This has been on my to-read pile for a while and finally I decided it was going to come off that list and get read. The subtitle for it is “sea kayaking the Shipping Forecast” and now I’m helping at the boathouse, I’m taking more interest in sea kayaking, which is why this caught my eye. The Shipping Forecast, if you haven’t come across it, is a weather forecast broadcast on the radio four times a day, giving an idea of conditions in 31 areas surrounding the British Isles. They actually go all the way up to Iceland, the coast of Norway and right down to Morocco. It’s also quite a good source of quiz questions!
Now, let’s start with a huge spoiler, although you do know it from page 1. The reason this book has two authors is because the original idea was Toby Carr’s – he came up with the idea to kayak the Shipping Forecast, he documented it extensively in many different ways, he got a book deal and he planned out the book. However, he died before finishing either and his sister Katie took on the task of finishing both the kayaking challenge and the book.
So that looms over it – you know Toby is going to die. But the book actually starts with the death of their brother Marcus. He and Toby both had the same genetic disorder called Fancomi anaemia, which affects bone marrow and makes its patients more susceptible to various cancers, among other issues. Toby had a lot of medical issues as a child and was suppose to stay inside, wrapped in metaphorical cotton wool but spent his life rebelling against this, taking to the water after their father’s death in 2010 and getting qualified as a sea kayaker. Eventually, he forms this plan to sea kayak the Shipping Forecast and even that nearly gets scuppered by unexpected meningitis.
The plan is to do a sea kayaking trip in every area of the Shipping Forecast. This isn’t, and was never meant to be, a continuous journey. It’s to look at each area and pick a trip to do in each, generally a multi-day trip along a stretch of coast or an expedition to or around an island. And he starts in Iceland! Having recently read Sea Kayaking Iceland, I was interested to see how different they were. Well, Iceland by Sea Kayak started on the east coast, having arrived by ferry from the Faroes and Moderate Becoming Good Later ends up on the east coast, ready to depart by ferry from the Faroes. Weather and admin tie them both to land longer than they’d like and Toby’s initial plan to kayak most of the south coast eventually is forcibly shrunk to kayaking the south-east corner. Judging by Iceland by Sea Kayak, he’s missed a long stretch of relatively dangerous but boring coast. This is the bit every tourist who leaves Reykjavik drives along for hours seeing nothing in particular but from the perspective of the sea, you’ve got a lot of floodplain, very little scenery, a lot of strong waves and surf and very few inhabited places to stop off. Really, it’s when you reach that corner that it gets interesting, so I think he gets the best of it.
Iceland is followed by a few days around the Faeroes, making trips out to the islands, around the islands, dodging surf and storms and waves far stronger than I’d ever consider. As the book goes on, you see Toby gaining in skills and confidence, just from practice, but it’s when you read chapters like this that you realise what an advanced kayaker he was right from the start. I am only really a beginning sea kayaker; I would never dream of going out in conditions like this.
The next areas are North and South Utsire, off the coast of Norway. Yes, the Shipping Forecast stretches from the UK to whatever’s on the other side – further round, one area touches Morocco and it takes until he reaches the eighth area of the Shipping Forecast before Toby actually kayaks the British coast. Between Norway and London comes the west coast of Denmark (Fisher), the north-west coast of Germany (German Bight) and pretty much the entirety of the Netherlands Coast (German Bight continued and Humber).
After paddling up the Thames, Toby continues around the Kent Coast (Dover), the Isle of Wight (Wight) and then my own personal paddle, setting off from Studland and round Old Harry (Wight going into Portland). I tend to stop at Old Harry but I have been as far along as Ballard Point, the northern end of Swanage Bay. Toby continues all the way to Durlston on the southern end and then turns back.
Next up are the Channel Islands for Portland, Brittany for Biscay and then a truly epic journey from Santander in northern Spain, all the way to the end of Spain into Biscay and then down the western side of the Iberian Peninsula, past Portugal and around the bottom corner for Fitzoy and Trafalgar. That alone could have been a book, that is a spectacular thing to do in its own right.
Then there’s a trip around Devon, Cornwall and the Scilly Isles to cross off Plymouth, Sole and technically Fastnet, before finishing the trip up the north Cornish coast to Newquay. In fact, if not for the detour to the Scillies, Toby would have kayaked all the way from Plymouth to Newquay which is another achievement that could have been a book in its own right. When you start to look at it, you realise Toby achieves some incredible things in his pursuit of this goal. It’s easy to count that he’s been to 18 of the 31 areas and think there’s a long way to go in this challenge. But the guy kayaks a huge chunk of the northern Europe coast, at least half, if not three-quarters of the way around Iberia and more than 150 miles around Devon and Cornwall! That’s huge!
But then Moderate Becoming Good Later becomes Rough, Very Rough. Toby can’t outrun Fanconi anaemia and things go downhill from here, resulting in Katie’s narrative taking over for the last two chapters.
In a way, I wonder if things aren’t actually harder for Katie. Over the course of this book, she loses both brothers and both parents, although mum Bron dies off-page after a brain virus when Toby was six has effectively made her family strangers to her. She’s the last survivor out of the entire family by the time she’s somewhere in her early 40s and although of course, the book is Toby’s memorial, it’s dedicated to all four of them.
It would feel mean to criticise this book under the circumstances but I don’t have anything critical to say. Toby – or Katie – manages to keep up a tone which is neither unrealistically optimistic and upbeat nor depressingly miserable. Type 2 fun written as “look how hard this was” isn’t fun to read and I don’t particularly enjoy going to the opposite extent either because it just comes across as fake and try-hard. The journeys, being mostly relatively small jaunts along sections of coast in different areas, feel realistic – I pictured this being a harrowing journey around the entire perimeter of the UK, or perhaps the entire British Isles, non-stop, with entire chapters of “why am I doing this to myself??” and it isn’t that at all, thank goodness. It’s Toby breaking down his huge challenge into 31 smaller bits and doing them one at a time, in no real rush, other than the time off work, the occasional speaking event or the looming fate. It makes you feel like you could do this too, with no real difficulty other than improving your paddling skills. I could never paddle several thousand kilometres in one long journey but I could do 31 smaller trips. (I won’t, but I like that he makes me feel like I could).
Which brings me to the other thing where I could be shaking my head. There are times when you’re reading about or hearing about people’s adventures where you might say “that is too difficult and dangerous, you idiot, what were you thinking??”. But in this case, Toby is clearly thinking about the conditions, about his own capabilities, his safety backup etc. Trips out get cancelled or delayed, problems arise and are overcome and you never have to worry about the danger. There are no cliffhangers where you go “He’s going to die, surely he’s going to die”. But I guess if you have a book where you know from the start that he is indeed going to die, and not from a kayaking accident, you don’t need to include extra peril or artificial suspense. The more you read and the more you know about kayaking, the more you realise Toby started this journey as a very competent sea kayaker and turned into one of the most experienced and capable kayakers out there.
So all in all, this is a lovely book. As a story about sea kayaking, it’s lovely, it’s varied, it’s happy, it’s non-stressful. But as a story about living life when you know yours is going to be short, it’s exceptional. It’s far more about that than it is about the kayaking, whatever the outward ruffles. It’s a man who watches his brother die and knows he’ll be next, deciding to make a major change to his life, to fill it with adventure and purpose and really test himself. Even if we can’t take a year or two out of our lives to take on a massive challenge like this, we can probably all do with some kind of personal challenge, to take us out of our comfort zones and put something more into life than the cycle of work-sleep-bills. So read this book and try to be a little more Toby.