Lakes and rivers > Articles > Up Dark Creek with a Paddle

Fospherecence? Phosforesence? Fosforescence? Phosphorblahdiblahrence! I can't spell, not even for a large brown paper bag of craftsman made, secret recipe toffee cooked up by some apple-cheeked granny high in the Lake District. So, as a writer, my most important ally is my dictionary. After coffee, that is. 'Went?, or 'whent?' 'Meditterannean' or 'Mediteranean?' All becomes clear from the well- thumbed pages of my Chambers.

So, looking up 'phosphorescence,' for reasons that will become clearer further down the page, I once again felt a gratitude to those clear thinking, literate toilers at the mouse and screen (or quill and vellum, for all I know) of contemporary letter ordering and word definition. Slightly compromised gratitude, though.

Defining words is a pretty important part of the dictionary deal. A crisp summing up of what the word in question is all about can save one a lot of wasted energy and discomfort. For example, I read 'tracheotomy - invasion surgery of the windpipe,' and suddenly I know, absolutely, that here is something that I neither want to try out or have tried out on me. And there is worse, I’m sure. For a start, malaria, McJob and motherhood, in 'm' alone. And some truly horrible things under 'x.' Rightly or wrongly, I always think of the courageous dictionary compiler as having actually tried out the less appealing definitions in real life, just so that I don't have to. Short-order frying hamburgers, child on hip, with a raging fever, for example, to bring first-hand knowledge to the relevant dictionary entries.

Of course, it works the other way, too. A rip-roaring sales pitch of a definition, for 'tiramisu' perhaps, or 'orgasm' maybe, can have me thinking, 'Righty ho, must give that a go myself sometime.'

So, I’m looking up 'phosphorescence,' for the spelling but, naturally enough, hang around to read the definition. And, well, I think the dictionary compiler may have got the letters in the right order for this one but, really, the sum-up is far from sparkling; 'To shine in the dark like phosphorous,' it intones, somewhat lacking in luster. Hardly sounding like a must-see phenomena.

With hindsight, I’m inclined to think that the quill pusher may not have got out from behind the vellum to check this word out. Because, if they'd taken the time to nip over to West Cork round about dusk, and then hopped into a sea-kayak to paddle night time waters aglow with bio-luminescence they'd, surely, have come up with a definition absolutely ringing with excitement and poetry. Or, I suppose they would have. But...maybe not.

Fourteen of us lined up on the slipway of Lough Hyne, in West Cork on a chilly summer's evening. A full moon was struggling into a cloud-darkened sky, somewhat in the manner that we'd struggled into our dry suits and lifejackets ten minutes earlier. Our flotilla of sea-kayaks bobbed in the shallows before us as we splashed out into the wavelets to climb into their narrow cockpits and become one with our craft. Which, at best, was like pushing a size 9 foot into a size 8 boot. Or, if you were a hydrophobic, like climbing into a Polypropylene coffin.

Lough Hyne is Europe's only inland marine lake; a glacier gouged lagoon joined to the sea by a narrow umbilical channel. Looking out on the lough's dark expanse, I thought of it as an upside down mountain of water, with its peak some 50 meters below us. In the lagoon's foothills, as it were, a carnival of sea-life compressed itself into the improbable variety and density of a child's encyclopedia’s 'wonders of the seashore' illustration. Fifteen-spined sticklebacks bristled in the manner of tetchy submarine hedgehogs, and scallops 'pooted' away from their moorings like B-movie flying saucers. There were the plump orbs of sea urchins, in two colour schemes, prosthesis pink and Plasticine mauve. Large fish shoaled and traffic-jammed in a piscine rush hour further out. The gourmet potential was huge, if you were a poacher, and even more so if you were a seal.

And there were seals. "Don't worry if you hear deep breathing next to you in the darkness - it'll only be a seal popping up for a look." Jim Kennedy, who runs the night kayak trips, was giving us the pre-paddle pep talk. "Pat and I have GPS, flares, maps and radios. The coastguards know we're out here and if we're not in the pub by midnight they'll come looking." As a former British and Irish kayak champion Jim knew everything about kayaking and the canoeing waters. And as a past winner of the 126 mile, Devizes to Westminster kayak marathon, logic supposed that any one of us could be sucked out of Lough Hyne and drift anything up to 61 miles off-shore and still expect to be rescued by a happily paddling Jim.

But even he couldn't find the exact words to herald the waiting luminescence, which was the whole point of our nocturnal jaunt. "There's going to be phosphorescence," he attempted, "and it's...well, it's amazing...magical...it's...ah...anyway, look, you'll see for yourselves...right."

We were a mixed group of paddlers. A few veteran canoeists, mixed in with a bulk of kayak virgins. The former effortlessly loping their craft across the dark waters, and the latter muttering 'put the oar in one side, pull, put the oar in the other side, pull,' under their breaths and making progress across the lough in a series of arcs, loops and circles.

Once on the other side of the lough we paddled close to the suck of the channel as it bath-plugged the waters out to sea. "Anybody here done a bit of kayaking before and want to have a go at the rapids?" Jim asked. Mike from California had obviously done a lot of kayaking before. His craft danced down through the rocks and tumbles of water, guided by a few relaxed paddle dippings and hip swivels. Pat McCarthy, Jim's co-leader, flowed through the surge of foam and spume like an albatross on a rising thermal. I, on the other hand, descended this cut-price cataract like a drunk sliding down an escalator on a tea tray. But all three of us paid the price for our bravado, having to portage the kayaks back up to the lough, barefoot through a gorse and briar thicket. And how the paddle virgins, who'd been lining the rapids' banks hoping for a drowning as we went down the channel, sniggered as we limped and skipped and shuffled our way back up through the thorns and spikes.

The flotilla relaunched as full, leaden darkness fell. Pat shepherded the shoal of zigzagging kayaks close together. "Raft up!" he ordered and the yellow canoes coalesced with a tattoo of hollow 'clunks', to become a bunch of plastic bananas jockeyed by shadowy figures. "Right now, number off in turn, and remember your number, then we can always check if we've lost anybody in the darkness." We stop-start counted our way along the line to '14,' and then followed Pat, who'd snapped a chemical light-stick and stuck it in his head-band as a beacon, into the black.

As the light snuffed out vision, my other senses sharpened. In the faint moonlight the open waters glittered dully like crumpled-up-then-flattened-out silver foil. A breeze blew salty rime onto my lips. My nose probed the seaweedy air. Muscles felt each pull of the paddle blades through the chunks of heavy water. Ears caught the far off 'pronk' of a disturbed heron, the whispering lap of ripples along the canoe's hull, the solid, slapping splash of a nearby jumping fish.

Gathering in a small channel, and numbering off, ("One!" "Two!" Silence. "Who's three?" Silence. "THREE?" " Oops, sorry, me...three!" "Four..!") Jim took over. "This is the time to Zen out," he instructed, with the spoken italics of a pragmatic Irishman who has, nevertheless, spent a lot of time leading canoe trips in California. "I’m going to send you off one at a time, so you can be alone and really feel the darkness, and see the phosphorescence."

One by one, dark shadows, emitting a Morse code of drips and splashes, disappeared into the darkness. Except, when I paddled of into the darkness, directly above the 50-meter deep summit of this upside down bulk of water, it wasn't. Dark, that is. Only a faint glow, at first, as each blade stroke sent a vortex of ghostly blue light down into the black depths. Then the kayak's bow wave roiling into a phantom, luminescent figurehead, and the wake exploding into tiny storms of cold fire as it hit the shore rocks, and ignited the bladder wrack and kelp strands with short-lived icy sparks. Suddenly the night was alight with phosphorescence.

I stopped paddling and drifted. Well, played, actually. It was irresistible. A spread hand touched to the surface left a perfect palm and fingers shape glowing behind it for a nano-second. Anything that moved in the water took on a faint, sparkling aura. Splashes became sheets of blue-green flame exploding like Molotov cocktails on the lough's skin.

All along the shore tiny flickers of light became the quicksilver outlines of canoe waterlines, or paddle tips or hands and arms. The dark was sketched with the illuminated blueprints of adults at play. We'd all become hydro-arsonists, immersed in the childlike wonder of fooling with this subtle liquid fire, hypnotised by its sudden ephemeral presence and instant disappearance back into the dark again.

Later, much later, back at the slip, dreamy voices numbered off in the dark for the last time, as we jack-knifed our bodies out of the kayaks. Nobody could describe what they'd just experience. But, hell, we all tried. Marcella from Kerry thought it was like "little fairy lights twinkling away...it was...just...amazing." Ted, a tough Australian was stunned; "Ah, it was beautiful...," he was almost whispering, "you just had to touch it, to play with it."

Mike, the rapid tamer, was equally awed. "What an experience, it was fantastic, and I’m comparing it with kayaking in Vancouver and San Francisco with grey whales and killer whales.' He looked at a bunch of paddlers on the beach, splashing at the waters, still entranced. "But this just brought out a playful side in me, the child in me. You could really play with the light and water."

Somebody with an E in A-level biology started up; "I guess, really, it's just the chemical activation of disturbed phyto-plankton in warm water..." but the voice died away, as they realised that this wasn't what it had been about at all.

Austrian Christina got closest; "It's amazing, so strange...you can't describe it... words don't work for this kind of thing." Which was both true and very bad news for dictionary compilers the world over. I forgave Chamber's its poverty of description. They'd done their best.

But Jim knew what we were feeling - having seen this reaction before, of course, many times. And he had the answer, in the Irish equivalent of Californian Zen. He and Pat were loading canoes onto the trailer and bundling up paddles at a rate of knots. "Come on, lads, if you want a pint!" he roared, "We'll just make last orders in Skibbereen, if you speed up a bit."

INFORMATION BOX
Atlantic Sea Kayaking, Skibbereen, West Cork, Ireland.
www.atlanticseakayaking.com
info@atlanticseakayaking.com.

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