The light fantastic
Us humans are a vision-led species, drawn to nature’s light-shows like moths to a flame. But where the northern lights, high above the Arctic Circle, form unpredictable and ghostly special effects, and the lightning storms of America’s mid-west explode like celestial fireworks for mere seconds, there is a subtler but less fleeting incandescence to be found just a short flight away, in Ireland’s west Cork.
For more than a decade, international kayak champion Jim Kennedy has been leading people out onto the night waters of Lough Hyne to drift through watery phosphorescence. A combination of temperature and no light-pollution makes Lough Hyne one of the best places in Europe to revel in the strange world of bioluminescence. The lough’s vigorous phyto-plankton light up like fireflies when agitated – and kayaking will do just that.
Seven of us were preparing to head out with Jim. We kitted up on the shore at dusk, wiggled down into the cockpits of our single-seater sea-kayaks and launched off the shingle out onto the water.
There was still just enough light to make out the large-eyed bulk of a grey seal bobbing in the ripples a few yards out, eyeing us curiously. And still enough glow in the sky to silhouette the pterodactyl-shape of a heron gliding into land. We had slipped into the lough just at the magic moment when our secondary senses – touch, taste, smell, hearing – were sharpening to take over from our failing sight.
We paddled out in line, following Jim’s hat-mounted glow-stick. I could taste salt on my lips and hear the drip-drip-drip of water off paddle blades, then a splash – a big splash – as a fish jumped. As Europe’s only inland marine lake, Lough Hyne is a unique tank of ‘stranded’ species: fish, sea urchins, seaweeds and molluscs better suited to the Portuguese coast than Ireland.
The only contact the lough has with the Atlantic Ocean is through a narrow, rock-studded rapid. We were voyaging across a self-contained, lost world. We stopped briefly at a small island, where a rectangle of stones on the shore marks a Bronze Age grave; it was also an ancient world.
Jim led us on through what had now become complete darkness. His glow-stick, a few faint shadows and the splashes of the nearest kayakers were all that marked the route. Silently – any inclination to talk had been silenced by the greater silence around us – we rafted up above the ice-gouged depths along a tree-covered hillside on the lough’s western shore. Sight could do little more now than register the faint differences in quality of blackness: one tone marked the sky, one the slope above us, the trees and the water.
“OK, I’m going to send you off one at a time,” Jim announced, “so you can be alone to really feel the darkness and see the phosphorescence.” One by one we set off into the dark shadows under the trees. In the moonless night there was only the faint glitter of stars between wisps of clouds.
Suddenly it was as if the night sky had capsized to become the water under me. First there was a faint pin-pricking of light on the surface; small ignitions as the drops of water falling from my paddle blade dribbled and splashed into twinkling constellations. Then the phosphorescence increased in intensity, flaring and catching like cold flames as I paddled further into the darkness.
I looked behind me – the wake of my kayak had burst into a glowing contrail. The surge beneath the bow lit up in swirls of neon foam. My spread hand touched to the flat sea left a fleeting print of palm, fingers and thumb in a phantom luminescence. And where the ripples hit the shore’s rocks an icy blue light engulfed the strands of wrack and kelp for nanoseconds. But as each flaring faded and disappeared, more light sprung up across the water.
Further down the shoreline I could hear gasps of wonder from the other paddlers, and see the faint slivers and gossamer webs and flashes of light they created as they played with the living water. With flicks of our hands and splashes of our paddles we’d all become aquatic arsonists, creating our own ghostly lightning storms and conjuring up flashing sheets of watery northern lights.
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