The Sea Wall

Pellets of North Sea hit my face as if flung from a slingshot.

My eyes burn. Tipping my head into the onslaught, spray ricochets off my hood and blows up my sleeves as my bare hands grip the boat and I brace to stop my body slamming into the steering position. The water is cold but bearably so, for now.

As the lifeboat climbs the face of the swell, I lean back against the rails and lift my face to the sea once again. The lighthouse on the Isle of May flashes twice to starboard above the lights of four large ships sheltering in the island's lee. That I can make out multiple lights on each vessel now is reassuring. Progress.

To port, lights on shore look more familiar. The green glow of leading lights. St. Monans. Safe havens along the coast alternate between red and green leading lights, the lights guiding mariners into harbour. Pittenweem next, then Anstruther, where we are heading.

Perhaps we'll be treated to a show of the northern lights. Looking up, there’s nothing but thick, storm-driven cloud. The full moon holds its breath.

It’s barely a week since Storm Babet pummelled the coast, reshaping the shore. The day after Storm Babet had passed, a sei whale live-stranded on a beach near Edinburgh. Photos showed the whale thrashing its tail flukes, arching spray and sand skywards. Raw patches on its rostrum, painful pink beneath grey, suggested it had rolled in the shallows, ill or exhausted perhaps, after days of battling 10-metre seas.

Autumn is usually a season of beauty. A photographer’s dream of rutting stags, leaping salmon, and cascading colours. Recently the photos are of crumpled cars, toppled trees and battered bridges. Relentless storms have made even the shortest of journeys unappealing, if not impossible.

BEEEEP-BEEP, BEEEEP-BEEP, BEEEEP-BEEP. My pager finally forces me from my flat. At 02:30 as another storm collides with spring tides. The roads are empty as I drive to the lifeboat shed, windscreen wipers sweeping away the rain flinging itself from the darkness. Then there’s whitewater too, washing across the road close to the harbour, between new banks of sand and tangles of seaweed braided across the tarmac. My wheels slide on kelp, gripping again on sand, as I feel the water hitting the underside of my van. This is new, uncharted territory. Here be dragons.

‘You're tasked to a casualty who's fallen through a gap in the sea wall,’ crackles the radio as the harbour lights fade in a cloud of spray behind us. ‘Casualty description: male, elderly.’ The Coastguard passes us a position to proceed to that'll take us an hour to reach. We're to conduct a shoreline search.

The man has already been in the water for 45 minutes. It's cold, dark and rough. Information exchanged and route plotted, the lifeboat’s engines roar but we fall quiet under the red light of the wheelhouse.

We're over halfway there when we hear the casualty has been found, just as Rescue Helicopter 199 arrives on scene. We won't be needed now, but it's ten minutes at the mercy of the swell before we're stood down. Faces drain of colour. Brows grow sweaty. Some start to yawn.

I know what's coming and ask permission to step outside to the upper steering position as we turn and head for home. Being immune to the queasiness of seasickness was always my strength, less so now.

As the lifeboat leans hard over to port again, I choose fresh air delivered at 40 knots over the tepid warmth of the wheelhouse where Barry's coughing continuously and Simon has turned grey. Euan joins me outside. Younger than me, he’s ghostly pale, his eyes puffy. We exchange a couple of grunts and a half-hearted thumbs up. More than enough for 04:00.

We have eight miles to run and we’ll make slow progress, punching into the heavy seas. I think of the sea life around us in the Firth of Forth, unseen in the darkness. Pictures of fish washed ashore after Storm Babet showed deep-sea oddities, like in the aftermath of a tsunami. A John Dory, brilliantly silver and flattened ‘the wrong way’, a mishmash of odd angles and proportions. Beside it, a fish that was all jaws and teeth with a long, tapering, ribbon-flat body.

I think of the creatures still enduring these conditions: cod and haddock shoaling tightly and pitching forwards, as one, to a greater depth where the surge of the swell is less.

I picture pods of bottlenose dolphins, battleship grey and heavily scarred, rising in unison between the swells, with a series of short, sharp puffs as they exhale and inhale, their blows indistinguishable from the spray.

These storms take their toll. Shags have been washing up dead on local beaches. Birds of brilliant petrol sheens in breeding plumage and summer sun, reduced to dull mounds of black, waterlogged feathers. Seal pups born on beaches on the Isle of May, still fluffy and white rather than slick and mottled, aren’t yet equipped for the sea. Only those who can scrabble beyond the reach of the waves will survive.

Then there was the sei whale.

How do we make sense of it all? The non-stop storms, the man on the beach beneath the thumping blades of Rescue 199, beached whales and sea legs whipped away. Do we just hold on and breathe when we can? Look for landmarks and leading lights, hoping for a harbour but knowing the pager will sound again? You can prepare all you like, but what good will it do when you pitch through a gap in the sea wall?