An offshore weekend in Jersey

Walk out, kayak off – a night marooned on Seymour Tower is a great way to enjoy Jersey's majestic tidal coast

So now I know how Noah felt.

All around us the waters rose. At first it was a sly seep across the ruffled sand, barely noticeable until it surprised my toes. Then it was a steady flow through rocky gullies, an occasional whitewater surge overwhelming an outcrop. Straits were narrowed, spits swallowed.

We retreated towards Seymour Tower and, from its prow-like platform, jutting out towards the incoming sea, watched as the tide cavorted and rampaged and encircled us. Relentlessly it flooded the landscape, erasing every hard edge, till the tower’s square walls were the only solid thing for miles around, and we were alone with the setting sun and the waves and the gulls.

“Shall we raise the Jersey flag?” grinned Mike, my guide, gesturing up to the empty flagpole.

Yes, we were on Jersey. Good old Jersey. Cream and potatoes; Bergerac, crafty millionaires and constitutional oddities. Hardly, you might think, an ideal place to commune with the raw forces of nature. But set aside your preconceptions, because the largest Channel Island’s coastline is an extraordinary, wild environment worth a weekend or more of anyone’s time.

A mighty ebb and flow

My Old Testament experience was the result of the south-east coast’s massive tidal range at its peak, some 12m. Every 12 hours, the 116 sq km island expands and contracts by more than a third, as millions of litres of water ebb and flow from the Gulf of St Malo. You can witness this daily phenomenon from any number of yachtie bars or surfer cafés, of course, but umpteen times more dramatic is the view from Seymour Tower, an 18th-century turret built on a jumble of rocks 2km from (permanent) land.

We had walked out to the tower at low tide that afternoon, a 45-minute ramble from the harbour at La Rocque across shell-scattered sandbanks and rockpools. Ahead of us the sea was a mere scribble on the horizon; far behind us lay the postcard-pretty Royal Bay of Grouville and the battlements of Mont Orgueil Castle. Like Orgueil, Seymour Tower was built as an early-warning defence against the French – specifically, to guard against any repeat of the Battle of Jersey, the dastardly Gallic assault of January 1781 that is still, technically, the last battle fought in the British Isles.

We clambered up rock-hewn steps to the tower’s base, and Mike lowered a metal staircase to allow us into the three-storey tower. Here, soldiers once kept watch on the Normandy coast, a mere 20km distant. While the tide was out, though, we didn’t linger inside – all around us was a unique landscape, a terra infirma that would shortly be 10m beneath the waves.

I wandered down towards the sea edge, where overturned rocks revealed spider crabs, and razorfish squirted seawater from their tunnel-lairs. Everywhere lay tresses of Japanese seaweed, like mermaids’ wigs abandoned in the sea’s headlong rush from land. In the rock-studded sand itself, there were echoes of other weird landscapes: here, a mini Atacama; there an Uluru; beyond it a rippled stretch of Sahara.

Soon, though, it was all being swept up by the incoming tide, and Mike urged us back to the tower. This is no place to stand and gawp: many have drowned in the treacherous channels, including occupying German soldiers foraging for seafood during WWII. (The Nazis’ tunnels and coastal bunkers – never used against Allied forces – remain a major visitor draw.)

Seafood supper and a paddle home

We suffered no such food shortages ourselves: we lit a barbecue, ate oysters and monkfish fresh from the bay, and watched a blood-red moon rise out of the sea – then slept to the crash of waves against the tower walls.

Our isolation ended at noon the next day, when two yellowkayaks pulled up alongside the tower. “Which one’s Crusoe?” yelled up Derek Hairon, a guide from Jersey Kayak Adventures with the irrepressible banter of a waterproof Peter Snow.

Soon I was paddling away in his company, threading west across St Clements Bay through channels exposed by the departing tide. “I call these wrigglers!” Derek whooped, as we sluiced down narrow gaps between the rocks. Some channels dead-ended, others opened out.

“This is real exploration!” he hollered, standing up precariously and looking for a way through the watery maze. “I feel like Franklin sailing through the ice. Look – there’s the South-East Passage!”

We paused at Icho, a Martello tower built a few years after Seymour, now derelict and guano-spattered. The final channel to land even gave us a taste of whitewater – the tide was by now pouring out at such a rate that we couldn’t paddle against it, and we hauled our kayaks through the shin-deep torrent to shore.

I'd spent the past 24 hours only a few kilometres away – Seymour was still a white smudge in the distance – but I felt a lurch of culture shock amid the ice creams and windbreaks. I’d been Noah, splendidly isolated, buffeted by the elements; now I was back in the 21st century, on a day-trip to the seaside.