Late September in Berlin and I’m a long way from the sea. I’m in bed reading about the local winds of Europe: the mistral, which blows north-westerly from southern France into the Mediterranean; the föhn, blowing warmly off the north side of the Alps. Then I find myself looking at weather forecasting websites back home in the UK. The surfer’s site Magic Seaweed shows clever graphics of approaching winds and sea swells. The Orkney Harbours site gives readings taken from anemometers around the islands, on hilltops and piers. Sanday Weather provides detailed information about a single location on a small isle. I’m living far away but I keep coming back to these places, carried on the tides of the internet.
In the Orkney Islands at the north of Scotland, where there are very few trees, autumn is not much of a season. Summer quickly changes into the long winter, which blows in with the September equinox. Two years previously, I was home in Orkney at this time of year and spent a week challenging myself to swim in the sea every day. The nights before, I looked at the websites and planned where to go depending on the wind direction and height of tide. Because I was on an island, with coastline facing in all directions, I could always find a sheltered spot.
In the strongest winds, on days when it’s too wild to swim, I try to walk into the gale. In a westerly storm on the island of Papay, I aim for the shoreline but my progress is slowed by sea spray, chunks of foam and grit being blown towards me. My eyes are watering, clothes and face being pulled backwards. The wind fills my ears and stirs my spirits, I feel in high pressure and held tightly. When I give up and turn around, I’m pushed by the wind into a run. I find it exciting but treat the coastline at these times with a healthy respect.
I download a tides app onto my phone. Here, I am able to see undulating graphs showing the movement between high and low tides at various points along the coast. It shows me their extent in metres, using data based on historical measurements. Inganess Bay is best to go to at low tide, when I can swim out as far as a shipwreck. High tide is better for swimming at Skipi Geo, when the sea comes up inside a cove. How the sea behaves around the islands, where the Atlantic meets the North Sea, is extremely complicated. Gaining this knowledge is a life’s work for fishermen and ferry navigators.
On the autumn equinox, which falls around 23 September, day and night are the same length all over the globe, when the sun shines directly on the equator. ‘Spring’ tides, which take place twice a month, a few days after new and full moons, bring the highest and lowest water marks of the month. The sun, moon and earth are lined up, combining their gravitational pull on the oceans. The weeks around the equinoxes bring the biggest tidal ranges of the year for similar reasons. When the equinox coincides with spring tides, you get the largest tidal range of all. It is complex: another tidal cycle works itself out over 18.6 years. The distance of the moon, wind direction and air pressure also contribute.
It’s at the equinox spring tides, at the very lowest waters, that people in Orkney are able to go out and hunt for spoots, the local name for razor clams, which live under the sand at the farthest reach of the beach. When I was a teenager, we picked winkles from the shore at low tide, scrambling on the slippy rocks and pools in the intertidal zone, and sold them by weight. On Radio Scotland, I heard a woman on the Isle of Harris say, ‘If you want to do seaweed foraging, you’ve got to start consulting the moon.’
At the highest waters, the sea swells in the bays that edge Orkney. If spring tides are combined with an incoming wind, they can cause damage, erosion and flooding. In autumn 2013, ancient drystone walls on the island of North Ronaldsay, built to keep seaweed-eating sheep on the beach, tumbled down in such conditions.
I’ve only recently found out that these rhythms are in my family, my grandma telling me about how her father, a ship’s supplier, had to go to work at high tide, shifts constantly changing. Mum has recently been learning about the tidal races and currents around Orkney with her kayak club. These cycles still affect people. Causeways to islands, the Churchill Barriers, are closed at certain high tides. I once unwittingly drove over the barriers at just the wrong time – high tide in an easterly wind – and my car was hit by a wave that breached the sea wall. I flicked on the windscreen wipers, held tightly to the wheel and drove on.
I’d long heard that as well as the biggest tides, the autumn equinox brings the strongest winds in Orkney. However, some say equinoctial gales are mostly anecdotal. Indeed, there is no straightforward mechanism that would relate the alignment of the planets to the areas of pressure that create wind. Reverend Charles Clouston, who began weather recording in Orkney in the nineteenth century, discovered that we don’t actually get the strongest gales at the equinox but the idea still holds. An enquiry to my Orcadian friends on Facebook caused a debate. Someone said that while we do get so-called equinoctial gales reliably in September and October, the windiest months are January and February. Another person maintained that despite science telling us it’s all an old mariners’ myth, with the change from Julian to Gregorian calendar meaning we’re all out of kilter, she still thinks it is more windy around autumn equinox – and the spring one. She puts it down to the Norse god Njord bestirring himself.
The direction of the prevailing wind in Orkney, which may seem simple, also causes debate. It seems to depend on if you factor in strength and where you are standing. Some maintain the north wind is the most common. My dad, who farms on the west coast, reckons it is the westerlies. I’m told confidently that our extremes of wind are usually from the SW–NW quadrant. An environmental report from Orkney Islands Council says: ‘The most characteristic feature of the Orkney climate is the frequency of strong winds and the prevailing winds are from between west and south-east for 60% of the year. Winds greater than 8 m s–1 occur for over 30% of the year and gales occur on average for 29 days per year.’ I just know that when I’m away from Orkney and hear the wind outside my bedroom window, it makes me homesick.
It’s pleasing to consider and observe celestial dynamics and see how the alignment of the earth, moon and sun can affect my plans: where to swim, when to forage on the seashore. I find it irresistible to tie these extremes of ocean and weather to my own life and moods. Henry David Thoreau wrote: ‘The poet must be constantly watching his moods, as the astronomer watches the aspects of the heavens . . . A meteorological journal of the mind. You shall observe what occurs in your latitude, me mine.’ An equinox sounds stable but really is an instant where the balance tips, and the nights become longer than days. It is the counterweight to the solstices.
Living in the city, the high winds and waters are something I experience as much digitally as physically. My electronic device links me to home and on the equinox I’m searching for a still point, something to hang on to in the hugeness of the internet, in the gales and the ever ebbing and flowing ocean.
Amy Liptrot, 2016