A classic of sea kayaking literature will be celebrated in a series of radio documentaries this summer. One of the paddlers, Simon Willis, outlines the plan. If you or any member of your family can remember the original Canoe Boys, or have a story relating to their trip, please get in touch.
“Please don’t tell people we’re re-creating the original voyage”, I asked Cailean MacLeod as we planned this trip. “There’s no way I intend to paddle the west coast of Scotland in a canvas canoe and a string vest!”
The Canoe Boys is the classic adventure story of the first epic Scottish sea journey by kayak, and I defy any modern sea kayaker to read it without clenched buttocks.
The equipment they used seems so primitive I’d hesitate before taking it into a swimming pool. Yet in 1934 Alastair Dunnett and Seumas Adam paddled Scotland’s wild, west coast all the way from Glasgow to Skye. They were either exceptionally foolish or heroically brave; probably both.
This summer two of us will paddle key sections of their route as apart of a BBC Radio documentary celebrating the achievement of the original Canoe Boys and seeing how the places they visited have changed.
The original Canoe Boys weren’t so different to us. They too wanted an adventure that would pay for itself and had also managed to acquire two boats of a new design.
Their plan was to paddle from Glasgow to the Outer Hebrides and finance the trip by writing and posting back newspaper articles. On the 18th August 1934 they put their boats in the water at Bowling harbour but by the time they reached Skye in October the weather had broken and they were forced to admit their journey was over.
Yet it was certainly not a failure as their literary legacy is a superb book, The Canoe Boys, that is re-published this spring.
Even today this expedition is a challenge. It’s around two hundred miles with some tricky hazards, including the Dorus Mor tidal race, the headland of Ardnamurchan Point, and open water crossings to Muck, Eigg and Rum.
We’ll have GPS, dry-suits and the very latest sea-kayaks all of which is quite a contrast to their equipment.
P&H have loaned us two Quest LV boats with Kevlar hulls; although we’ve just tested one so far, we’ve found it light, stable and ideal for our voyage.
Our predecessors used similarly innovative boats, two Lochaber design canoes which split into three sections for carrying and had a small sail.
However, the central section looks awfully exposed, with straight sides, covered only by a large spray-sheet.
“It was like sitting in a fish box”, confirmed marine archivist Duncan Winning, honorary president of the Scottish Canoe Association.
As a child he sat in a Lochaber and agreed it would be unnerving to paddle any distance.
Duncan led me into a warehouse in a quiet part of Glasgow where the bare, teak bones of an old kayak dangled from a roof girder.
“Now that’s a Queensferry, the design which followed the Lochaber”, Duncan explained.
He later showed me photos, taken for the Scottish Hostellers’ Canoe Club, of young men, stripped to the waist, paddling Queensferry’s on Loch Lomond.
“The original Canoe Boys would have had an easier voyage had they waited for this second design.”
However, it was their safety equipment that left me open mouthed in astonishment. We will carry the usual arsenal of flares, marine VHF, mobile phones and buoyancy aids.
They sat inside a car tyre inner tube, and… that was it! Alastair Dunnett described this inflated ring as a “comfortable backrest and a lifebelt in emergency”.
Now you realise why I’m in no rush to re-create their experience, especially on one stretch of water.
The Dorus Mor is gaelic for ‘Great Door’. It is a small gap between the mainland and an island through which the tide rushes at a wild eight knots and when the wind’s against it, the tide rears up like hundreds of startled stallions.
The original Canoe Boys were originally advised to paddle this at slack water, but then the crew of a herring boat offered contrary advice, telling them to take it at the flood and they’d be pushed all the way to Oban.
They were having a laugh! Since we’ll begin our voyage at Crinan we’ll face the Dorus Mor on day one - talk about in at the deep end.
I asked local kayak guide Tony Hammock, of Sea Freedom Kayak, about this fabled stretch of water. “It doesn’t really go slack,” Tony told me. “It goes full pelt one way, hand-brake turns, then charges back again”. What about going through on the flood? “I hope you’ve got a good roll”, was his only comment. I didn’t dare reply.
Alastair Dunnett described a wall of water, darting at and striking them; hands in the water trying the seize and wrestle the paddles from their grasp; a moving group of whirlpools with a noise like hissing thunder; the sea gathering below their canvas and slatted hulls like a horse bunching for the gallop. It’s a superb passage to read. I hope radio listeners will appreciate what it’s like to paddle.
The other modern Canoe Boy is Cailean Macleod, who’ll probably breeze through this as if it was a riffle on a stream. He features in the Falls of Lora chapter of Justine Curgenven’s new DVD, This is the sea 3. Watching him cope in that maelstrom is reassuring, but Cailean is not only there to stop me drinking the Dorus.
I write for a living and, although he’s not a journalist, so does Cailean, in his work for The Prince’s Trust. We’d rarely paddled together, but I’d been a regular reader of his blog and I liked his style. Our personalities are very different: I’m a loud Geordie while he’s a quiet, deep Islander from Lewis. While that might be awkward on a long, intense expedition, it should be ideal for our programmes as we’ll approach situations and people in different ways.
Kayaking legend has tended to overlook the main reason for the Canoe Boys journey. They were looking for stories to write to pay for their trip, and not only tales of daring-do. The white-knuckle stuff was just to grab an audience and, once they were reading, Dunnett and Adam delivered more serious thoughts about the hardship of life in remote coastal communities. Through their newspaper articles and book they analysed what they called, “The Highland Problem”. It’s this side of the journey which fascinates us.
Seventy-three years after that voyage, what’s changed? In absolute terms, life is better; health care, roads, education, working conditions have clearly improved. But when compared, not with the past, but to the rest of the UK, are things all that different? What are the new challenges? These are the questions Cailean and I hope to answer.
Our producer is Richard Else whose company, Triple Echo Productions, specialises in making television and radio programmes in the world’s wildest places. If I whimper like a baby in the Dorus Mor, Richard wants to record every syllable. We’ve tested audio systems by sticking microphones in condoms and taping them in places where the noise of wind and water won’t drown out the sound of me drowning. But I’ve drawn a line at using their clothing.
On land they wore kilts; on the water it was vest and shorts, with the Spartan comfort of a canvas jacket when it rained.
Fine. But I’ll be in a dry suit, and that’s not up for discussion.
“Please don’t tell people we’re re-creating the original voyage”, I asked Cailean MacLeod as we planned this trip. “There’s no way I intend to paddle the west coast of Scotland in a canvas canoe and a string vest!”The Canoe Boys is the classic adventure story of the first epic Scottish sea journey by kayak, and I defy any modern sea kayaker to read it without clenched buttocks.
The equipment they used seems so primitive I’d hesitate before taking it into a swimming pool. Yet in 1934 Alastair Dunnett and Seumas Adam paddled Scotland’s wild, west coast all the way from Glasgow to Skye. They were either exceptionally foolish or heroically brave; probably both.
This summer two of us will paddle key sections of their route as apart of a BBC Radio documentary celebrating the achievement of the original Canoe Boys and seeing how the places they visited have changed.The original Canoe Boys weren’t so different to us. They too wanted an adventure that would pay for itself and had also managed to acquire two boats of a new design.
Their plan was to paddle from Glasgow to the Outer Hebrides and finance the trip by writing and posting back newspaper articles. On the 18th August 1934 they put their boats in the water at Bowling harbour but by the time they reached Skye in October the weather had broken and they were forced to admit their journey was over.
Yet it was certainly not a failure as their literary legacy is a superb book, The Canoe Boys, that is re-published this spring.Even today this expedition is a challenge. It’s around two hundred miles with some tricky hazards, including the Dorus Mor tidal race, the headland of Ardnamurchan Point, and open water crossings to Muck, Eigg and Rum.
We’ll have GPS, dry-suits and the very latest sea-kayaks all of which is quite a contrast to their equipment.
P&H have loaned us two Quest LV boats with Kevlar hulls; although we’ve just tested one so far, we’ve found it light, stable and ideal for our voyage.
Our predecessors used similarly innovative boats, two Lochaber design canoes which split into three sections for carrying and had a small sail.However, the central section looks awfully exposed, with straight sides, covered only by a large spray-sheet.
“It was like sitting in a fish box”, confirmed marine archivist Duncan Winning, honorary president of the Scottish Canoe Association.
As a child he sat in a Lochaber and agreed it would be unnerving to paddle any distance.
Duncan led me into a warehouse in a quiet part of Glasgow where the bare, teak bones of an old kayak dangled from a roof girder.“Now that’s a Queensferry, the design which followed the Lochaber”, Duncan explained.
He later showed me photos, taken for the Scottish Hostellers’ Canoe Club, of young men, stripped to the waist, paddling Queensferry’s on Loch Lomond.
“The original Canoe Boys would have had an easier voyage had they waited for this second design.”
However, it was their safety equipment that left me open mouthed in astonishment. We will carry the usual arsenal of flares, marine VHF, mobile phones and buoyancy aids.They sat inside a car tyre inner tube, and… that was it! Alastair Dunnett described this inflated ring as a “comfortable backrest and a lifebelt in emergency”.
Now you realise why I’m in no rush to re-create their experience, especially on one stretch of water.
The Dorus Mor is gaelic for ‘Great Door’. It is a small gap between the mainland and an island through which the tide rushes at a wild eight knots and when the wind’s against it, the tide rears up like hundreds of startled stallions.
The original Canoe Boys were originally advised to paddle this at slack water, but then the crew of a herring boat offered contrary advice, telling them to take it at the flood and they’d be pushed all the way to Oban.They were having a laugh! Since we’ll begin our voyage at Crinan we’ll face the Dorus Mor on day one - talk about in at the deep end.
I asked local kayak guide Tony Hammock, of Sea Freedom Kayak, about this fabled stretch of water. “It doesn’t really go slack,” Tony told me. “It goes full pelt one way, hand-brake turns, then charges back again”. What about going through on the flood? “I hope you’ve got a good roll”, was his only comment. I didn’t dare reply.
Alastair Dunnett described a wall of water, darting at and striking them; hands in the water trying the seize and wrestle the paddles from their grasp; a moving group of whirlpools with a noise like hissing thunder; the sea gathering below their canvas and slatted hulls like a horse bunching for the gallop. It’s a superb passage to read. I hope radio listeners will appreciate what it’s like to paddle.The other modern Canoe Boy is Cailean Macleod, who’ll probably breeze through this as if it was a riffle on a stream. He features in the Falls of Lora chapter of Justine Curgenven’s new DVD, This is the sea 3. Watching him cope in that maelstrom is reassuring, but Cailean is not only there to stop me drinking the Dorus.
I write for a living and, although he’s not a journalist, so does Cailean, in his work for The Prince’s Trust. We’d rarely paddled together, but I’d been a regular reader of his blog and I liked his style. Our personalities are very different: I’m a loud Geordie while he’s a quiet, deep Islander from Lewis. While that might be awkward on a long, intense expedition, it should be ideal for our programmes as we’ll approach situations and people in different ways.
Kayaking legend has tended to overlook the main reason for the Canoe Boys journey. They were looking for stories to write to pay for their trip, and not only tales of daring-do. The white-knuckle stuff was just to grab an audience and, once they were reading, Dunnett and Adam delivered more serious thoughts about the hardship of life in remote coastal communities. Through their newspaper articles and book they analysed what they called, “The Highland Problem”. It’s this side of the journey which fascinates us.Seventy-three years after that voyage, what’s changed? In absolute terms, life is better; health care, roads, education, working conditions have clearly improved. But when compared, not with the past, but to the rest of the UK, are things all that different? What are the new challenges? These are the questions Cailean and I hope to answer.
Our producer is Richard Else whose company, Triple Echo Productions, specialises in making television and radio programmes in the world’s wildest places. If I whimper like a baby in the Dorus Mor, Richard wants to record every syllable. We’ve tested audio systems by sticking microphones in condoms and taping them in places where the noise of wind and water won’t drown out the sound of me drowning. But I’ve drawn a line at using their clothing.On land they wore kilts; on the water it was vest and shorts, with the Spartan comfort of a canvas jacket when it rained.
Fine. But I’ll be in a dry suit, and that’s not up for discussion.
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