Free Atlantic Britain by Adam Nicolson Page A

doing a cancan in my gut. Was this really the thing to do?
    Why, after all, was I doing this? Because it was a way of stepping off the safe place, an engagement with the sea, a plunging in, a way of feeling life on the skin. I knew in my heart then, and I know now, it is something no one would do who
was
properly engaged with the sea. It was a conscious dive into ignorance, into the other element. What was about to happen was bound to happen.
    As I started up the outboard and took the dinghy away from the
Auk,
in towards the shore still half a mile away, George shouted, ‘Just go very slowly! See what is going on, coast around the outside of the surfline and then you can judge the moment to go in. Pick it! Make sure you pick it!’ I was now too tense to talk. I took the inflatable in towards the shore. I had bought it at a chandlers’ in Falmouth, £1,000 of red rather handsome-looking rubber. There, at twelve foot or so, it had seemed quite a big thing. Here itwas a toy, to the wrong scale as the big ridges of the Atlantic swells came strolling towards me. I watched the
Auk
herself disappear behind each sparkling ridge. The hull, the cockpit canopy, George, and the entire mizzenmast rolled below the horizon, so that for a moment only the peak of the mainsail and the top of the mainmast remained visible, a snapshot of canvas and rigging where a boat should have been, until my inflatable rolled back up to the top of my ridge and the
Auk
herself, too much of her, her whole fat body, appeared again but now below me. For a second I was looking down on to her decks, the boat exposed in plan, with George a model of a human being in the cockpit.
    It was a slow-motion roller coaster, but I was all right with it, constantly shifting my weight in the dinghy to counteract the rise and fall of the sea, up on to the side sponsons as the swell lifted beneath me, down on to the floor of the boat as they went through and past. I was taking the dinghy back and forth just outside the surf zone, watching the sets roll into the sands, getting used to their pattern, three big ones and then a pause, a passage of lower swells, three more and then a pause. The engine was responsive in myhand. I would wait for the last of three and then go in hard for the shore.
    It didn’t happen like that. Looking landward, I felt the familiar rise behind me of the next big one coming in. I shifted, still without looking, to the seaward side of the dinghy, to take my weight over there as the swell came through. But then - simply through the geometry of my body and the boat, by the steep angle at which the boat and I were now tipped - I knew that this one was different.
    I looked behind me. Out to sea, still seventy or eighty yards away, with its crest breaking and the sunlight burning through the bright thin fin of water just below it, I saw the biggest wave I have ever seen coming towards me. It was steepening with every second; the impossibly white crest was lengthening and deepening as I watched. It was perfectly clear, even in that first second, that the whole thing, the whole green, heavy, and increasingly lowering wall of water was going to dump itself on top of me, fill the boat and maybe - this was my thought at the time - drive me back out of the boat like a knife scraping food off a plate. The sheer size meant that it was breaking far outside the surf zone of all the others. I was alreadyin its surf zone, just at the most dangerous point, the biggest wave I have ever seen coming to get me.
    I know now what I should have done, or at least tried to do. I should have turned the boat shorewards at that moment and ridden with it, going with the engine at full throttle, taking me inshore on a big boiling mass of surf, a chaotic sleigh ride into the beach.
    But I didn’t. I didn’t have the gumption. At the time I thought my only option was to turn into it and take it on the bow. I had only just made that decision when I realised it was the wrong one, but