Ten minutes later we launched again after stopping for the wee Lochy remembered he needed moments after we set off the first time. It was beguilingly warm, the lake and the fells blazed in saturated Instagram hues. We’d brought our own canoe, which accommodates three, but had spiced up the challenge by wrestling a six-month-old Border collie into a life jacket and coaxing her aboard. This, in essence, was the plan on a cloudless May morning when we shoved off from a stony beach on the western shore. You disembark, watchful for natives, and you explore every track, every cluster of trees, every cliff and lookout, every rocky corner, and then you plant your flag and declare the island yours forever. On reaching the small island huddled close to the southeastern shore of the lake, you find your way in among the rocks to the hidden harbour. Your craft may look like a canoe, a sit-on-top-kayak, an inflatable dinghy or (if you’re really going for authenticity) a sailing boat rented in Coniston, but you know that really, it is a pirate brig or a raft you have cobbled together from bits of shipwreck. You should pack your rations and a few other useful items – telescope, pocket knife, Jolly Roger flag – and set forth onto uncharted waters. They will also know that properly, you should have no map, but make one for yourself. Most maps of the Lake District call it Peel Island – but fans of Arthur Ransome’s blissful Swallows and Amazons adventure series will know it as Wild Cat Island. It’s also one of the tiniest, though it could hardly command a bigger place in his imagination. In Lochy’s view, the smaller and less inhabited the island the better, and the best of all islands is the first he remembers visiting. In this extract from The Voyage to Wild Cat Island, Amy-Jane Beer describes an ambitious canoe trip to the island made famous by Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, that didn’t quite go to plan.
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