Winn - Paddle: A Long Way Around Ireland. Jasper Winn

T HE GREY, SWILLING WAVES that Im paddling through are, what? a foot high? two feet? six feet? Or, maybe, theyre just uppity ripples and better measured in inches? Even here, right in amongst the waves, I realise that I dont really have a clue as to how big they are and abstracts like feet and inches and miles per hour, and their metric equivalents, and even the more nautical fathoms, knots and Beaufort speeds, are not much help in getting a grip on confusions of water and air.

Wet stuff, especially when its moving around and being frothed up by a stiff breeze, as it very nearly always is in Irish seas, can feel very big. And many times it is. Other times, you take a look and think its on the benign side, not worth taking seriously, and discover too late how wrong you are. Like jostling a small, mild-looking guy at a bar by mistake, and finding him full of close-wound anger and quick with his balled-up fists. Then at a bar or at sea theres the shock of sudden blows and struggling and being thrown round and fighting back and coming out the far end with heart racing, wondering how you could have missed all the signs, and how lucky not to have got badly hurt.

Right now day one of my kayak trip around Ireland the waves are looking and feeling, well, quite big. And the sky doesnt look so great, either. Everything I see in an arc southwards from the west back to the east is either sea or sky. Even the coast far to the north is no more than a thin, dark haze squeezed between more water and air. Everything in my long vision is monochrome grey. Close up there are splashes of bright, plasticky yellow, blue, orange and scarlet; the kayak, my buoyancy aid, the sleeves of my cagoule and the paddle blades.

And if I dont have the measure of the waves, then I have even less idea of the size of the smooth Atlantic rollers rising under the kayak and lifting it slowly up and up and then slowly dropping it again. The waves are sharp little peaks knocked up by the local winds here and now. But the swell is a powerful heaving. A storm shadow rippling across the ocean from some long-past hurricane off the coast of the Americas that pushed millions of tonnes of water up into towering hills and then left their subsiding energy to oscillate through subsequent days and across thousands of miles. And as it travelled, the swell has picked up the earths own resonance from its out-of-kilter orbiting, and from the pull of the moon. Here, in the Celtic Sea, just off the coast of West Cork, where the sea bed is shallowing from thousands of feet to a few hundred, the rollers are running out of depth and so lifting even higher to corrugate the surface of the zinc-coloured ocean. Inshore, against the dark suggestion of the cliffs, I can see them running aground, but under me the rollers are silent. There is only the odd sharp splash sound as wave peaks of similar bulk and height smack into each other. Or into the kayak. Its all just so much more stuff that I cant measure.

The wind, though? Well now, thats definitely blowing a force three. Unless, those are real white-caps and not just scummy foam streaks coming off the tops of the waves (the waves that I dont know the height of), then its somewhere around a four, maybe gusting five. Of course, if only I was closer to the land which would be about two miles distant, I suppose then I could do some Beaufort Scale checks to see if the leaves are barely shivering on the trees, or smoke is being whisked sideways from chimneys, or escaped hats are bowling down streets.

I keep paddling. The kayak stretches fore and aft of me, so its like sitting up in a yellow coffin. The feel of its hard plastic under my arse, as well as the heft of the paddle loom as I dig the blades in one side after another, are the only solids amongst these shifting, immeasurable elements.

Im still trying to make sense of my surroundings. Most of the waves muscling in on me look, I now decide, about the height of a coffee table. The bigger ones, every now and again breaking over the bow, are pitched about the height of a kitchen table, while occasionally one rises as high as a fairly substantial breakfast counter. The swells, meantime, I chart at the height of plump sofas, with their white surf flapping over the heavy waters like linen loose-covers.

Calibrating the seas in terms of furniture and upholstery helps them seem familiar. It makes the waters seem domestic and indoorsy, like paddling through an IKEA catalogue, rather than the threatening reality of cold and wet. Im wrong about this, of course, but reassuringly wrong. Kayaking amongst these furniture-sized blocks of water I picture myself as a drunk making his way across a large room booby-trapped with dancing armchairs, scuttling three-piece suites, wobbly occasional tables, scattered bolsters and ruckled carpets. Im likely to fall at any moment but, with a drunks confidence, Im pretty sure I can make it from, say, the door to the drinks cabinet with no more than the odd lurch. In terms of what Im doing now that means paddling from the Stags Rocks, which Im just passing to seaward, and then onwards some twelve miles further west to reach Roaringwater Bay around which there are, appropriately enough, a number of drinks cabinets, so to speak. MacCarthys. Bushes. The Jolly Roger. Caseys. The Algiers Inn.

Hello! He-llo!How are you? Lovely day, isnt it? A bull grey seal is flopped out on a narrow ledge on the Stags Rocks, high above the splash of waves. He raises himself into a U shape, his head peering down at me, the furled bunching of his tail flippers twitching skywards.

Dont mind me. Just passing through. No, no, no, dont get up, please, please, dont bother, really I greet him politely, aloud, glad of the company, feeling a little less alone to find him so at home out here, a couple of miles offshore.

The seal, exuding bad temper and bad breath, gets up anyway and undulates heavily across and down the sharp blades of rock, putting me in mind of a plump slug. He tumbles into the water with a surprisingly light splash and disappears. His head pushes up through the waves beyond the rim of rocks, stiff whiskers bristling. He gives me an irritated look. I provide him with a gruff, disgruntled deep baritone voice to answer me in.

Sod off, you yellow weirdo Ill come over and tear your nasty pointy little head off and stuff your stupid red flippers up your arse.

Barely into the trip and Ive started talking to seals. As a seal. Talking to myself, in other words and not in my own voice. Nor uttering what I would have thought of as my own sentiments, either.

It is early June and Ive set off to kayak the whole way around Ireland. Ahead lie a thousand miles of these furniture -sized seas. A month and a half of paddling, perhaps. Two months? Or, depending on the weather, maybe even longer. A lot of talking to myself, anyway.