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Why would somebody leave a full-time job to kayak around Ireland? ÉIBHIR MULQUEEN meets the person with the answer

CIRCUMNAVIGATING IRELAND in a small canoe-like craft might seem a dangerous and lonely occupation but for Dubliner Barry Coscoran, careful planning has made it an exhilarating and relatively safe one.

A 28-year-old who gave up his job with the Blood Transfusion Service Board, he is making the trip to raise funds for Women’s Aid and has completed about half of the 1,200-1,400 mile journey.

He left his home village of Portrane on June 11th, heading south, and is now crawling his way up the west coast in a kayak, resting up in Galway for a few days until the weather settles again.

Kayaking around Ireland has become an increasingly popular endeavour. Coscoran says four people have already done it this year but that does not make the undertaking any less hazardous. A treacherous coastline, unpredictable seas and sudden weather changes underline the need for training, careful daily planning and an exit plan when things start to go wrong.

He is also in no particular hurry, happy to pull in when conditions are not right.

“I had originally set aside three and a half months for it. I will stop off to enjoy it. It is also fantastic that I have been able to catch up with friends in different parts of the country.”

Before starting out each day, he radios the Coastguard on his portable VHF, giving his route and his estimated time of arrival.

“They are watching my progress as I am going up the coastline and they give me the odd tip as well, and if there is foul weather coming in, they let me know.

“It is reassuring that someone else knows where you are if something goes wrong.”

Navigating with sea charts, OS maps and a compass, Coscoran also carries a Sat Nav, providing him with an accurate fix of his location in emergencies.

He can cover up to 25 miles over seven hours in good conditions but sometimes progress might be as little as four miles.

Given the Irish summer, he has sometimes had to sleep in a damp sleeping bag. “Just over the last couple of days the tent has been soaking in the morning when I was packing it up and fairly wet each evening when I was putting it back up.”

After paddling sometimes for hours, the pattern has been that he scouts out a camping site, cooks his meal, settles down and repeats the cycle the next day.

He has also stayed in the homes of friends and has been surprised at the kindness of strangers.

“I have received a lot of hospitality and made a lot of new friends. People who I have met on slipways have taken me into their houses. Those things have made a big difference.”

The kayak, a Quest LV, was made and sponsored by an English company, P&H Sea Kayaks. It has three dry box hatches and “even when it is fully packed, it is designed to carry all the gear”.

“If you were to see the stack of gear beside the kayak you would not be able to imagine how it would all go in there: tent, sleeping bag and inflatable camping mattress, pillow, stove, enough food for about five or six days, water for about two days, enough changes of clothes for a week, cooking pots.”

Factor 50 sun cream has gone by the wayside after he found it was not working. By switching to a zinc oxide barrier cream, he says his nose has now stopped flaking.

Fishermen have grown accustomed to seeing him in his yellow ocean-going hood with its high-visibility stripe and his “sparkly blue” kayak.

“When you come up out of the swell they get a bit of a surprise, this small thing out in the big ocean.”

While he has been joined by friends for short periods, mostly it has been a case of the aloneness, if not the loneliness, of the long-distance kayaker.

“I have thoroughly enjoyed being by myself. I would never say it has been lonely,” he says.

He chose Women’s Aid, which helps women and children suffering abuse at home, as his designated charity because of what he learnt through a friend working in a refuge.

“It really hit me when I heard a lot of the stories. It is not just women who are involved in that situation, it is children as well. It is quite a horrible situation for people to wind up in.”

Afterwards he hopes to find work as a freelance sailing and kayaking instructor. “I strongly believe that if your heart and soul is not in a job, it is not for you.”

Donations to Women’s Aid can be made directly to the charity, womensaid.ie, or via Barry Coscoran’s website: mycharity.ie/event/baz_coscorans_event/

BAZ COSCORAN

For the past couple years many of the P&H paddlers have been begging Graham to design a “playboat”. Not just any ordinary 16 foot day tripping machine, but rather a boat specifically designed to surf and play in rock gardens. I got my first glimpse this year at the Outdoor Retailer show and have been patiently awaiting the boat to show up here on the west coast. So when Jamie Klien called me last week on Friday to inform me that two Delphins had arrived in Bellingham, I wasted no time putting the wheels into motion. After bribing Chris Tretwold to make the journey North at 5 am the following morning, we were in route to a place the everyone knows all to well. Skooks. Of course we did not have any shortage of boats to pull from and with a 12.5 knot tide we decided to bring the full flotilla. 2 Delphin’s, Cetus LV, Capella 161, S Molan, and 2 M Molan’s. Graham you have designed us the best fleet of boats in the business…thank you! Trouble is I keep needing a bigger and bigger roof rack because I can’t decide on what to bring.

Despite having an absurd number of boats to mess around with, Chris and I were focused on putting the Delphin through it’s paces. Staring with the glassy green wave all the way up to a pretty sizable foam pile, we wanted to see how this boat compared to other short, playful sea kayaks. Right from the second you climb into this boat, it is clear that you are in something new and revolutionary. The Delphin comes equipped with the same Connect 30 outfitting as the Pyranha boats. Being able to hop in the boat and rachet up the backband, the boat instantly feels like a performance kayak. A nice keyhole cockpit is complemented with grippy thigh braces and a small accessible hatch just like the Cetus range. Once we hit the water, both Chris and I instantly felt the boat was extremely nimble, yet stable. A boat that will scream performance if that is what you are looking for, but also a boat that beginners will hop in and find extremely easy to paddle. Perhaps the most unique feature of this boat is the shape of the bow. Lots of rocker and well defined edges that allow the boat to plane up quickly. For the first time ever, I was surfing a sea kayak on a steep wave and it flet like I could keep the bow our of the water and carve. Viola! Notice how the water sheds off the bow of this boat in the picture below. The edges allow a clean movement of the water off the bow without it being under the water. Very cool.

One of the things I was most curious about with this boat is how it would behave in rough water and also it’s speed over ground. Park and play at Skooks is one thing, but how would this boat perform in bigger ocean water and could you actually get to rock garden locations with any energy left. Chris and I spent a bunch of time just doing downriver laps, where we would purposely drop it into whirlpools, fight up current lines and test hull speed. Plastic boats always feel a little sluggish, but I think this boat is about as nimble and fast as they come. I would have no issue padding this boat in big coastal water for the day. It feels like a sea kayak when you put the hammer down, but it surfs like no other boat on the market. I’m looking forward to the glass Aries and the smaller Delphin. This boat is going to revolutionize sea kayaking. Perfect for beginers to learn the cause and effects of edging and so nimble that the experts will paddle locations on the coast that were once thought to be unaccessible.

There are lots of different things we picked up on about on this boat over a couple days at Skooks. At first I was hoping to see even more aggressive edges that carried the full length of the boat, but then realized how forgiving it is in a side surf or crossing eddy lines. The stern carries the water line pretty long for a 15.5′ boat, making it faster than it might appear on first glance. I had imagined this to be a boat that people like myself will flock too, but did not realize how much potential it would have for new paddlers. I can’t wait to get the boat out rock gardening along the coast in the coming weeks!

All photos by Steve Rogers!

Just as much fun on the flatwater as on the wave.

Enough edges to play on the wave but subtle enough for easy transitions across eddy lines.