhiking. They offered their help in spite of us being three unshaved men, whose faces were burnt in the sun, with a strange look in our eyes. I was just thinking what would their welcome be when Inna, my partner, takes Gaddi’s place. The doors of the houses would open on their own, and the Irish fishermen would be chasing us with their boats pleading us to accept their humble present of mackerel fish. We would be satiated with the daily gourmet dinners and would kindly decline their offer and ask for their help to get to the nearest branch of McDonald’s.
Inna arrived and brought good mood, calmness and a lot of
smiles along with her. It looked like the nature welcomed her with the favorable
weather: finally we were receiving tail winds that pushed us forward along the hazardous
west cost of
Alon and I were considering the eight days of Inna’s leg a
kind of vacation: after 18 days of paddling together with Gaddi we were in
excellent shape, while the major part of Inna’s training at that time was
putting our two kids to bed in the evening and arriving to her office in the
morning. In addition Inna has a quality in her character – she often
underestimates herself. When talking to her you get an impression that she has
just heard about kayaking a week ago. And six hundred kilometers that she solo
paddled among the Greek islands and in
Three of us were padding along the chain of islands at the west coast. All the surroundings were covered with the thick fog. We navigated with the help of compass. It looked as if we lost our way inside a cotton-wool cloud. Sea gulls emerged out of nowhere, made a round over our heads and disappeared out in the endless whiteness. Where did they come from? Where were they heading to? All over sudden a cliff silhouette of an island appeared in front of us, as in a fairy tale. We shifted our kayaks from their course and proceeded along the shoreline. We could not even guess what the cliffs dimensions were, since their upper body vanished in the fog’s obscurity. The seas were calm. I am truly fond of these cold and gloomy days, when the nature is sober and alienated. It emphasizes the enormous power concealed in it. A thin layer of arrogance and excessive self-confidence that formed around me during the past sunny days quickly evaporates. The obscure light and the darkened sea bring me back to the “working state”.
Contrary to our expectations, Inna didn’t bring us any luck
with hot showers. Her gentle soul strongly refused to use any hints when it
came to getting in touch with locals. She expected that the fellowman would
understand our situation alone and would generously give us a hand and a towel.
The fellowman wouldn’t usually guess what we were longing for, therefore in most
of the paddling days with Inna we ended up with a chilling bath in the waters
of
Alon and I were left alone. We returned to a daily routine known to us from the previous expeditions: early awakening, 9 working hours, overtime if necessary, lunch breaks on the water, landing, dinner, sleep. According to our collective agreement, every seventh day was a paddle strike, except for the paddling weeks when there was a storm that forced us to make an unplanned break in the middle of the week. The stormy days are poorly coordinated and are hard to predict, just as the holidays in the Jewish calendar.
The two of us know each other well, from the other’s technical level and decision making abilities and up to the amount of sugar in the other’s tea and the level of sleeping mattress inflation. Likewise in the sea, we analyzed quite similarly the seas and winds potential, made the decisions that led us to the expected outcome. Almost, always…
On that very day we planned to get around the north-eastern tip
of
The time was 4 pm. We were still in the sea, planning to paddle another 5 miles up to the landing point. We noticed that suddenly the seas started rising up rapidly. The waves were 1.5 meter before, but now they were getting bigger and steeper, up to 3 meters. I switched on the GPS and realized that our dropped to just 3 knots. The tide must have switched before the time that was noted in the tide table. No delay in making decisions: we needed to paddle back against the wind, to the nearest point where the landing was possible. It was scary to watch the waves that got steeper every minute. The upper part of the wave was already breaking, the wind was roaring in our ears. We managed to turn the kayaks 90 degrees, parallel to the waves, however we could not yet complete the full turn. Every time the bow was rotated a bit, there came the wave that turned the kayak back towards the wind and the waves. We kept struggling for a few more minutes that seemed to us being ages, but finally we overcame. Now we had a one kilometer paddle to make, under the salty shower of sea water that the wind tore out from the seas and threw in our faces. Our eyes were almost shut. Via narrow eyelid slots I could see the furious mountains of water that rose against us. I bent forward, braced with a paddle to prevent capsize and paddled on stubbornly, putting all my force into every stroke. The day after the tendons would get inflamed as a result of an irregularly strong effort, but nobody thought about it that day. With all the tension from the situation that has almost got out of control, with the eyes half shut, I found myself being fascinated by the might and beauty of the beast named the sea.
No, the sea is not treacherous, it is noble and beautiful. It demands respect and does not forgive arrogance and disesteem. It is certainly stronger than me and Alon. Its flicks are painful. Being in the sea is like playing with a satiated tiger: it allows you petting it, crawls with you on a carpet, but the moment it feels loosing your attention it will rise against you. The sea has a soul of a living creature. It talks to you, helps you to better understand yourself: what material are you made of, what is your true love. It makes you experience the childish joy and the fear of death, sometimes both of them on the same day. The sea draws and attracts you even after it has shown you its furious look. It’s hard to rationally explain this attraction but believe me it’s a strong and sincere one. And what about us? We cannot resist its call to come again and get to know it anew.
Thanks to our sponsors:
Nigel Dennis Kayaks: www.seakayakinguk.com
Lendal: www.lendal.com
Snapdragon design: www.snapdragondesign.com
Kokatat: www.kokatat.com
Reed: www.chillcheater.com
The web site of the expedition: