As I can't sleep, an anecdote to send you to sleep. Bear with me.
We were somewhat committed, exactly
here, at the base of 500 foot+ sheer cliffs and faced by a towering sea stack (with a big hole through the middle, oddly) with a vicious headwind blasting into us and the sea doing confused things. Definitely a, "How did I get my poor wife into this much danger?" moment, well outside her comfort zone. Getting past the stack looked tough.
To delay the hardest bit, we had lunch in the boats trying to get some shelter behind the stack. Heather somehow made an entire tin of red salmon and a McVities Ginger cake vanish in the time it took us both to be blown from one side of the eddy to the other.
I lined up to paddle the gap between the stack and the cliff; I had to make this look easy, or I was convinced Heather would freak out and refuse to follow. I had to put my head down to paddle against the confined wind, the gap was dark and narrow. Halfway through this claustrophobic gorge...something fast, sharp and black shot out of the sky into the water inches from me. Tightly wound up already, I nearly soiled my pants there and then. The hundred yards of sea after the stack was dire, thrashing clapotis and confused currents. I reached the end of this and waited anxiously for Heather.
She paddled through at a leisurely pace, but made it without any problems. I steeled myself for the inevitable stress-induced tears, but Heather was actually in tears with
laughter.
Why? Partly because she'd just done the whole thing with the entire Ginger cake still in her gob, and partly because she'd watched me jump out of my skin when a large cormorant decided to divebomb me at pointblank range.
Well, maybe you had to be there...
-----------Mark Rainsley
Edited by: guidebook at: 6/6/04 1:30 am
