We take a bumpy night ferry over to Stornoway and begin the tortuous drive down to Harris through the darkness. The road narrows and narrows till it’s just a single track, climbing over a snow capped mountain, with sheep sleeping all about the place, I have to drive slowly around them. There are small lay-bys here and there to help vehicles pass. The car sat nav tells me that yes, I am still on the main road. The next day I wake in the bed of the cottage I’ve rented and discover that the landscape looks like the surface of the moon. Interestingly enough, there’s a lot of anthracite in the rock here which I’m sure I read somewhere is similar to lunar rock. Harris is a lot harder to drive around that Orkney, so many mountains and lochs, and in two weeks I see just one other surfer. The remoteness is compounded when I stupidly jump over the nose of the board to dodge a closeout and it gets flicked into my ribs, breaking the cartilage. Cue foghorn bellows as I flounder trying to catch my breath. This definitely made the rest of the trip a lot harder, but by taking things very slowly I’m still able to get a few more sessions in, I’ve got all winter to rest up at home.
It’s Saturday evening in Cornwall and after a month of scouring the most remote coastlines in Europe (outside of Scandinavia) the missus and I are meeting some friends in the Ring O’ Bells in St. Columb Major. A brutally honest mate tells me that I’ve lost weight and due to my staring eyes look like a ‘bug’. The ribs are aching and I’ve got a fair amount of stubble poking out – proper raised by wolves stuff and not one of these bleddy fashion beards – and the Doom Bar tastes like home. I feel like I’ve journeyed back from a parallel universe where people look and talk the same but the pace of life is probably closer to what it was in the south before WW2. If you want to find some empty waves by your own merit, test your nerves in remote seas and meet some of the most stoked locals going, you should probably put the Scottish Islands into the ‘where shall we go next?’ hat. SUP
Somewhere on the M6, just north of Birmingham, is where I start to consider myself to be in an exotic location
