Finding Hope

The highs and lows of paddleboarding 800 miles around the Scottish Coast

This summer will mark three years since I paddleboarded around my favourite country in the world – Scotland. I thought I knew about its waters, and my own connection to them, but this expedition would be by far my most eye-opening yet, for the most unexpected reasons.

My reason for the journey was to connect what’s out of sight and out of mind to the ocean’s role in the climate and biodiversity crises, ahead of COP 26 which was being held in Glasgow later that year. I wanted to delve into our human connection to the ocean and how that informs our actions. I had an idea of what both of these might look like before setting off from the banks of the River Clyde in Glasgow city centre. But had no idea of what I would really discover over the following 10 weeks and 800 miles on my paddleboard.

Glasgow is Scotland’s largest city, with nearly a third of the country’s population living within the Glasgow city region. It was a shock then, after 2 days of paddling from the city centre down the river Clyde to pop out into the open ocean, the Isle of Arran with it’s soaring mountains dominating the skyline, and the promise of its above- and under- water wildlife just a 10 mile paddle across the Clyde. I got to wondering how many of those 1.7 million people that live in and around Glasgow were aware just how intrinsically connected their lives are to the ocean. One in five children in the UK has never been to the sea, and yet on an ecosystem-level we’re all a part of it – our actions affect the ocean, and the ocean’s health affects us.

I was particularly excited to get to Arran because there’s one species there that was once common in the Clyde, before becoming extremely rare, and is now celebrated for its return within a small part of the South Arran MPA. The Flameshell is a bivalve mollusc with Irn-Bru coloured tentacles, which creates incredible, intricate biogenic reefs – living reefs which can be home to myriad species. Not only is this an essential base for the biodiversity of the whole ecosystem within the Clyde, but the reefs that are created become important Blue Carbon stores.

Blue Carbon is the term given to elements of the ocean that absorb and store Carbon Dioxide – and they are just as important as terrestrial carbon stores. The ocean has already absorbed 25% of our anthropogenic carbon emissions, and the rewilding of the sea could provide an amazing opportunity to remove even more from the atmosphere. The seabed stores an enormous amount of carbon – not just the reeds, but the muds in Scotland’s sea lochs contain more carbon than all of its terrestrial forests and peat bogs combined! And plants such as kelp and seagrass store carbon at ten, and thirty-five, times faster than rainforests respectively, the latter sequestering it into the seabed and locking it away.

So our ocean mustn’t be forgotten in the conversations around nature-based carbon sequestration. In the ocean, often-times complicated rewilding programmes aren’t needed – it just needs to be protected well enough from damaging human activities to recover.

The return of Flameshells in the South Arran MPA, Scotland’s first community-led No Take Zone, is a fantastic example of just that. Flameshell reefs in the Clyde were destroyed by scallop dredging – a seriously damaging form of fishing which drags heavy metal rakes across the seabed, hoping to catch scallops, but ripping up everything else in their path, including these slow-growing, biodiverse reefs.

This wasn’t always the case: Until 1984 there was a 3-mile limit around the whole coast of Scotland, inside which bottom trawlers and dredgers weren’t allowed. After this was repealed in 1984, a collapse of fish stocks ensued- the whole ecosystem was damaged from the bottom up: This left fishers who rely on a healthy ocean with very little else to fish. Flameshells are now flourishing within the No Take Zone, and fishers adjacent to the area have also reported an increase in size of their catches, presumed to be a spillover effect of that now thriving area of seabed.

My paddleboard journey continued up the West coast of Scotland, to an area called the Argyll Hope Spot. And here, I did indeed find hope. I had one of the best snorkelling experiences of my life in an area that from above the water looked like nothing more than some dark seaweed floating on top of a cold ocean. But below the surface was a maerl bed – a slow-growing coralline algae that again creates intricate and interweaving reefs, providing spawning grounds for species like herring when they once frequented these waters. Surrounding the maerl were enormous starfish and brittle stars in their thousands, some even crawling up my legs as I entered the water! And the most beautiful seaweed, dancing in the currents. I saw fish, crabs, anemones – not a dissimilar amount of biodiversity and life as a tropical reef, but quiet, cold and delightfully surprising.

Further along the coast I had the opportunity to visit Loch Craignish, where the community-rewildling programme, Seawilding, is making incredibly positive change for two very special species – seagrass and native oysters. Snorkelling amongst the seagrass beds was like being transported into another world – a vibrant, verdant place, impossibly full of life. The native oyster programme, a species that was also once prevalent around Scotland’s coast, with very few remaining now, aims to reintroduce them to appropriate areas so that they can once again become essential ecosystem engineers, creating complex reefs and storing carbon.

Seeing the Seawilding project in action gave me so much hope for the future of the the health of our sea lochs – a return to a flourishing, thriving ecosystem. But these places desperately need a reintroduction of something akin to the protection once offered to them by the 3 Mile limit in order to be safe from bottom-towed gear such as trawlers and dredgers.

You can learn more about the movement to bring back The Limit, and have your say, at OurSeas.scot

As I journeyed North, the coastline became increasingly wild and dramatic. Enormous rock stacks covered in thousands of noisy birds, swell crashing into the cliffs and creating big peaks and troughs on the ocean. Amidst incredible wild-camps, glorious sunrises and dolphins, porpoises and eagles, I weaved my way past Mull, around Ardnamurchan point, across to the Isle of Skye, and via the Summer Isles and the Old Man of Stoer, to Scourie. Just a short distance away from Cape Wrath, the UK’s most Northwesterly point, the sea conditions were turning from challenging to dangerous, and I had just one morning left of paddleable weather before I would have to sit out for a few days to let a storm pass through. I didn’t want to get on my board that morning – the grey, drizzly midgey skies begging me to stay in my tent. But I got on the water at 5am, and pushed off into the thin fog. 

About 3 miles from my destination, around the back of Handa Island, I lost the remaining energy I had and knelt down on my board, head on the deck. In the silence, I heard a ‘pffft’ behind me, and turned round expecting to see dolphins, delighted at the prospect that they’d come to gee me up in my moment of exhaustion. Instead of dolphins, I saw three enormous black fins coming at speed straight towards me. As they approached, I began to truly appreciate their size. Two of the fins were 6 foot tall, taller than me standing on my board – male orca. They proceeded to circle my board while the third, a female, swam underneath me, turning on her side as she did so and looking up at me. For a fleeting moment, I locked eyes with her, and my appreciation for these beautiful, enormous creatures was changed forever. 

Cape Wrath and the North coast of Scotland delivered some of the most challenging paddling I’ve ever experienced – long, committing days and nights between get-out points, big swell, strong and unfathomable winds, and at the same time a kind of wild I’d never experienced – gigantic bird-covered cliffs and rock stacks, Risso’s and White-Beaked Dolphins and very few humans. 

I was ready for a change in pace as I turned the corner at Duncansby Head, and began the journey back South down the East coast in beautiful sunshine and calm seas.

One day, not far from our destination harbour, I saw something floating offshore. It was big and white, and I hoped above all else it was debris. As we got closer, the oil on the surface of the water and the stench confirmed my fears – it was a dead whale – a juvenile humpback, with ropes around its tail connected to big pots descending into the ocean’s depths below. Entanglement of marine animals is a big problem in Scottish waters on account of the large amount of rope that’s left in the water attached to creel pots for catching things like langoustine, crabs and lobsters. I knew it was an issue, but seeing it for myself really brought it home. I felt utterly devastated. A baby humpback whale – a species I’d never seen before. Huge and majestic, succumbed to a length of rope and pots. There are moves being made to mitigate these negative consequences of this otherwise low-impact fishery, and you can learn more at scottishentanglement.org

My paddling took me down the East Coast of Scotland, to its last harbour, via the stunning and impressive Bass Rock, the world’s largest Northern Gannet colony. I finished the expedition feeling a mixture of relief, sadness and hope. I had had the great pleasure of meeting so many individuals and communities around the coast with their own connection to the ocean, and had a renewed understanding and empathy to what the ocean means to different people – conservationists, fishers, paddlers, trauma survivors, children… It was truly eye-opening and a privilege to be able to have those conversations. 

I also came away feeling a real need to help more people see what our seas in Scotland are actually all about – the magnificent life they hold, their capacity to be so much more full of life and incredible blue carbon stores, and the destruction befalling them. I felt that if people could actually see some of the wonderful aspects of our ocean for themselves, especially underwater, then they would be able to make much better-informed decisions about how they use their voice for the health of our ocean, from a place of their own personal connection to it.

So after we finished paddling, we began what has become a recurring event in the calendar of the charity I run, Seaful, to help people who might not otherwise have the opportunity to experience our ocean for themselves. We took a group of school children from inner-city Glasgow to the Isle of Arran to go snorkelling for the first time. None of them had ever been to Arran before, and arriving at the Community of Arran Seabed Trust centre, they already had grins across their faces and stories to tell of the jellyfish they’d seen from the ferry.

I was so nervous about getting them in the water – afraid they’d be cold or bored or unengaged. We had planned a 20 minute snorkelling session; after nearly an hour we had to drag them out of the sea so we didn’t miss the bus back to get the ferry home. They were enthralled by what they could see – amazed that they could actually have their face underwater, and their idea of what the ocean in Scotland is was changed forever. I asked one of the young girls how it had been for her, and she said that it had been incredible, the best day ever. But it had also made her sad, because now she knows what’s down there, she’s mad that we use the ocean as a trash can.

My partner, the award-winning film maker James Appleton, kayaked with me around the coast, and together we created a 3-part docu-series about the adventure called ‘Scotland: Ocean Nation’. It’s available to watch for free on STV Player in the UK until April 2025.

https://player.stv.tv/summary/reelsoul-scotland-ocean-nation

All photo credit: James Appleton