Kayaking the Hebrides
The journey I made by kayak along the coast of the Outer Hebrides, from Castlebay on Barra to Lochmaddy on North Uist, with my old friend Paul.
Each colored line represents one day's travel by kayak.
Day One: Ferry Day
We arrived in Oban at lunchtime on July 22, about an hour before the ferry to the Isle of Barra. Of course, we hadn’t allowed enough time to navigate the usual summer traffic jam, find our pre-booked parking spot and get last-minute supplies so it ended up being a bit rushed. But we made it. The CalMac crew were great - they helped us carry our kayaks and our bags of kit onto the boat.
We arrived in Castlebay at about 6 pm. There is a great community store close to the pier which was still open, so we were able to pick up coffee, porridge, a couple of tins, and importantly a paper OS map, which we had originally planned to get in Oban.
Then we had to pack the kayaks, which involved taking the kit out of our big blue Ikea bags and stuffing it into the three hatches on each. A couple of things I had brought - like a spare pair of old shoes - had to go in the bin. It took at least an hour to do all that and to put on our dry suits.
Our boats were on the slipway about a metre above the waterline and the tide was coming in. So by the time we were ready to go, the kayaks were almost in the water. The weather was grey and the Minch looked pretty choppy. Heading off into that for a week or so, you are looking at a future that is not completely certain. There is a part of you that wonders what you are doing.
Anyway, we pushed off and paddled out of the bay to see a pair of otters and an eagle before long, all quite close. We went about 5km to a small island that we had spotted on the map that seemed to have a beach. It did. We got there about 9 pm, set up our tents and lit our little camping stoves to prepare our suppers - we were pretty hungry by this time. I had brought one nice M&S tikka masala with rice - after that it was just going to be sachets and tins. The island is not far from the mainland and we could see lights in the houses on the shore as we sat and ate our meals.
Barra from the island we camped on.
Day Two: Scary Day
The Hebrides is a long chain of islands, extending to over 250km, but there are only a couple of gaps where the tide flows freely between the Minch and the Atlantic. At those places, it is very powerful and so, sometimes, is the wind. There is a complex interaction of forces: wind, waves, tide and paddling. We were planning to cross over one of these gaps, the Sound of Barra, to Eriskay. The best time to cross is at slack water, between the strongest tidal flows.
We paddled to the isle of Hellisay which is at the north-eastern tip of Barra. By this time we were past the inhabited area of the island. Hellisay is hilly and barren except for a few sheep. You can see the cliffs of Eriskay’s Na Stacan Dubha but even with binoculars it looks a long way - about 2km.
We had four hours to wait for slack water, until about 4.30 pm. I had a nap, Paul explored the island to get away from my snoring. When we judged it was time to leave, the wind was quite strong (25km/h) coming from the southwest.
Getting ready to leave Hellisay.
Initially, we paddled towards the wind to see what that was like, and coming back again, that all seemed to be OK so we started the crossing. As we got out into open sea the waves were getting quite a bit bigger - over a metre - and I was quite whippy and unstable with the wind. Although I didn’t think I was close to falling in, it did seem that the situation would get more challenging before it got easier. And progress was slow.
It’s hard to assess how strong the wind is when you’re going with it, but we felt the wind behind was really pretty strong - it grabs your paddle blades when they’re out of the water. We were talking to one another about it. Paul asked: ‘How do you feel about this?” and I said: “ I'm coping, but it's not brilliant at all. There's room for the situation to get much worse.” What we were concerned about, since the wind was blowing like this, was we could end up getting blown across into the Minch. So when we got about a third of the way out here, seven or 800 meters, we had a quick conversation and Paul called it that we should go back. We turned around and we went back as quickly as we could to Hellisay.
Hellisay is made up of two main islands separated by a narrow channel. We kayaked into the channel and found somewhere in there to camp. It was a lovely evening
Day Three - Crossing Day
Hellisay in the sunshine.
It started off as a nice morning, A tender from a yacht came and landed on our island with one man in it, who waved at us and then went to climb the small hill.
But we could see a big thundercloud coming over so we knew the weather was going to get worse and we wanted to make the crossing on the next slack water, at mid-morning, so we were under time pressure.
It took a frustratingly long time to get ready to set off. To illustrate the point, it took me 20 minutes to put my contact lenses in because I am not used to doing that outside. But it was pretty rainy later so I am glad I did it.
We made coffee and porridge and then we had to wash everything. Then I had to take my tent down and make sure that everything was dried out and put everything into the IKEA bags. Our camp was about ten metres above sea level so I had to make several journeys to walk the IKEA bags down down over the slippery rocks. And then I had to lie down beside the kayak and push all of the stuff in. I got really frustrated with that, because it was taking ages and Paul was ahead of me and I was feeling the pressure to make the safest time to cross.
This time, the conditions were quite a bit more amenable and then we just sort of gently went across. So instead of the wind being 22 to 25 kilometers per hour, it was more like 15 to 18. That makes a really big difference. If the wind’s 22 to 25 kilometres per hour, you can feel it catching your paddle where your paddle is out of the water.
So we got across and then we started to make good progress. We kayaked along past Eriskay and around the southern tip of South Uist. It is a superb rocky coastline, with cliffs up to 100 metres high. You are conscious that you can’t really land much of the time - but we found a couple of places to stop.
A beach below Beinn Mhòr on South Uist.
It was quite wet that day but when you are kayaking in the rain it can be quite beautiful. You see the raindrops bouncing off the sea, in that Hebridean light, the soft grey sky with dramatic shafts of light breaking through - what a friend calls ‘Jesus hands’. We saw more wildlife - seals, otters and sea eagles.
In the afternoon we stopped and rafted up and looked at the map and the GPS. We didn’t have phone reception, but we needed a forecast for the next few days, because Lochboisdale is the last point of refuge that's got any kind of facilities. If for example, the weather forecast was going to be three days of storms then we would go in there. But we agreed that if it was good we would keep going.
By then it was getting quite windy - the wind was a bit against us there. We were really battling with it, it was whipping sideways into our faces. It had been quite a long day by this point. Anyway, there was no reception, no reception and by the time we got reception we were literally about 700, 800 meters from the Lochboisdale ferry terminal, which allowed us to establish that the forecast was good. By which time, I said to Paul, I know I said that if the forecast was good, we don’t need to go into Lochboisdale but we are literally 700 meters from it now. So I just can't face not going in there. I was also conscious that it might not be that easy to find somewhere to land if we kept going. So went towards the hotel.
Paul thought it was funny that I didn’t even take off my dry suit, I just stumbled from the shore into the reception. The hotelier asked if I had been yachting and I explained I was in a kayak and he rented me a room. Paul is a bit more of a purist about things so he set up his tent outside, but he did have a bath in my room and joined me for dinner and breakfast.
It was fantastic. The staff were charming. We never went anywhere other than Lochboisdale Hotel - except Paul tried to go and get toothpaste on the Sunday morning and failed. We arrived on Saturday night and the place was actually quite busy. That was a real success because, for example, my phone wasn't working because it had become kind of damp, and I couldn't recharge it. So I went to reception and said: ‘Can you give me a handful of rice in this bag?’ because I knew that I could use the rice as a way of drawing water out, and that worked which was great. Graham was the hotelier. We had an amusing chat with him. He was full of stories about island life, the friendly rivalry between Uist and Barra, the politics of ferries. Lochboisdale has two ferries, the one to Oban which takes five hours and in the summer one to Mallaig which takes three. That is obviously important to the hotel and to the island but the ferry committee had many disagreements about priorities. Graham asked the local priest to chair the committee - because it is so hard to argue with a priest, and that worked and they got agreement.
I had a couple of pints of beer and one whisky. I had scallops, and a good steak and sticky toffee pudding. Paul is vegan so he didn’t have that. I don’t remember what he had. That was me totally replenished. I had a bath. I was able to dry out my things and then the next day it was just 50 metres back to the boats.
Day four - Southerlies Day
We had seen in our research that the prevailing winds at this time of year seem to be coming from the south and that was why we chose to go the direction we did. This was the first day that worked out for us. I think we were also lucky with the tidal flow which was going our way. So we totally hammered up the coastline.
Your maximum paddling speed is about 5km an hour but the tide can be flowing at about a km or two per hour. And if you have 20 km per hour of wind at your back that may add another km or two per hour. So we were whistling along at between six and seven km an hour.
We met a kayaker who was travelling the other direction - he had been out for weeks. His name was Roland Arnison. We floated close together to chat for a while. (Arnison featured on a Radio Four programme Rare Earth about seabirds recently -36 minutes in.)
We saw another sea eagle - I took a short video of it taking off. This coastline is really impressive here because you've got these massive hills that are 2000 feet high, right by the shore. The Hebrides is famous for its beaches but they are mainly along the west side. On the east side, it is a very rocky coast without any houses and very few beaches.
We had seen from the forecast that the next day was going to be bad weather and we were fortunate as we managed to find a MBA bothy. We stayed there for two nights and had a day resting. Paul slept in his tent but I slept in the bothy.
Day five - Bothy Day
I made a fire in the bothy and was able to keep it going using driftwood, so it was quite cosy and I found a book that I also have a copy of at home “Cairngorm John” about the Mountain Rescue service. So I read that, rested and listened to the wind and rain outside.
Day six - Argument Day
The following day we had quite strong winds again. We also discovered that I had lost the plastic lid off my main hatch - it wasn’t secured with a cord. That was potentially disastrous: if water gets into the boat it can destabilise it. We found some foam floats among the waste that had been washed up on the beach and stuffed it into the hole. We packed in Paul’s inflatable paddle float to seal the space. I found a round bit of plastic that fitted over the top so we taped that on.
We then made our way round the edge of South Uist, passing a lighthouse. We went across to Benbecula, sort of zigzagging around these islands, there are quite a few little islands and peninsulas there.
There are a lot of seals too, and we were trying our best not to startle them, because when they slip off the rocks into the water they can use up a lot of energy. In a kayak, you are very quiet so you can get quite close to wildlife. At one point we saw a tourist boat and it seemed so loud - I don’t know how they ever get to see anything.
Mid-afternoon we saw a boat that appeared to be coming towards us at quite a pace. It seemed to me, because I live in the Highlands and I see a lot of fishfarm boats, that it was one of those. I could see a farm in front of us and I thought it was actually in the process of turning to head for that so I thought we should stay where we were. Paul thought the boat was heading directly for us and so we should move. We had a brief disagreement and Paul started to move and then he realised I wasn’t following. The worst result would be to be separated so he came back. Actually, it was a fish farm boat but we ended up arguing about what had occurred. I had accused Paul of being ‘gung ho’ in the moment, which he found very annoying because he regards himself as being the cautious one. Anyway, we soon set the dispute aside and continued on our way.
We ended up coming round the island of Ronay to a little island called Flodaigh Mor. It is connected to Benbecula by a causeway and it has a few cottages, but we didn’t see anyone. In the evening we saw an otter playing, we watched it for ages. It dived each time for almost exactly 45 seconds. We camped there and set up our stoves and had some hot dinner. Paul went for a swim - as he did every day.
I had been out of phone contact for a couple of days by this time. I picked up some signal and received a few messages from Jackie asking if we were OK. I texted but in a fat finger moment, I messaged ‘Help’ instead of ‘Hello’ - I sent another message immediately and she picked them both up at the same time. I managed to get through to speak to her and fortunately we were able to laugh about this.
Day seven - Westerlies Day
Paul swimming near our day 7 campsite
This is quite a complicated landscape here. It's quite difficult to navigate. So basically the way to do it is the map gets folded out on the deck of your boat. You unfold this thing you bought, but you don't really know where you are on it. And then you pull out the GPS and it says - you're here - and you go Okay, that looks like where we are. But you soon find you have to get the map out again.
What you're doing is sort of crawling along, skipping from island to island. In a way, you feel more comfortable being close to the land, but you can always be in more danger if you get blown into a cliff. There aren’t always a lot of places you can land. But what you are looking for is a bit of protection from the wind.
We found channels and caves a couple of times to stop in. One channel had a water slide coming down it, so I put my kayak down that, like a water run. That was fun.
Eventually, we came to a big natural arch which is super cool and we camped near there, below a big hill which is just a bit bigger than Arthur Seat, but it looks a lot bigger because it comes out of a flat landscape, so it goes right up from sea level.
Day 8 - Good Decision Day
What we were planning to do was to paddle around the headland and up into Lochmaddy but as we started out around it the conditions in the Minch worsened. And we thought, hold on a minute - it's another three kilometres. There was a swell and the wind was strengthening from the west, so we thought actually, this is a bit dangerous.
So we decided that instead we would go back and turn into the inlet below the headland. We could see we could kayak to a road - we thought maybe we could get there and find someone with a van to give us a lift, get a taxi or something, maybe it wasn’t particularly realistic.
Paul being blown across the freshwater Loch Euphort.
But then as we got towards the road, we looked at the map and said okay, hold on, if we go back up to there, then we can go to the tip of the sea loch and then we could go across freshwater loch and another freshwater loch and another, all the way across to Lochmaddy. And that is what we did, but it was really physically demanding. There was a lot of portage. It took us five hours to travel five kilometres.
We would paddle across a loch and then we have to get all of our stuff and the boats which were heavy as they were full of damp kit and carry them over the heather and hills between the lochs. We were worried because our phones were going flat and we didn’t have a paper map for that bit. So I drew a map of the lochs on the back of our map. We couldn’t have done it without a map. There were probably about five portage sections. I lost another hatch cover en route.
Finally, we arrived at the Lochmaddy Hotel. We booked two rooms and then we asked about dinner. The woman at reception said, oh dinner is off, we stop serving at 8.30. I said ‘Well it is just as well the clock behind you says 8.25 - we will place our orders now.’ So luckily, she took our orders. So we ate, and managed a beer before turning in about 10.30pm.
And that is phase one of kayaking the Hebrides - next time we will start at Lochmaddy and go up to Stornaway.
