West by Northwest: Lundy Island by Standup Paddleboard

We left home at the crack of dawn. It’s always the best time of day to set off on a proper mission; that heady mixture of coffee and bleary-eyed adrenaline fires you up every time. And today we needed to catch the early morning ebb tide to reach our destination: a small island off the North Devon coast, marking the intersection of the Bristol Channel and the Celtic Sea.

The road northwest was empty and silent. Crows and buzzards circled over dead-still treetops under a blood-orange sky. There was barely a breath of wind: a large high pressure system had hovered stubbornly over Britain for the past few weeks, creating textbook-perfect open ocean paddling conditions.

The small cove at Lee Bay was mirror-smooth when we arrived. A few gulls floated lazily, like specs of dust on molten glass. Far out in the bay, the tell-tale lean on a lobster pot buoy confirmed what we already knew. The ebb tide had just started to flow, and would speed our progress westwards into this perfect summer’s morning and the heart of the sea.

The idea of getting to Lundy on a standup paddleboard completely unsupported had been much discussed within the small team of SUP enthusiasts I paddle with regularly. We knew that the island had been reached before on a paddleboard, by long distance paddler Fiona Quinn, on her Land’s End to John O’Groats trip. Fiona – probably very wisely – used boat support for the sea-based section of her trip. As far as we knew, whilst the trip gets done regularly by experienced sea kayakers, nobody had paddled to Lundy unsupported by SUP before. 

As we passed the prominent lighthouse on Bull Point, which marks the western end of the Exmoor Coast, we caught the full force of the ebb tide running west. The addition of a lightweight sea kayak compass screwed to the camera mount on the bow of my SIC Maui board using an improvised GoPro attachment made the tidal vectoring for the next 10 kilometres a whole lot easier. I just set the needle for ten degrees west-north-west and away we went, carried by the ebb stream into the heart of the Celtic Sea.

Lundy itself shimmered on the horizon dead ahead. It’s a strange and wonderful thing, this little island: a three mile long slab of granite sliced off from mainland Britain and miraculously dropped in the middle of the Celtic Sea between North Devon and Pembrokeshire. A small pod of porpoises breached the water not far to the north, rising and falling in that effortless, arcing motion, coming in towards us for a while before heading further out to sea at speed.

After we’d left Bull Point well behind us to the east, the sun’s heat was building; the wind that had ruffled the sea earlier had slackened right off. I checked our progress on my GPS: 18.2 kilometres. We were right at the mid-point of the crossing. A pair of gannets were diving for fish a hundred metres to starboard. A few oystercatchers floated on the sea not far to the north, breaking the silence of the sea with their distinctive trilling call as they took off. Lundy, meanwhile, was getting bigger; we’d easily be there in a couple of hours by my reckoning. The weather was perfect, but the wildness of the situation wasn’t lost on either of us. Ten miles offshore in the middle of a strong tidal stream, we were really in quite the location to be standing on a pair of 14 foot long race boards, without any other vessels in sight.

A small cruise ship approached us heading east, having spent the night in the lee of Lundy’s east coast. The slow line of its wake rose ahead, forming a sudden, momentary groundswell on an otherwise calm day.

As soon as we turned the corner of Lundy’s southwest point, the first members of what would be a very large host of seals appeared, following us as we eddy-hopped the tide with that beguiling, dog-like curiosity. The stream was in fact running against us for this first section of the west coast, exactly as stated in Mark Rainsley’s South West England Sea Kayaking guidebook. We cruised upstream using the back-eddies around the offshore rocks and using the micro channels away from the main flow as our route; further out it would have been harder going against the full force of a 3 knot current. 

The further north you go up the west coast of Lundy, the wilder and more dramatic the scenery becomes. I’ve climbed extensively on Lundy’s cliffs and know the coast well, but to see it close-in from the sea creates an even more spectacular impression than observing the coast from the cliff top paths. Once Battery Point is passed – with its distinct Napoleonic micro-fort and gun emplacement atop a striking rock archway – things really start to get interesting.

Our host of seals followed us with gusto into the wide bay that encases The Devil’s Slide, Lundy’s most famous cliff; a smooth slab of red and gold granite that falls from the cliff top straight into the sea for four hundred feet. Here, it was so calm that we actually swam right off the boards, without needing to land, in the narrow inlet just north of the Devil’s Slide. Half a dozen seals were in the sea with us, their silver shadows darting and turning underwater. They would rise and breach the surface with that distinct, strong exhalation, then stare back at us with their wide eyes and spiky whiskers. What do they think of us when they observe us in this way, these wild sea creatures with such strangely human qualities? Who do they think we are? It is no wonder that the myth of the Selkie – the half-seal half-human spirit – emerged in Celtic myth and folk tradition. For me, the seals’ brief, curious, free-spirited companionship is always a gift; we take part in their existence when we meet them, as they do in ours. There are very few wild animals with whom it is possible to have this sort of exchange in their native environment.

Heading north from the Devil’s Slide, we picked up the full force of the early ebb tide running around North Light; a ferocious race forms here, and even today, in perfectly calm conditions, we could see the crests and breaking waves of a big tidal rapid just north of the point, only a hundred metres from the rocks; imagine what it would be like here in a fifty-knot winter gale!

All too soon, though, we were clearing North Light and entering the completely sheltered water of the east coast, and leaving the drama of Lundy’s western cliffs behind. We’d been paddling for over seven hours, approaching the 45km mark, and were both starting to feel it in our shoulders and calves. But despite the fatigue, the final section down the east coast felt like a victory lap; it’s an easy cruise back to base from here, really, and the seals followed us most of the way.

We made landfall back on the shingle beach just before six o’clock; we’d been paddling for over eight hours today and on the water for over nine. And what a day it’s been; just over fifty kilometres of standup paddling through some of Britain’s most dramatic coastal scenery, including a long offshore crossing and a circumnavigation of a truly spectacular island. You’d be pretty hard pushed, I think, to find a better day of open water paddling in the UK than the crossing out to Lundy combined with the circumnavigation of the whole island.