It’s been over a week now since I returned from my week at sea with Sail Britain, and it is a very grey, gloomy day in Dalkeith, so what better time to revisit this amazing experience.
Back in 2020, while doing some early redrafts of my second middle grade book, I was researching trips in the Hebrides. Somehow I came across Sail Britain, who organise interdisciplinary sailing weeks largely in and around the Western Isles of Scotland, mixing conservation and creativity with sailing.
You may remember 2020 – it was not the best time – so sailing was a no-go and I ended up spending a beautiful, isolated week on Colonsay with Laurel between lockdowns. For various reasons we weren’t able to make a sailing trip work over the next couple of years, so when we finally got to Mallaig a couple of weeks ago, it felt like it had been a long time coming!
We joined the Wild Writing week led by Catherine Edsell and Jenny Kinnear, which combined writing with meditation, singing(!) and, of course, sailing. At first I thought it would be like the last writing retreat I went on, and was planning to treat it a bit too much like work – but when I realised I couldn’t bring my laptop, I went from feeling briefly stressed to feeling much more excited about the whole thing.
I always write on my laptop, and I think it affects the way I write. When I write by hand, I can’t keep up with my thoughts, so work gets done much faster when I’m on the computer. But sometimes I forget it’s not all about getting work done fast, especially this kind of work. Writing is meant to be creative. It’s an art. When I write by hand, I take much more care over what I put down on the page.
So, going into this week without any plans to work on a current project was kind of freeing. I only took one notebook and a small journal (usually I have a stack of notebooks which all have different purposes). I only keep a journal when I’m doing something interesting, and I did keep up with it every day, but otherwise I wrote only when we were given a prompt. At Catherine’s direction we meditated upon and wrote about air, water, ether, reciprocity. We wrote in spirals about dolphins and the very moment we were finished, dolphins appeared.
The first day we sailed to Eigg, surrounded by islands, though we couldn’t see them through the cloud. Rain hammered us for the last portion of our journey and we spent the rest of the afternoon below decks, feeling a bit damp. I had never been on a yacht before and hadn’t really given much thought to what it would be like, so I found the first day pretty challenging – we were all wet, cold and exhausted at the end. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to cope with a whole week at sea.
Thank god I stayed! The next day we explored Eigg, then sailed to Soay, where Gavin Maxwell (author of Ring of Bright Water) had his basking shark fishery. His book about life with otters was one of the first pieces of nature writing I ever read, and I have always found it fascinating that he almost completely decimated the population of basking sharks on the west coast. I swam in the natural harbour there (forgetting the hundreds of jellyfish we’d seen) and we went ashore to explore the ruins of the factory. It was a pretty haunted, but beautiful, place.
From Soay we sailed to Canna, which felt like the edge of the world. It was so still and so silent. We had a barbecue on the beach and I couldn’t believe it when I realised there was machair right there. It’s a wildflower grassland habitat that’s unique to the western shores of the isles, and it’s an important part of the setting for my second book. I also couldn’t believe my ears when we heard a corncrake loudly announcing its presence all evening – I’ve only ever read about them before, as they are red-listed.
Despite clouds on the mainland and some of the islands, we hardly saw another drop of rain or a cloud while we were out on the sea after that first day. The sun on the waves made the water sparkle so much I was living in my sunglasses. We spent a night in the harbour at Rum, where I was able to have a hot shower on the mainland (luxury) and we had an impromptu bagpipes concert from another boat. (He not only played the classics, he also played the Proclaimers.)
Our last destination was effectively a rock surrounded by sand off the coast of Skye, labelled “Desert Island” on an open-source map. There we swam with an otter (it was a couple of hundred metres away, if that!) while terns dived at it from above, and saw some of the most colourful and beautiful shells I’ve ever encountered. Half the sand seemed to be broken coral.
In our days on the water we had many encounters with dolphins, which I tried to keep up with on the Whale Track app. I kept my binoculars close at hand all day every day, and I’m pretty sure I saw a minke whale surface a couple of times on the way to Canna. I kept a list of all the species we encountered, including Lion’s Mane jellyfish, porpoises, puffins and shearwaters.
I love singing, but that’s usually limited to singing loudly in the car. Jenny taught us that singing used to be a communal activity before the Industrial Revolution, and was something everybody did. She said that there’s no such thing as a bad voice, and that really changed my perspective! We sang sea shanties as we sailed, and a Gaelic seal song, which was my favourite. I love the idea of taking back singing as something that belongs to all of us, not just the professionals. The same is true of writing.
We were so fortunate to be on this journey with a diverse group of people who were all so open and warm-hearted. We hauled ropes, shared readings, swam and navigated a very cosy space below decks together.
This was my first experience of sailing but it won’t be the last. Again, not something I’d really given much thought to before – travelling by wind power?! I couldn’t get over what an amazing way to travel it was, and it gave me a new appreciation of distance as we criss-crossed the seas between the islands.
I can’t recommend Sail Britain enough. A huge thank you to Oliver for all his work in making these trips happen, to Cath and Jenny for leading such a wonderful week, to our patient skipper Graham and everyone on board the Merlin who made this trip so memorable.
Even though my second book is almost finished now, there’s so much I’m going to take away from this experience for Blair’s adventures in the Hebrides (tiny teaser) and no doubt for future work too.
Alex Mullarky 