Authors: Amy Liptrot
These mass ‘strandings’ of jellyfish happen when currents wash a swarm into shore, often in spring. Jellyfish are only capable of upwards independent movement so are moved horizontally by currents and tides. The names of jellyfish and hydromedusae found around UK coasts are poetry: blue, compass, by-the-wind-sailor, moon, lion’s mane, mauve, Portuguese man o’ war. Moon jellyfish,
Aurelia aurita
, are transparent with a hint of pink, and blue rings inside – their reproductive organs. Jellyfish are the
outline of a creature barely there, drifting in the currents, pelagic and intangible.
I have been looking, amazed, at some underwater photographs. Strange and beautiful creatures and bright colours suggest the tropics but the pictures were all taken in Orkney waters, in the shallows close to shore. Local snorkellers find and photograph many species of fish, shellfish, anemones and jellyfish. They see sea urchins, sponges, starfish and sea slugs.
My friend Anne from the RSPB comes out to Papay from the Mainland to show me how to snorkel. At a rocky area of North Wick Bay, we put on wetsuits, neoprene boots, gloves and hoods, flippers and snorkel masks, and slip into the water, like less-elegant seals.
My first time snorkelling hits me with several new sensations: first, being in the water with the protection of the wetsuit and breathing through the snorkel, but second, and most memorable, looking under water, close to the seabed, able to see clearly what’s usually hidden. Although today the tide is too high and wind too strong for ideal snorkelling conditions, the dip is enough to get an idea of the ‘different world’ Anne talks enthusiastically about entering.
Anne leaves me with a set of snorkel gear, and at low tide after the next full moon, I go out to try it alone. Walking down to the sea, I feel nervous about getting cold or swept out, and I choose a sheltered spot at the corner of the bay known as
Weelie’s Taing, circled by rocks like a lagoon. I crawl into the shallow water on my face and after a few minutes I realise that I am breathing easily through the snorkel and don’t feel cold in the wetsuit. I begin to relax and enjoy it.
I don’t have to keep moving, I just float on my front, observing what’s around, moving with the tide, like a corpse. I forget I am floating on the surface and feel I am deep on the ocean bed. I use my hands to drag myself over the rocks, parting seaweed, looking for sunken treasure. Hermit crabs cram themselves back into their shells at my approach. I see red anemones and paddle-worm eggs – tiny balls of electric green strands in jelly, linked by stalks to the rocks. I discover a rusting ship part, perhaps from the boiler of the
Bellavista
.
Usually we see seaweed at low tide on the shore and jellyfish washed up dead, but under water they come alive. Going a little deeper, I’m surrounded by seaweed and kelp of vivid greens and browns and reds standing up straight and swaying – it’s like I’m in a lush forest.
I am exploring a very strange environment, like being in space. It reminds me of the thrill I got the first time I went to a dark nightclub under the railway arches in the city, seeing ornate Goths and pierced metallers; the thrill that I could be among these exotic and tattooed creatures, that it was so easy to walk into a world I’d only ever seen in films and music videos. Under water, I feel like I’ve gone through the looking glass.
I put my head above the surface and my stomach lurches when I realise I’ve drifted. It is hard to tell time, distance and direction in the water. I don’t know how long I’ve been in. Due
to the refraction of light in water, objects appear larger and closer. Sound travels faster. This distortion interferes with co-ordination. I try to pick up a shell and find my hand clumsily swishing through water.
It doesn’t take long for this world to become my new reality. The swaying seaweed is reflected on the underside of the water’s surface, which has formed my new sky. It’s a grey, overcast day and when I pop my mask up above, I immediately want to get back under water – it’s brighter and bigger there. When I do stand up, I feel invincible in the wetsuit, able to walk through nettle patches and wade across lochs. Back home, I peel it off like a selkie’s skin.
Anne keeps posting pictures: urchins and father-lashers and lumpsuckers and seven-armed starfish. She hopes to see an octopus or even make Orkney’s first record in more than 150 years of a seahorse. She often snorkels in Scapa Flow and says that sometimes she is surrounded by so many swimming and seabed creatures that it feels like being in a fishbowl. I want to learn and see more. The sea has more depth than land and even a small surface area reveals many layers; the possibilities of entering it make Orkney seem many times bigger. ‘In Orkney, our forests are under water,’ my Polar Bear friend Sam tells me.
There are about a million marine species, with hundreds of thousands still undiscovered. If a rare bird is spotted in Orkney, many people will rush to see it but there is so much still unknown about sea life. Government policy on marine protection zones is still being formulated with more discoveries made all the time.
A recent survey found a puzzling ‘faceless, brainless fish-like creature’ in waters off the East Mainland.
Papay fisherman Douglas goes out most days, year-round, on his boat
Dawn Harvest
, setting and retrieving creels laid on the seabed around the island to catch lobsters and crabs, which he sells to the shellfish factory in Westray. There used to be three creel boats working around Papay, and before that most crofters would have had a small boat they used to catch fish for their own table and to bolster their meagre incomes.
Out on his boat, Douglas has seen not only minke and right whales and orca, but also sunfish – gigantic, circular fish, like a tractor wheel, with a dorsal fin that pokes above the water. He tells me about fishermen in Westray pulling up a tropical turtle that had become tangled in fishing lines. He tells me about gannets flying, trailing plastic necklaces – they had dived straight through the holes in drink-can packaging. He once pulled up a guillemot that had dived into a creel sitting on the seabed 30 fathoms (55 metres) deep.
Anne has never seen an octopus but Douglas confirms they are in Orkney’s waters. Octopus enter the creels while hunting and inject the crabs with poison that pulverises their flesh within the shells. The octopus are clever enough to eat the crab, getting to Douglas’s catch before him, leaving him just the shells, then exit the creel and escape.
* * *
Back in the summer, I went searching for bats in one of Orkney’s only woods, using a special detector that converts their echo-location into noise audible by humans. There are more dimensions than I thought: frequencies we can’t usually hear, habitats we can’t normally breathe in. It is thrilling to enter them, just for a short time.
I read about how we might have more than five senses, like the heat sensors in our skin that can tell if something is warm without actually touching it, or how we are able to know if we are upside down.
When I came to Papay, I was attracted to the idea that, by living and walking within its coast, I could become familiar with the whole island and know all of its residents. Small islands are easier to comprehend than cities and I thought I could be able to understand it all. However, I find out about the ‘coastline paradox’, which explains how it is impossible accurately to measure the length of a coastline. The smaller the scale used to measure, the longer it becomes: a coastline is fractal, breaking into ever smaller inlets and cracks and promontories and bumps, from hundreds of miles to millimetres. This accounts for the vastly different estimates for the length of coastline in Orkney and how, the longer I am on Papay, the more there is to discover. I am thrilled and daunted.
People with longer sober times in AA say that the good things about their new lives are things they didn’t imagine, things they couldn’t explain to a newcomer. They say that what you think you wanted is likely not, in fact, to be what you want.
I never saw myself as, and resist becoming, the wholesome
‘outdoors’ type. But the things I experience keep dragging me in. There are moments that thrill and glow: the few seconds a silver male hen harrier flies beside my car one afternoon; the porpoise surfacing around our small boat; the wonderful sight of a herd of cattle let out on grass after a winter indoors, skipping and jumping, tails straight up to the sky with joy.
I am free-falling but grabbing these things as I plunge. Maybe this is what happens. I’ve given up drugs, don’t believe in God and love has gone wrong, so now I find my happiness and flight in the world around me.
Snorkelling is a completely new experience. I enter a new ecosystem, stimulating my thoughts and senses, shaking myself out of sad routine. I feel elated and refreshed afterwards, wanting to tell others of the strange seldom-seen world lying so close to our everyday lives, the secrets under piers and at the edge of car parks.
I’ve not gone mad. Dad doesn’t take any medication to control his manic depression and has not been seriously ill for years. He has found a way to deal with it himself, to recognise the triggers, to know the shifts and the lie of the ocean bed.
Since I got sober, I sometimes find myself surprised and made joyful by normal life. It can feel like a hallucination, this stunning reality. Face down in shallow water, coated in neoprene and breathing through a tube, I feel as if I’ve opened a door that has always been in my house but I had never noticed. Life can be bigger and richer than I knew.
27
STRANDINGS
IN 1952 THERE WERE WINDS
in Orkney so strong they blew away hen houses, killing 70,000 chickens and effectively ending the islands’ poultry industry. An account of the storm said ‘tethered cows had been flying in the air like kites’.
At primary school, on the windiest days, the smallest children are not allowed outside at playtimes. In the big winds of early December last year, half of one of Dad’s cattle-feeders – a six-foot-diameter steel ring – was found five fields away, having crossed fences and dykes. The old chest freezer I liked to shelter behind blew across the field and almost hit the caravan, and the shopping-trolley shelters at Tesco in Kirkwall bent and buckled.
Orkney has a fairly temperate climate, with warmer temperatures than other places on a similar latitude, thanks to the Gulf Stream, but the wind is our most defining weather characteristic, and its relentlessness is often the thing newcomers find hardest
to deal with. Farmers battle against the wind, often losing. Dad planted a field of new grass but early gales ripped it out.
The wind, as well as the salty air, is the main reason there are few trees in Orkney and none on the farm. People don’t bother with flimsy bird-feeders or greenhouses that would be gone in the first gale, and umbrellas are rare. This year, the Papay Christmas tree is sunk in concrete: the last few blew over.
Because I grew up in it, I like the wind: it makes me excited, as it does the calves in the field, frisky in blustery weather. It gives me energy, like a fire. I remember power cuts, lights and TV flickering, torches and candles, school closed. In an easterly gale on Papay, waves and spume come over the top of Fowl Craig. I go for a short walk and return ears aching, mania whipped. A small burn is being blown backwards, water rising in a vapour catching the light. The weather-vane on my house has given up and is simply spinning.
The original Beaufort scale didn’t give wind speed in miles per hour but, rather, in terms of its effects on sailing ships, from ‘just sufficient to give steerage’ to ‘that which no canvas sails could withstand’. This winter I am having adventures in the Beaufort scale, in the gusts and squalls of the North Isles. On Papay and the Outrun, we are fully exposed to the Atlantic and closest to the passage of areas of low pressure. Here, wind is not just the movement of air caused by changes in pressure in the atmosphere, but a way of life.
There are easterly gales forecast tonight, rising to storm force. I look at the weather-monitoring websites – the Met Office and
Dave Wheeler – and am thrilled by the steeply climbing wind-speed graphs and the area of red coming towards Orkney. The ferry from Kirkwall to Papay is cancelled but the afternoon plane still comes. I watch it land, approaching into the wind, wobbling slightly.
From inside by the fire, I feel the air pressure drop and hear the wind rise. It is suddenly howling and whistling around Rose Cottage in different tones, like an orchestra tuning up. I go outside for thirty seconds to retrieve the bird-feeder and return with my face salty from sea spray.
Orkney folk will usually only go as far as saying it’s ‘a bit blowy’, but tonight everyone on the internet admits that it’s ‘blowin’ a whoolie’. Tonight Orcadians are battening down their hen houses, predicting that wheelie bins and trampolines will be flying in the town. I speak to Dad, who’s in the caravan at the farm – he’s staying there tonight ‘in case the roof starts to come off’.
At five o’clock, the height of the storm, the window of the caravan blew in. A whirlwind was created inside, lifting the farm paperwork. Objects that had been with Dad since we lived in the farmhouse – pictures and furniture – shook and fell. There was a storm inside his house. Dad opened the door to relieve the pressure and managed to drag a sheet of plywood to cover the window, a temporary solution.
Two mornings later, after the storm has subsided, there is fear mixed with intrigue on Papay. What has it done? I’m still here
but my crate of driftwood outside the house has shifted. I retrieve the lid of my compost bin from a field over the road.
I walk the east coast of the island to see if anything good has been washed up. The combination of east winds and high tides was unusual. The variables of wind, pressure, the state of the tide, currents and rainfall had combined to cause much damage on the shore.
Some sand dunes had been breached, with waves blowing onto the front road. The water has now subsided but rocks, seaweed and other debris are strewn over the track. At North Wick, there are huge piles of seaweed where two days ago there were none. What was a gentle slope from the dunes down onto the beach is now a tall step. Tonnes of sand have been moved and rocks exposed.