'I'm finishing the kayak adventure my brother started before he died of cancer'
A woman is kayaking through all of the Shipping Forecast zones in memory of her brother who died midway through the mammoth adventure.
Four times each and every day - twice at both five and 11 - BBC Radio 4 sends a confusing, almost incomprehensible string of words into the airways.
"Machrihanish Automatic. West by south six, rain, one mile, 981, falling more slowly."
For the past 156 years the broadcast has been beamed out for the benefit of coastal communities and those out at sea peering at a large dark cloud on the horizon and wondering what it's planning to do.
If you're not directly connected or on the sea, then the Forecast likely serves more as a pleasing string of nonsense words that appears on the radio late at night or early in the morning when you should be asleep.
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Toby decided to embark on the trip following the death of his brother Marcus (Supplied)Toby Carr an architect and senior lecturer at Falmouth University, decided he wanted to find out what all of the mythical sounding place names like Fisher, German Bight and Cromarty, Dogger and Heligoland were actually like, and what if feels like to experience "981, falling more slowly."
So in 2018 he set out on a big adventure to visit each of them along the coast of the British Isles, around Shetland, past the Faroe Islands, up to Iceland and then back down to Denmark on his sea kayak, as well as a brief trip down the western coasts of France, Portugal and Spain.
The avid adventurer hoped he would connect with nature and local people along the way, as well as work through the grief that came after the death of his brother Marcus.
Tragically, Toby himself also died - from liver cancer in January 2022 - before he could finish the mission.
Like his brother, Toby had a genetic condition called fanconi anemia which affects as few as one in four million babies and hugely increases the chances of suffering from cancer.
He would live until he was 40 - an unusually long life for someone with the condition when Toby was diagnosed at the age of 11.
After his death sister Katie - an author and artist - was going through the process of losing a brother, for a second time, and sorting through his notes and recordings when she realised the kayaker's adventure didn't have to stay unfinished.
"When he died I looked at all his books and I realised I could piece it together from the notes, what he saw and what he was feeling," Katie told The Mirror ahead of the launch of Moderate Becoming Good Later. "It felt like it was really important to do."
The book also recalls some of his encounters with locals along the way (Supplied)Because Toby had managed to get the book approved for publication prior to his death he'd had to jot down a chapter list, which helped Katie work out where he'd been and where he hadn't managed to get to.
She began piecing together the book as she thought her brother would have, acting as a ghost writer and trying to see things from Toby's perspective in the kayak.
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In doing so Katie got to relive "the happiest times" of her brother's life and produce something that felt like a tribute to her sibling.
"In the beginning of the book he goes to Iceland but he can't get his kayak out to customs," Katie recalls. "He spends a week on land with local people that have been helping him. They get him out on the water, take him to a national football game. Generally he found so much kindness from people.
"In Spain he turns up to a place where they had a big sailing festival on, and these guys adopted him because they'd seen him in the regional paper, took him for a drink."
The 40-year-old made it up to Iceland on his trip (Supplied)One of the qualities that shone through Toby's notes and came from him in conversation, Katie says, is how much he loved exploring the country of his birth.
"Toby was always more interested in the UK and northern places, like Scandinavia, and he started to realise you don't need to spent 1k to fly to Costa Rica," Katie said.
"If you're not bothered about the sun, you may put your kayak on the roof of your car and go to the Hebrides."
As well as tracing his adventure through Shipping Forecast waters and telling the history of the broadcast, Moderate Becoming Good Later deals with what it's like knowing you're going to die young.
"He knew his life would be short, he told me one day that he thought he'd be next after Marcus, but he doesn't think about it," Katie said.
"You probably live life in a slightly different way. You don't waste time. Toby was 40 when he died, he didn't expect to reach 40. He might have told you after a few beers, but most people didn't know he had it."
After Marcus had died in 2017 Toby had begun angling for an adventure and so started building up his kayaking skills in preparation of the big paddle, and motored through many of the 31 areas in the early days.
One particularly idyllic stretch came on the south east corner of Iceland when Toby would kayak for 45km a day, explore towns when he came across them and then wildcamp at night.
Toby had ten zones to go when he died (Supplied)As he became more and more sick in 2020 the adventure slowed down considerably, with Toby able to tick off parts of Cornwall and the Sicily Isles before the terminal diagnosis came through.
"He became very thin and couldn't do these big trips anymore, but he never gave up on his idea of doing the last bit," Katie said. "We offered to drive him to Ireland to get that bit done in the summer 2021, but he was very ill. He had the terminal diagnosis by then."
Now that Katie has finished the story of Toby's adventure as far along as he managed to get, she is setting off to finish the final ten parts of the Forecast for a second book.
With just the "wet, cold and windy" ones to go, Katie is determined to finish off the project over the next 12 months, bringing things to an end at the northern most point of Britain at the top of Shetland.
She will be taking her two kids with her on some of the legs, proving that there's plenty of adventures to be had "as a mum of two at 45".
Toby made it out to the Maunsell Forts in the Thames (Supplied)As her relatively modest skills compared to Toby mean Katie has to be more careful about the storminess of the seas she plunges into, the challenge of stepping into her brother's shoes after his death has also been emotional;
"It was really difficult in the beginning, but then I began imagining telling his story to people," she explained. "It felt like I'd given something back to him. That really helped. It has been like spending an extra year with him on his trip on the best time of his life.
"I have all his kit. His fully body suit. I put all his kit on and realised I was wearing the same thing he was wearing on his last paddle in January 2021, nine days before he died. We carried the kayak down for him in the village where he lived. He was out on the sea for just ten minutes."
Moderate Becoming Good Later is on sale on June 8 this year.
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