Free Atlantic Britain by Adam Nicolson

had to summon me again and again to the point. ‘What’s happening, Adam? And what are you doing about it? Concentrate!’ Theshearwater life. It became a sort of code between us. Just then, too, dolphins had come to play in our bow wave, squeaking and rolling beside us, synchronising their surges so that four or five came up together in an arc of gaiety and pure abandon, an expression of the sea at its most generous. It felt in the sunshine as if the big mother
Auk
was with her brood, as though, by some kind of miracle, she had actually given birth to them.
    In that beautiful sailing expression, we soon raised the Pembrokeshire coast, our progress pulling the land up out of the horizon haze. We moored the boat overnight, away from the wind, in the harbour at Dale, a still and sheltered nick tucked in at the entrance to Milford Haven. The film crew met the boat in Dale. Not a whimper of the big swell out at sea found its way into Dale Roads, and George and I, Will Anderson the director, Ben Roy the producer, Luke Cardiff the cameraman, and Paul Paragon the soundman, all of us sat that May evening on the harbour wall outside the pub, making plans.
    I had long wanted to go to Marloes Sands, a wonderful two-mile beach just around the corner from Dale, famous geologically as one of the richest in thecountry, with tens of millions of years of sedimentary rock layers tipped upright in the cliffs and displayed like a library of the past above the sands.
    What better way of coming to Pembrokeshire than to plunge into the ancient past straight out of the breakers? We decided on it that evening. I am not sure quite why, in retrospect, none of us considered it a dangerous and difficult thing to do. Perhaps we even did acknowledge that, but slid past it in the way one does, thinking of the goal, of the good outcome, without fiddling through the details of how to get there. Plunge in and you will arrive. That was about the limit of it.
    It was blowing a little harder the next morning. The crew drove to the beach, George and I cast off in the
Auk
and beat out of the entrance to Milford Haven, each tack taking us deep up against the battered red sandstone headlands of south Pembrokeshire. The seas were driving hard into them, leaving spume-stained pools of turquoise at their feet, while big modern oil tankers slid out past us, one swell after another slapping up against their bows.
    By mid-morning, we had arrived half a mile or so off Marloes Sands and hove to. The swells weremagnificent, whole downlands on the move. They go much faster than you think, thirty or thirty-five knots, but something about the length between crests, which can be a hundred yards or more, and their wonderfully effortless gliding ballroom motion, the sheer untroubled progress of that bulk through the sea, makes them seem slower, gentler, less powerful. Hove to there in the
Auk,
they rode up under us and past with the discretion and sleekness of a butler: fat, waistcoated, perfect. We could have sat there all day, drinking our tea, drinking up the sunshine, listening to the boom and surge, half a mile away to the northeast, of these very seas breaking on Marloes Sands.
    Those breakers looked like a ruff below the cliffed neckline of the shore. Anxiety raised its little inquiring head. As George and I prepared the inflatable dinghy for me to go in, we talked about how to do it. I made sure my life jacket was tightened properly around my chest. We tied a small anchor on a very long line to the inflatable’s bow fittings so that I could drop it when still outside the surf and feed myself in. That way I would have a means of pulling back out when I wanted to return to the
Auk.
The little dinghy was lurching up and down beside the yacht’s hull. ‘Goodluck,’ George said, and in the tension of it I simply passed a flat hand through the air, as if to say nothing doing, no trouble, as smooth as you like, when, of course, that was only a signal of the wild chaos by now