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Alun and I are in the dramatic Faroe Islands – described by our friend Axel like paddling in the sea of flames, and we can already see why. Their tidal stream atlas shows dangerous tidal streams and overfalls as intimidating red streaks, or flames on the ocean. It´s enough to make you think twice about getting on the water, but the scenery is stunning, with steep high cliffs and islands all around. It reminds me a little bit of Orkney and Shetland but everything is on a grander scale. We are near the southern end of the islands in the relatively fertile and less steep islands, and still we climbed a hill of 480metres today on an island less than 2 miles long.

We are on Klotur Island, one of 18 islands in the group. Just 1 family live here and farm the land here. They have a few hundred sheep and about 50 Scottish Highland cattle! It is the only good beef cattle in the Faroes and it’s all organic so the beef is well known here. On Wednesday we took the Norona ferry from Lerwick in Shetland to the capital Torshavn. We stocked up with a delicious buffet breakfast, one of those where you know you are going to eat too much and feel a bit ill but there is so much delicious food to cram in! I had emailed a local paddler who bought one of my DVDs from the internet, Andras, and he met us the ferry and took us and our kayaks to his house (with an elaborate home made system for tying the boats to the roof of his bmw, without a roof rack!) We camped in his garden and walked into Torshavn for a look around. Thank you Andras for your hospitality!

Yesterday Andras dropped us off on his way to work, at a small beach just south of the city. A few walkers gave us amused looks as we packed everything into our kayaks in the drizzle. According to Andras, kayaking is not very common here and we are an unusual sight. We decided to just paddle about 13 nautical miles to the island of Koltur because Axel had told us that he had met some interesting local people on the small island. “It won’t take us long”, I told Alun, confidently, “We’ll have the tide with us and there isn’t much wind”.

Once we got away from town and turned around a few small headlands, it turned out that the wind was a lot stronger than predicted, and of course, was in our faces. We could see a lot of intimidating white water marking the channel where the tide was going with us, but it was a long way from shore and heading in the wrong direction. We weren´t positive that it would curve around and take us around to the West into the channel we wanted to paddle into, so we hugged the shore and fought the wind and the eddy. It was slow going, but the cliffs to our right were very pretty – even though at less than 50metres high they don’t even get a mention in any tourist guides in a group of islands where the average height of the land is 300 metres! When we reached the SE corner of the island, there was quite an exciting tidal race, and there seemed to be breaking waves everywhere in the channel we ultimately wanted to cross. We paddled hesitantly around the corner and hugged the coast again, out of most of the breaking waves. After 2 miles close to the shore, the sea seemed much calmer in the fjord. We stopped briefly at a 900 year old turf-roofed house – it has been shipped in from Norway and reassembled there, making it possibly the oldest pre-fabricated house in the world? After bread, jam, cheese and a hard boiled egg (well,it’s what we had in our day hatch)we got back on the water and decided to cross the 2mile channel to our island of Koltur. The tide should be with us, going to the West and it was. We had 3knots of current with us, and it’s only the smallest of neap tides at the moment. We passed close to the island of Hestur, the top engulffed in mist, and aimed towards Koltur. We knew the water in the channel between Hestur and Koltur should be sucking us to the south so we didn’t get too close. The waves certainly got bigger as we crossed the channel and there was a moderate sized race close to Koltur, but the current wansn’t strong and we made it to Koltur easily in an ever-lowering mist.

We landed by a small quay, and walked up to the house, appearing from the mist. We soon met Bjorn and Luka, the couple who have lived here alone for just over 10 years. Not only are they farming, but they also have plans to restore the old turf-covered buildings, which are the best example of a farming community in the Faroes 50 years ago. There is a guy from Czech Republic, David staying here with them for a month – he studies languages and is here to learn Faroese. It’s a beautiful place, with an impossibly tall bulging hill on the west side, a smaller hill on the east side and a small valley inbetween. They even have a small sandy beach on the north side. On our walk today we saw lots of birds, including a tern colony, fulmars, a wren, wimberels and oyster catchers. We spent the evening last night chatting with them and eating traditional dried sheep meat, aswell as other types of sheep meat, made into pate and all sorts of tasty things.

They have a website, and you can read a bit about it, in English following the link below.

http://www.koltur.com/bp/index.php?id=14

It was windy again today, and misty and raining this morning. It was one of those marginal padlding days where you could go, but you could justify staying! We decided to stay here for the day and have an explore of the land. We climbed the big hill as the mist cleared and had fantastic views over many of the other islands. It’s truely a stunning place and I can’t wait for the next 2 and a half weeks of exploring it. We also watched with interest the many tidal races around the islands, there was always white water somewhere, but the location of the race seemed to move along a fjord and never stay in the same place. That was a new experience for me, so we are slowing starting to try to understand this magnificent land. Tomorrow we hope to paddle – if conditions are good we will try to get to Mykines, the furthest west of the islands, through a notorious tidal race. If it is not good, then we will probably go to Vestmanna up one of the sheltered fjords. We are told there is a city party there tomorrow night!!

We’ve enjoyed mostly lovely weather for the Shetland sympoisum – which I forgot to mention that we kayaked right to the door of…. It’s a beautiful place, ‘bigger islands than Orkney, with more hills and moorland. If you like caves and sea stacks then Shetland is the place for you. I was lucky enough to be mostly asigned to day trips during the sympoisum and Alun and I enjoyed a day paddle around Muckle Roe, which is a lovely granite island about 15km around, with stunning red caves and passages through rocks. It’s always a delight to poke your bow into a dark cave and creep forwards carefully until you see a gleam of light shining a hundred metres away. You have found a way through!! The swell was pretty big on this day so I’m told we couldn’t get into ‘the best caves’, but I was very satisfied with what we did manage to explore. I think we’d still be there if we had been able to get into every cave.

Yesterday we paddled around the small island of Noss which has some of the best ‘bird cliffs’ in Shetland ( except for the island Foula which we hope to visit also). I think the cliffs are about 180metres high and there is a large gannet colony, and a few other stow-aways in amongst the gannets. Guillemots, razor bills, puffins and fulmars also made their nests there. We enjoyed fantasic views and sounds over lunch as we landed at some almost horizontal ledges underneath the towering colony. A few people found themselves a bit too much ‘underneath’ some of the flying birds, and the sea was used to clean affected clothes and hair.

We might be going to Faroe tomorrow – a bit of an earlier departure than planned because of a minimal ferry schedule to get us back from Shetland to Orkney. If so, we hope to paddle a day or 2 more in Shetland after Faroe, and before returning home. I will keep trying to add photos! Happy paddling!

We made it to Shetland! We had 2 incredibly contrasting crossings, each of 28 nautical miles by the time we landed. The weather couldn’t have been any calmer for the journey from North Ronaldsay to Fair Isle. There wasn’t a breath of wind, and the sea was as smooth as velvet and a beautiful deep blue colour where the sky was reflected in it. We let the last of the flood tide tide sweep us to the east a bit before the flood tide swept us west for 4 hours. We chose our ferry glide angle and ended up in exactly the right spot at the SE corner of the approx. 3 mile long island. Although the tidal atlas shows that the tide is pretty much at right angles to our desired path, I think we actually had more tide against us than with us, as we travelled at an average of 3 knots ( slower than we’d have expected in such calm conditions). If I did it again I’d go 6 hours earlier on the last of the ebb as I suspect this would be a bit more favourable. However the way we did it meant that we arrived at Fair Isle just as the tides were reaching the start of a 3 hour slack-ish period ( just in case something had gone wrong with the navigation, or we’d been slower than expected). Eventually we landed at about 9pm after 9 hours in the kayak.

I was feeling a bit ill when we reached Fair Isle, with a sore back and tummy. the next morning I was worse. Alun called out the local nurse who diagnosed that I had a kidney infection. 2 hours later I was on antibiotics and drinking cranberry juice, but the whole of that day I felt week and had pains in my tummy. It was a beautiful bright day with very little wind ( perfect for crossing to Shetland) but I was in no fit state to paddle and we wanted to have a rest day and a bit of a look around Fair Isle, which is a beautiful island with thousands of birds – 10 different species breed there.

After an early-ish night I felt a bit better on wednesday but not really like kayaking 28 nautical miles. We decided to stay another day, but when we got a forecast we realised that our good weather window was slipping away. I felt a bit better and we decided to leave that afternoon. the tides were right for us at 4pm and we would actually get a bit of help from them on this part of the journey. We weren’t worried about landing late because it doesn’t really get dark here at this time of year, but we were a bit worried about the force 3 SE wind.

NORTH HAVEN ON FAIR ISLE
As we started off the wind gradually picked up, until it was F5-6. The bad weather that we had tried to avoid had come in early. the sea conditions were exciting, with waves to surf and we made good progress, travelling at almost 5 knots. Unfortunately the tide turned when we were about a mile away from land and suddenly we had wind against tide off Fitfull Head. Our progress slowed right down and we had a bit more urgent surfing to do, but we made it safely to land. We camped at Spiggie Loch on the West side of the island – a beautiful spot. 28 miles in 7hours 15mins.

now its symposium time! I will try to add a few pictures when i get the chance

Alun and I are in North Ronaldsay, the northernmost Orkney island for the second year running. We’ve had a great trip kayaking up to here, and have met lots of lovely people. We’re having a “rest” day today before attempting to kayak the approx 28 nautical miles to Fair Isle tomorrow. This will be a challenging journey because there are quite strong tides which run perpendicular to the direction that we want to travel in, and there is a notorius tidal race on the south end of Fair Isle once we arrive. Thankfully (unlike last year when we were here) we have a favourable weather forecast, with a high pressure hovering over us for the next few days.

We paddled across the Pentland Firth on Tuesday in about a force 4-5 South-Easterly. It was a bit choppy but there wasn’t any swell so it was mostly just windwaves and nothing too big. We were a bit slow packing everything into our kayaks and we left Harrow, near John-O-Groats about an hour after we had intended which meant the tides were getting stronger all the time. We knew there would be a strong current running to the SE when we reached the south coast of South Ronaldsay, trying to take us out to sea. We allowed for this and approached the island from upstream, but the current was stronger than we’d thought and we still had to paddle very hard at the end to make a big eddy on the south end of South Ronaldsay. The tides are incredible around here.

We had hoped to make it up to North Ronaldsay fairly quickly because our mission for this trip is to get to Shetland rather than to explore, but the wind had other ideas and we made slow progress for the first 3 days – in fact we didn’t get off South Ronaldsay! We did meet some friendly locals though, and have eaten incredibly well! We happened to camp by a hatchery for arctic char, and were given some undersize ones to cook up and eat. I’ve never had that type of fish before, which is pink like salmon but not so rich. It was truely delicious. That evening we went to a nearby house to ask for water and spent the evening chatting to the owner about local life, shipwrecks and vikings! He gave us some eggs from his hens which marked the start of our ‘porridge-avoidance’. We’ve so far been given eggs from 3 different people’s hens and have been enjoying breakfast delights such as ‘fried eggs on rye bread’ and poached eggs on burritos! YUM YUM!! Tomorrow, who knows what we’ll invent!

After our slow start, we had a monster day from Newark Bay on South Ronaldsay all the way up to Eday island, via the small island of Copinsay for lunch. 35 miles in about 7 hours, with quite a lot of tidal assistance in the afternoon. We still only just made it before the tide turned against us, and had a bit of a ferry glide at the last minute. We arrived at Eday at the same time as the ferry and shouted up to the people on the pier to ask where the pub was! A man replied that there wasn’t a pub on Eday, but his wife had a tea room and could cook us dinner, and he’d drive us there and back from whereever we camped. We had a lovely evening with Pete and Chris on the north of the island, and Chris cooked us a mouthwatering bellyfull of delicious food.

Yesterday afternoon we caught the tidal conveyor belt from Eday up the north side of Sanday, and reached over 10 knots at one point. We skirted around the side of a meaty looking tidal race in ‘Lashy Sound’, enjoying the speed of the water without crashing through the biggest waves. We stopped for a late lunch on a headland and waited for the tide to turn in our favour once more, for the final leg to North Ronaldsay – 25 miles in total ( 19 nautical miles). Last night I was almost asleep in the tent when Alun came back from a water collecting mission and dragged me out of bed to go and meet yet more lovely local people. martin Grey had greeted Alun in his waterproofs and empty waterbottles with ‘you must be one of the mad kayakers’. Apparently everyone who is planning to kayak to Fair Isle comes to his house for water, as it’s the nearest one to the north of the island! He hosted Sean Morley on his birthday last year and just a few days ago, hosted a guy called Patrick who is paddling solo to all the furthest islands in Scotland. Pattick made it to Fair Isle last Wednesday and is probably in Shetland by now?

The weather is pretty good today for crossing to Fair Isle, a slight northerly wind, but since we have a good longterm forecast, we’re resting. Alun is right this minute watching England play Ecuador on the big screen in the bird observatory! I better finish writing and go and see who’s winning!!

PUFFIN ON FAIR ISLE