A feeling - a sense of something special. Experience the Isles with award winning writer Wyl Menmuir. 

I remember catching sight of the Isles of Scilly for the first time clearly, through the front window of the helicopter. My first thought was that this was exactly how I imagined the fictional world of Earthsea. I spent countless hours dreaming of sailing around and exploring Ursula Le Guin’s fantasy archipelago when I was a child and the memory of it came back to me suddenly and powerfully. My second thought, almost immediately after, took me to Swallows and Amazons as I had already started to plan hiring a small sailing boat or kayak with which to find myself a tiny, uninhabited island for a few hours. 

I was making my way to St. Mary’s to write a travel feature for the Guardian on holidaying on the islands, but even before the helicopter landed, I had the sense that this was just the start of an adventure that would last far longer than that one trip. The prediction proved true. Like so many people I’ve talked to who visit year on year it was a case of love at first sight. I’ve been back every year since, sometimes several times a year, and it was never in question that the islands would feature heavily in my book, The Draw of The Sea, which explores our relationships with the oceans that surround us, from which we draw inspiration and solace, adventure and peace.

On that first visit, I found my uninhabited island in the form of Nour Nour, having hired a kayak from St Martin’s Watersports, and on each family holiday since, we hire a sailing boat on which to explore the islands at our own pace. With the sails up, in search of an island of our own for a few hours, everyone relaxes. The children play at being Polynesian navigators (and – predictably – sing songs from the Disney film, Moana), and with one hand on the tiller and the other trailing in the water, I’m taken back to that first memory of seeing Scilly as Earthsea, and for a while I drift off to another place entirely. That, for me, is the draw of the sea in Scilly.

St. Martin's with the iconic stripey daymark in the background

One of the true pleasures of writing The Draw of The Sea was seeing the waters I had got to know as a holidaymaker through the eyes of people who have made their lives around these waters. In a lull in a winter storm on St. Martin’s, I listened to the stories of Keith Low, of growing up fishing around the islands, of the prehistoric Celtic menhir he named Billy Idol in the mid-1980s, about wreck he had found and fish he’d caught, wild tales that had me hooked from the moment I met him. Keith is, sadly, no longer with us, and I felt privileged that he passed on some of his stories to me. On St. Agnes, I rowed out to the Western Rocks with fisherman, Jof Hicks, on his bizarre and wonderful rowing catamaran, to pull the lobster pots he weaves by hand as part of his plastic-free fishing project, and in the harbour at St. Mary’s I watched a wandering walrus, who was both welcome and unwelcome, and spent time with the people working to protect him, and to set him up for his long journey home, in the frigid waters of the far, Arctic north. Off the beach at Porthcressa, I swam with a group of medics, teachers and farmers in cold spring waters, who used the sea to balance themselves, and I met a group of long-distance endurance swimmers as they hauled out after making the swim from the mainland, an epic feat to raise money for Surfers Against Sewage. Each person I met had a slightly different way of seeing the seas, of relating to these waters, knowing them and, more often than not, protecting them.

If there’s anything I hope for the book, it’s that it will encourage people, through reading about it through others’ eyes, to explore their own relationship with the sea, the many ways in which we benefit from being on, in or around it, the many ways in which we are drawn to it and, perhaps, to view the islands with slightly different eyes, too.

Wyl’s book, The Draw of The Sea, an exploration of our relationships with the ocean is out now. You can buy it online at Waterstones, or at Bordeaux on St. Mary’s.