Due to my general levels of growing despondency, I had neglected to document the next stage in the journey after it was complete as I felt no one was interested. Certainly the analytics for this blog suggest no interest. But with the next stage after, I felt it definitely needed to be noted, if only for my own memories. So I come to now where I will chronicle both stages which bring myself and Niall from the telegraph pole on a South Howth jut all the way around the Irish sea side of the peninsula to Balscadden Beach which is just at the beginning of Howth Harbour.
To the uninformed among you, the coastline between theses two points is cliff and rock. The route takes you across a certain ‘Doldrum Bay’, around the magnificent Baily Lighthouse to really the only possibly break in the 8 kilometres of this coastline that can be exited. This point is called Tiny Hidden Beach, and after that its Balscadden. That all sounds routine and perfunctory, however I will now go into the detail.
The Telegraph Pole to Tiny Hidden Beach
The thing to bear in mind with these stages which was always on my mind, is that if anything went wrong, it would go wrong badly, potentially catastrophic. We had toyed with the idea of kayak support and canoes, but the lack of anyone we could call on as well as the unfeasibility of carrying a canoe up and down cliffs and cliff paths meant that we just had to consign ourselves with getting on with it. On this stage the car logistics were simple. We just had to drive to the road entrance to the Baily Lighthouse where our sea entrance was a kilometer and a half to the west along the cliff walk and our sea exit was almost a kilometer east from the car along the same cliff path.
Low tide was expected at around the 9 am mark so we had arranged that Niall would collect me coming from the south side of the city at 7:15 having us there for 8 ish. This was going to be a short enough stage and the weather charts had given us a forecast of bright and calm. I had consulted my brother-in-law Eamon who sailed these waters for a lifetime about the potential currents in the area and I suppose he wasn’t going to put himself in a position of making recommendations, so his words were of caution and going at low tide, which was our intent.
Arriving in the car at the gates to the road down to the Baily, I don’t remember much of the detail. We chatted and got ready. There was no one else about. By the time we were walking the cliff path at 8:30 is there were a few people out in the morning. If they were people from the surrounding houses, then they would have been terribly rich but we didn’t see much gold on their persons. None in fact.
We were so un acquainted with the area that we walked past the point of descent to the previous day’s exit and had to double back. It was scary going down the cliff, even though this was one of the lower height descents on the coastline. We remembered that there was a particular perilous piece of rock climbing involved in the last day but because the tide was fully out and it was a spring tide at that, we could descend a different face on the same rocks. The descent was painstakingly slow and every step was taken with a sense of impending doom that one might slip on the wet mossy rocks. The water awaited as the sun rose above the lighthouse across the bay from us.
Niall suggested I get in first and he take photographs with his phone. I agreed to it with the understanding that I would be hanging around in the cold water while he followed me in after packing his tow float. The photos turned out great, so I am thankful. I watched Niall crawl over the rocky waterline on all fours realising I must have looked a sight. More beached whale than elite commando. When he was in the water beside me, he pointed out that a seal was watching us from about 20 metres away. I thought this was cool in a Jacques Cousteau sort of a way and hoped that he might playfully accompany us on our journey.
We got going and the water was like a glass lake and within 25 minutes we had crossed Doldrum Bay (ergo) and were at the foot of the Baily looking up. The seal had long since left us to our own devices and the sea was beginning to get choppy. Niall was eager to breaststroke this bit and take in the beauty of the scenic lighthouse from beneath, and without making any effort, the sea seemed to be carrying us in the direction we wanted to go.
Then the chop turned into a two meter swell and I was unsure what or why this was. We didn’t see this earlier when we were walking the cliff path and we had no contingency. Dublin Bay was draining and this was the valve. My brother in law had mentioned eddie’s but not their directions or impacts. I didn’t feel safe, but panicking was not an option either. We were getting thrown around big time and Niall was laughing. It was like the wave machine in the National Aquatic Center only twice the height. We started freestyling north. After about five or ten minutes the swell died down back into a chop. What had happened really is that we were carried through it by the current and it was now behind us.
Our exit point of Tiny Hidden Beach was ahead but completely secluded, and having never been here before from this angle, we had to trust my instincts. All this geography was completely unknown to Niall and he had put all his trust in me. At this point I was just glad to be out of a phenomenal swell. From Google maps, I anticipated another 600 metres of swimming which would be ten minutes if our planning of the tides was correct. But it wasn’t and we seemed to be swimming for ages and every time I looked up the Baily didn’t seem to be regressing into the distance. Again a moment for trepidation as we were very exposed. Niall wasn’t convinced and felt we were making ground, so I went with that. I had forgotten how unfit I was on account of doing little or no training all year and the tiredness levels were rising despite the fact that I was getting ahead of Niall with every burst of swimming.
Then after what seemed like an eternity trying to get to a cove I couldn’t see, I suddenly spied the steps up the cliff face that I was familiar with. The relief was immense given the tricks my mind was playing on me and we plodded home the final 100 metres to land in the form of a rusty coloured pebble beach. This was true open water swimming in every sense of the concept.
Tiny Hidden Beach to Balscadden
So to sum up this swim, I will repeat what I have said a good few times about it since. This is possibly one of the most stupid things I have done in a long time. Though that may be a dramatisation considering the previous stage was quite stupid and that this stage was framed in some especially stunning scenery.
It was a two car stage and we had talked about it on and off for a week and that it might probably be the last jaunt of the season. After the last day, I had some serious reservations about this stage and if it wasn’t for Niall’s gung-ho attitude to it, I probably wouldn’t have attempted it. Further conversations with my brother in law laid out the fact that your pretty much damned if you do and damned if you don’t with that stretch of coastline. On a falling tide, the flow is north to south, on a rising tide a confluence will flow north to south. This, however, is hindsight conjecture and in the planning we surmised we needed to catch the rising tide at the halfway point, which we did.
We met at 8 am in Howth village. The weather was beautiful and while the was a bit of a chill in the air at that time, it didn’t bite. Parking was free, what more could you ask for? As we were getting ready into our suits, a car drove past with what seemed to be Vincent Brown driving. Maybe he was doing some investigative journalism on sea swimmers, lacking in grey matter. We had chosen the two car approach, as the road between the start and the finish warranted a very steep climb, which all Dublin’s aspiring professional cyclists use for training their mountain stages. This would have stopped us dead in our tracks had we attempted it on bike.
At this time, Niall’s enthusiasm had me in a default position of thinking that this stage will pass of easily, and the cliff walk and descent to Tiny Hidden Beach, passed of with no scandal. On the beach we made or final preparations and we entered the water at 9 on the dot, which was exactly what we planned. I was wearing my waterproof watch so had a clear picture of how we were going to navigate the east face of Howth in 45 minutes, before a sharp left would take us into Balscadden in another 25 minutes. Roughly, a little over an hour. We seemed to be moving at a strong pace and the starting point moved away behind us.
We must have been about 50 metres out, and there was a defined headland of rocks ahead of us in an indeterminate distance, behind which all was hidden. After twenty minutes, we both stopped to get our bearings, and all seemed ok. After a minute, we got going again. Ten minutes later, we stopped for another minute and then proceed. I noted that the Baily lighthouse behind us seemed to be just as formidable as it was previously, suggesting we weren’t making much ground. We stopped again and Niall said, I don’t think we are moving. I agreed, It doesn’t look like it. He came up with an idea.
Over to our left close to the rocks, there was a small yellow and a small orange buoy for lobster pots. Niall suggested we take 50 strokes and see what change the buoys made location wise. At this stage we stroked quite powerfully with the preconception that we were up against it. I had lost count but I took Niall’s lead and when he stopped, I stopped. We hadn’t moved an inch. Shit!! Niall said, ‘Here will we go back’. In an instant, I weighed up the situation. We were against the flow, a significant flow. We had no idea of exactly how much ground we actually had covered. If we turn back, we may get swept out to the middle of Dublin Bay. If we failed now, we may never get beyond this point. It was all going quickly through my head.
“Right! Into the rocks and see what’s what”. Thankfully Niall didn’t argue and it took a full five minutes of intense swimming to get less than 100 metres in. Clearly this was a sinister eddie. When I got close enough, I could see there was a rock that we could latch onto as if it was specially placed there by spirits of the past, in an entire vista with nowhere else to perch. Niall was lagging behind because he was wearing neoprene boots but he could see I ‘landed’ and so had something to aim for. We had been swimming hard for 50 minutes at this stage and the rest was a saviour.
Niall reiterated at that point, should we go back, but as the water rose and fell, It became evident that against the rocks, the north south flow was not as inhibitive and I said we should keep going. I can’t remember now if I gave a reasoning but as we breaststroked off the rock, It was apparent that we could still cover ground if we stayed beside the rocks. Thus began our water based trek through the boulder islands at the foot of the cliffs. There were only two places we could exit the water as far as I was aware., the start and the finish. And at this point we were truly pioneering adventurers. Edmund Hillary didn’t have a plan ‘B’.
We started to see some very beautiful cave mouths and as we navigated between each channel between land and rocks, we met with another small bay with it’s own microsystem of currents. Each of these channels took a lot of effort to swim through as water funnelled through them southward. And then as we entered yet another semi-inlet, Lambay came into view in the glorious sunshine. This was a welcome reprieve as it suggested we may have at least reached a halfway point. A lobster fisherman came by, dropping his cages into the sea. I don’t know what he though of us in this wilderness?
We stopped and breastroked regularly but we didn’t talk much. Anything yet may still happen and we didn’t know how far from home we were. The next to come into view was Ireland’s eye. Surely we must be approaching the nose of Howth. As we proceeded, front crawl where we felt the flow wasn’t against us and breaststroke when we felt we needed to edge our way along beside the rocks, the east pier of Howth Harbour came into view. The elusive turning point of the Nose of Howth. Hurrah! Then confronted with a massive flow pushing us back. Immediate end of celebrations! We grabbed onto the rocks beneath a crevice. All the waterline was covered in small dead barnacles which lacerated our hands and feet. Niall got stung on the hand by a lions mane. Howth is famous for them.
We struggled through the next channel and then Balscadden came into view. It was still off in the distance but I now felt vindicated in making the executive decision not to turn back earlier on. Now we could see houses above us on the cliffs and Howth basking in the sunshine. The rocks in the water were now only a metre or so above the water level, where as previously they were up to thirty metres high. There were fishermen above on the rocks now. I don’t think they were fishing for mackerel as they weren’t constantly casting and pulling in their lines. Some of them did pull in their lines out of courtesy and others let them sit there as it wasn’t a issue if they remained dormant.
We got closer to the beach, observing a coastline we had seen many times before in the ‘Island race’, but never this close and it now revealed a whole seascape of beauty and intrigue. At this point, I was now enjoying the final 200 metres, seeing beach paddlers getting clearer. The watch stated we had been on the go solidly for 2 hours and I was working on adrenaline still. I could see Niall was exhausted. We landed on the stoney beach, and it hurt my bare souls to stand on it, to walk and so I had to awkwardly reach forward to shake Niall’s hand. Niall said with a huge sense of relief, ‘That was ridiculous’, and he didn’t mean that frivolously.