It was hard to shift gears when one moment my heart and emotions were deep in the lives of people of the past, my own past, and the next I was back in the boat, feeling the sea wrap around me and demand that I live in the moment.  Throughout the trip, I struggled with that transition, wanting to stay with the emotions, to explore them and feel their depth, but knowing that once I was in the boat I had to let it go and pay attention to my surroundings.  The rhythm of the trip was like that:  while my experiences on the land were as intense as those on the sea, it was a life of constant transitions.

Day after day, weeks flowing into months, I had seen and experienced more than I thought was possible.  Every time I thought I had reached the peak, that the passion for the journey must certainly begin to wane, I would stumble on another experience that pulled me onward.  Stroke by stroke, four miles an hour, Ireland was filling me with its life blood.  At times the awakening was one of haunted loneliness, a severed connection to the people of my own beginnings.  At other times it was the high of feeling free and running with the abandonment of winds and swells.  Still others, it was sitting in complete surrender and awe beneath great walls of cliff that reminded me how very tiny and insignificant I really was.  It was ironic, yet at the same time uncannily natural, that I should come back to a land my ancestors had fled.  Somewhere in this country were the ruins of my family, the stones and earth that had known my blood relatives.  It was no wonder I felt so alive, so open and willing to take the risk of being both physically and emotionally vulnerable.

While I paddled, my mind was free to move through these thoughts, exploring the images and feelings of the trip and letting them go again when the sea demanded my attention.  That was the beauty of the journey.  I could move freely from one realm to the next, the constant dip and pull of the paddle a mantra that connected both worlds.

I paddled on the inside of Slyne Head, happy to have the reefs and islets that extended out to the lighthouse breaking the power of the bigger waves.  A mile offshore, the light tower stood on an island and warned of the shallows.  As regular as the swells, huge explosions of white broke against the seaward side of the island and mutely climbed into the air.  In closer, smaller waves broke over hidden rocks, lifting and cascading in bands of brilliant white on deep blue.    They broke with a regularity that marked them separately from the smaller whitecaps covering the sea surface.  Most of the breakers I ignored; they were close but not close enough to be a threat.  The others I watched and eased the bow to either right or left as I came up on them.

That night I slept beneath the sand dunes in Mannin Bay twenty sea miles from where I had started the day.  Massive dunes stood side by side, crowding the beach and spilling sand into the blasts of wind that buffeted the tent, the same winds that had pushed me around Slyne Head.  The forecast was for strong southwesterlies, shifting to northwesterlies by dawn.  During the night I awoke several times to the slamming  and popping of the tent inches from my head.  I drifted in and out of a disturbed sleep and later woke to a sudden calm.  Perhaps the winds had blown themselves out?  I needed rest desperately and finally settled into the first deep sleep of the night.  I should have remembered the forecast.

It seemed like moments later when the next blasts hit the tent from the other direction and suddenly the rain-soaked nylon collapsed over me.  I was instantly awake, groping for the headlamp and crawling out from under the gritty mess of sand-covered nylon.  In the driving wind and rain, I searched for rocks to pile on the tent corners and shifted the boat to the windward side.   Anchored again, I reset the tent and laughed at the image of myself working in the wind and rain with nothing but a headlamp on.  I crawled back into the tent, did my best to shake the sand off everything, and shivered in the sleeping bag until dawn.   I was gritty, cold, but for some reason, perhaps madness, I was happy.

Copyright @1999 Chris Duff