Vectors in the Stream

Derek Hainon, the author of the excellent sea kayaking guidebook to the Channel Islands, came up with a useful way of thinking about offshore crossings in the archipelago. He describes the islands to be ‘like rocks in a river’. This particular river in question changes direction four times a day, with the six hour North Atlantic tidal cycle. The other thing is that the ‘river’ between Guernsey and Sark, if you think of it like this, is slightly wider than the mouth of the Amazon – the world’s largest river – at Macapá, Brazil, still a few hundred kilometres before it flows out into the Atlantic Ocean. Furthermore, numerous tide races with large overfalls, eddies, and standing waves form in multiple locations around and between the islands. Here were all the ingredients, then, for either a truly memorable trip or an elephantine epic. 

The necessary weather window opened in the middle of June. After carefully cross referencing tide times, swell charts, and the wind forecast, my partner Dorka and I decided the Sark paddle was worth a shot. She’s one of the few standup paddlers I know who’s strong and confident enough on the water to do something like this. She’s also one of the only people I know who is mad enough to even contemplate doing so.

The Channel was as calm as a mountain lake as we left Portsmouth on the ferry; ideal conditions for what we had in mind. A few hours later, as we approached Alderney, the most northerly and outlying of the Channel Islands, massive swirls and interconnected eddies began to appear in the sea as we entered the Raz Blanchard, or the Alderney Race. The whole thing was on an impossibly large scale: the tide race extended around us for dozens of square miles. The Raz Blanchard forms in the channel between Alderney and the tip of Normandy’s Cotentin Peninsula. Almost incomprehensibly, the tide stream can reach twelve knots (22 kmph) through here at certain times of the year. The French coast was around thirteen nautical miles south, Alderney was eight nautical miles west, yet even way out here the stream was rolling along like a freight train. On this particular afternoon there was almost no wind, yet still the sea was alive with tidal energy in a way I had not previously seen anywhere else, not even on my extended paddleboard expedition around Southwest England. 

There are places with a bigger tidal range than the Channel Islands – most notably Canada’s Bay of Fundy and the Bristol Channel in England. But those are inshore waters; to experience this kind of tidal power in a truly offshore, deep water, oceanic environment you have to come to the Channel Islands, and in particular to the sea lanes of the Grand Russel and Little Russel which we would be crossing tomorrow.

Heading away from Herm and an assembled flotilla of yachts and powerboats basking in the sun and shelter of the northeast side, we create an invisible marker point around ten degrees north of the northern tip of Sark, and use that as our sighting-line for the tidal vector we want to take across this wide channel through which the water constantly surges. The tide is now flowing faster southwest than we can paddle east, so we need to make for a point that’s at least forty-five degrees upstream of our intended landing point on Sark’s Grande Grève beach if we are to stand a chance of actually arriving there.

A large rock known as the ‘Noir Pute’ commands the lonely seascape on the northern approaches to the Grand Russel. We keep it to our port side as we make our course out into the heart of the huge channel. From here, with our corrected course to the north, the tide will (or rather might) pull us down on to the coast of Brecqhou, a small island that lies just off the west coast of Sark, from where we can nip around into the bay where we intend to land. The plan sort of works, but as with so many things at sea, it doesn’t exactly pan out as intended.

As we approach Brecqhou, the large castle prominent on its seaward coast provides a valuable reference point. We’re closing in, but we’re still around half a nautical mile offshore. As the first big eddies appear that indicate we are now entering the faster tide stream created by the point of Brecqhou itself, the castle appears to be moving left at an alarming rate, the same way a platform bench might look as your train departs from the station. It’s blindingly obvious that for this final leg to clear this point, we’re going to have to paddle hard to get across the tide and enter the sheltered water on the south side of Brecqhou.

If we don’t manage to clear the point, on the other hand, we won’t be going to Sark at all. We’ll just have to head back out to sea, going southwest with the tide towards the distant coast of Brittany (!) that lies some way beyond the horizon, and wait for the stream to change direction before heading back to Guernsey’s east coast on a different vector. That was the Plan B. At sea, you always need a Plan B. Neither of us were particularly enthusiastic about this one.

Dorka is slightly to the north of my position. We’re both paddling at full race-pace now, with high cadence strokes, tensed cores, and maximum concentration. The water everywhere is alive with kinetic energy. We only look up occasionally to check our course. Under our boards, the tide rushes and swirls, eddies and counter-eddies. The eddies are the ones to watch out for; they are the fin-catchers that can flick you overboard in an instant. We’re being pulled sideways at six or seven knots – the tide is much faster right here, off the western point of Brecqhou, than our forward speed towards Sark. There’s virtually no wind, yet the sea is fully charged with the pull and torque of the tide. It’s an awe-inspiring place to be.

The voyage back

It’s just before five o’clock. We make final safety checks on the boards and to our personal kit once more. The tide is just about to turn. In an hour, the last of the south-flowing stream between here and Guernsey will wane, quickly change direction, and start to rapidly flow north again. We’re going to try to use this briefest of lulls in the tidal cycle to our advantage. You can’t really call it slack water, as this point in the tidal cycle is sometimes described. The sea in the Channel Islands never really stops moving, it just slows down a bit before doing a 180 degree turn and winding back up to the full five knots-plus.

We push out and paddle west into the sun. The wind has completely died, and the sea shines darkly in the liquid light. It’s utterly idyllic. Soon we’re out beyond the point of Brecqhou; it’s nothing like it was an hour and a half before, when we came this way through that great river of swirling water cranking southwest. The stream has slackened off; it’s now just before the turn of the tide. We set a point for our course just to port of the tiny island of Jethou, which lies immediately south of Herm, to give us a course back across the Grand Russel. As we transit the channel, the tide will first pull us south, then back north as the stream changes direction.

We glide back across the Grand Russel as the midsummer afternoon slips slowly, imperceptibly, into evening. And what an evening it is. One of wildest sea channels in the British Isles is, for now, a scene of total calm. A powerboat heading east for Sark passes well north of us at thirty knots before coming slowly off throttle and circling around. We think perhaps they’ve seen puffins, but actually they’ve just seen us. They slowly approach, checking we’re okay. We give them the thumbs up; they wave us on. The middle of the Grand Russel is not, I suppose, the most likely place to see standup paddlers.

As we approach Jethou, the north-flowing stream gets going. A large rock topped with a brilliant white obelisk called La Grande Fauconniere lies just southeast of Jethou, and makes a useful reference point as we close in. At first, we think we can clear Jethou to the south, but the way the obelisk starts moving as we near the islands proves otherwise. We’re being pulled north rapidly now with the early flood stream, so we’re going to have to use the Percée Passage – the narrow and spectacular channel between Jethou and Herm – to get back into the Little Russel and return to Guernsey. Another boat approaches to check up on us – a small yacht. I give the skipper the thumbs-up. He gives me a look of incredulity that I can take only as a muted compliment.