‘Sole, Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea. South, 5 to 7. Rough or very rough. Occasional rain, fog patches…’ The Shipping Forecast usually has landlubbers like me drifting off to sleep, but the night before crossing to Lundy this jolted me awake. Very rough? The BBC website said this meant waves ‘20ft high’. Arghhh. Maybe we should have gone to Malaga. But the two-hour journey, early the next morning from Bideford in north Devon, wasn’t all that bad – for me, anyway. For about half the passengers it was hell. Some of them stared desperately at the horizon – the only thing that wasn’t moving up and down. One man zipped his head inside a cagoule, as if to make the whole ordeal disappear. A friend of mine sat stock-still and green-faced on a bench on deck; then, just as the ship approached Lundy’s landing jetty, he had to change his son’s...
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