April – September · Sailing daily

Boat passagespast the stacks

One day out to the seabird island and back, on a forty-foot ketch that carries twelve people and no more.

One day · seven hours
Spring, summer, autumn
From age seven
Two landings

The route

Four waypoints, one tide

We leave on the ebb and come back on the flood, which fixes the timings more firmly than any schedule we could print. Here is the passage as it actually runs.

07:40 · Departure

Under the headland

The boat clears the harbour wall and passes beneath the old battery. The guns at its base were last fired in anger in 1854, and the skipper will tell you about it whether or not you ask.

The harbour headland seen from the water — The Battery

09:15 · Open water

The three brothers

Three basalt stacks mark the end of shelter. Between them the swell arrives properly for the first time, and even in good weather the boat will roll noticeably for the next forty minutes.

Three basalt sea stacks rising from a steel-blue ocean — Three Brothers

11:30 · First landing

The seabird island

In high summer several thousand pairs nest on the eastern cliffs, and the noise from the water is genuinely startling. We land on the shingle spit for ninety minutes; the colony itself is watched from below.

Green cliff headland above a cold northern sea — Kittiwake Island

14:50 · The way back

Along the inshore edge

We return close to the cliffs so there is something to look at, and because seals haul out on the ledges at low water. Anyone who wants to fish is handed a line somewhere around here.