Dances with Waves

Dances with Waves has all the ingredients of a great adventure – danger, high drama, narrow escapes, bizarre encounters. On Brian Wilson’s solo 1200-mile voyage around the coast of Ireland his little kayak is lashed by the tail-wind of Hurrican Gusta, bombarded by the incontinent gannets of the Skelligs, and almost run down by a ghost galleon off Mizen Head. Sherkin Island pirates kidnap him for ransom, his boat is claimed as wreckage by the beachcombers of Connemara, and he receives an ecstatic welcome from Fungi, the Dingle Dolphin. Add to this diversions into sea-lore, local legend, music and history and you have a yarn that will entertain landlubbers and sailors alike.

Praise for Dances with Waves:

“A daring, eloquent, and deeply rewarding adventure story.” NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELLER

“This is the story of a great journey taken by a larger-than-life individual who is not happy unless pushing out the boundaries of his own experience.” Cameron McNeish, GREAT OUTDOORS

“Rocked every which way by wind and wave, kidnapped by pirates … for Brian it’s all just another day at the (rather watery) office.” MODERN WOMAN

About Brian Wilson

Brian Wilson is a highland-based writer and environmentalist, best known for his adventure travel writing. Educated in Aberdeenshire and at Edinburgh University, he graduated with an honours degree in Mental Philosophy in 1984. After working with many of the major Scottish conservation and environmental organisations, he is now a freelance environmental contractor and trainer specialising in traditional stonework and thatching. Currently thatcher to HRH Prince Charles at Birkhall, his company Wildland also won the Association for the Protection of Rural Scotland conservation award in 1996 and 2000.

Brian lives near the north-west highland port of Ullapool with his French partner Marie-Pierre and their daughters Malin, Manon and Nellie, and dog Damson.

Brian writes STERN WORDS, a monthly column for OCEAN PADDLER magazine

An Interview with Brian Wilson

When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?

Apart from academic work, and a couple of magazine pieces, BLAZING PADDLES was my first serious writing project - an unusual one in that it required spending 4 months in a small boat! I set out to write an adventure travel book of the kind I would have liked to read, but was far from certain that I could complete either the book or the journey itself!

Some of my earliest inspiration came from Tolkien, Hemingway, Herman Hesse and Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). RLStevenson's Travels with a Donkey has much to answer for too. Later, I sat up and paid attention to writers like Gavin Maxwell, Frank Fraser-Darling and George Mackay Brown who wrote about people I wanted to meet, and places I wanted to discover for myself. Rachel Carson and Farley Mowat demonstrated that it was possible to write eloquent prose about environmental issues, and Patrick O'Brien and Tim Robinson (Stones of Aran) reassured me that there was no end of stories to be told about the coast, and the sea itself. In a sense these authors, among others, travel with me at all times, as guides and mentors.

Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind your books? And about what you were trying to achieve, what ideas you were trying to convey?

I've been trying to write books with an appeal to a general readership. It is all too easy to become pigeon-holed into a niche for kayaking and adventure-sport readers. This can be avoided to some extent by careful marketing, cataloguing and reviewing, and by the 'image' of the book, but it can only really be successful if the writing itself is of genuine interest to a wider readership. I've tried to explore the interplay of adventure, environment and folklore, and to represent the drama, humour and philosophical connections between the people, places and events of a journey. These, of course, are the elements of any good yarn anyway! The most satisfying aspect of having BLAZING PADDLES serialised on Radio 4's Book at Bedtime was that it meant the BBC believed it had wide listener-appeal.

How do you go about creating your voice on the page?

Truth is indeed often stranger than fiction, but this rarely renders it as engaging to the reader, and first-person factual narratives are at great risk of seeming dryly egotistical. My aim is usually to hide the 'I' amongst the encounters and events which make up the narrative, or to reveal essential information through observation, key encounters and dialogue. There is, however, a limit to how much can be hidden, as readers do like to know with whom they are travelling, or indeed sharing a tent!

While travelling I keep a log of thoughts, conversations and expressions, which will later become the flesh of the book. Back home, I try to stick verbatim to the expressions and phrases as written in the log, which are inevitably fresher and more flavoursome than any chosen for literary polish at a later date.

How and when do you write?

Ideally I need long periods of peace and immersion in order to write well. It may be that several weeks will pass in thinking, reading, planning, arranging structures before material will begin to emerge in forms and phrases I am happy with. A (distant!) deadline of some sort is useful to me, as otherwise something else is always more urgent than the 'work in progress', however the monthly deadline for my Ocean Paddler Magazine column always seems to come around far too quickly! Outdoor work occupies most of my time these days, except in poor weather. So I write mainly during daylight hours, on foul days, between dog-walks and cooking!

What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the monent?

I enjoy Jonathan Raban, Bruce Chatwin and Bill Bryson - three very different travel-masters - and a particular hero of mine is Tim Severin, whose imaginative journeys and meticulous historical reconstructions have been inspirational.

Kenneth White amazes me with his ability to express geopoetical ideas so concisely, and his Waybooks were a lot of fun.

Among novels which I have returned to more than once are Barbara Kingsolver's amazing Poisonwood Bible, Keri Hulme's Bone People, Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things, Louis de Bernier's South American trilogy ... oh and almost anything by Annie Proulx!

I'm also looking forward to exploring several writers from the Two Ravens bookshelves, which are beginning to look very hard to resist.

An extract from Dances with Waves

A visit to the shop after Mass was clearly a high-spirited social event which seemed to have more to do with cramming a record number of people into a tiny space, than with exchanging money or goods across the counter. It was therefore to be expected that some geezer elbowing his way through the crowd in a pink nylon suit, answering other people's phonecalls and asking to buy bread and chocolate, would cause a few raised eyebrows, and become the subject of a certain amount of lively debate.

“He's tryin to see can't he get all round the country in a little canoe – by sea!” explained one man, triumphant at having grasped the elusive concept.

“What would he want to be doin that for?” piped up another sage, “Sure, doesn't everybody know that the sea goes all round Ireland?”

A wave of a laugh filled the little tin shop.

“It's a circo-circle-circum-navigation, so!” decided another.

“No, isn't that what the Jewish sailorboys have at birth!” came the reply from Cath O'Sullivan, to yet more laughter.

It was with a large entourage still locked in academic debate over the finer points of oceanography and comparitive religion, and with a loaf of hard-won bread under my arm, that I returned to St Finnan's Bay. There, the kayak itself silenced all further discussion, and the look on every face said “No, surely that can't get all the way round Ireland.” To the further bafflement of onlookers, I proceeded to unpack all but the kayak's essential safety gear – hauling long-lost items from her deepest recesses and storing them in the tent – for only with the boat as light as possible could I hope to haul her ashore on the Skellig Rocks.

“How long will it take you to reach the Skelligs?” asked a serious old man.

“About three hours, with any luck,” I replied.

“Oh, your poor mother!” squealed Cath O'Sullivan. “Or are you married even? Oh but who in their right mind would marry the likes of you, going into the sea like that!”

I tried to assure her that I was neither married, nor had any intention of 'going into the sea'; but my defence fell on sceptical ears, and Cath shook my hand in a very final-sounding goodbye.

* * * *

In what had become a neat, polished routine, I hurriedly pitched camp, changed clothes and brewed a drink; and was huddled behind the quay, drinking hot chocolate as the rain swept over, when a pair of fishermen walked past.

“By Jesus there's still a few of them on the loose Pats!” said one, waving a big gloved hand in my direction.

“Round ... Ireland ... Solo,” said Patsy, reading from the kayak's stickers. “How many of ye are there in that then?”

“Just the two of us; myself and the boat.” I tried to sound cheery and confident.

“Well, I wouldn't give much for your chances. But I'd say the boat might make it!”

When they returned from checking their mooring, Patsy and Dan told me of an infamous pair who'd stopped at Quilty some years before whilst rowing round Ireland in a traditional currach. They were shown regularly on TV, sculling powerfully out of various west coast bays, or pulling in at island harbours, and giving interviews from their currach. But what everyone assumed to be a pile of safety gear covered with sackcloth near the stern of the boat, was in fact a well-disguised outboard motor. Patsy was doubled over with approving laughter as he described how the pair would row out to the first headland, whip off the sackcloth, fire the motor into life, and head for the nearest pub along the coast. “And do you know this,” said Dan, “I think they are probably going at it to this day!”