Rua Fiola - adventure training and survival week in the Hebrides

Date: Friday 9 October 2009

25 boys and girls from Forms 7 and 8 flew north in the middle of the summer holidays to take on the Rua Fiola challenge. This was our eleventh annual trip to the Wild Island Exploration Centre on the island of Rua Fiola in the Inner Hebrides. Even with the flight from Stansted, the journey from Canterbury took twelve hours and when the boats arrived in the kyle beside the house, the children (and staff) were invited to dive over the side and swim ashore rather than take the more stately route via the pontoon or the pier. Thus began a week of high adventure in which the children were invited time and again to step outside their comfort zone and to reassess their own estimates of their courage, strength and endurance.

The watchword at Rua Fiola is ‘enthusiasm’ and the instructors deliver this in enormous bags! Youngsters learn that almost any amount of physical discomfort or anxiety in the outdoors can be overcome with a powerful shot of enthusiasm. What a lesson for school and for life! This year’s participants proved themselves every bit as lively and enthusiastic as their forbears and we had a memorable week of kayaking, rock climbing and abseiling, sea fishing, expeditioning and, of course, Robinson Crusoe survival.

There were some wonderful kayaking highlights. All the groups managed to acquire sufficient skill to enjoy a paddle out of the protected waters of the canoe kyle and onto the open sea beyond, circumnavigating the island of Droma and surfing back into the kyle on the waves of the incoming tide. On one such trip a basking shark made an appearance and the kayakers were able to paddle very close to this giant. The kayak instructors radioed ‘Goldeneye’, with her fishing group lobster-potting nearby and they managed to arrive at the scene in time for several youngsters to jump into the sea for a swim in the vicinity of the basking shark – what an adventure! Then there was ‘Shakira’, a young orphaned seal which had taken up residence in the canoe kyle and over the summer had learned to trust the Rua Fiola kayak groups. She was bold in the proximity of her approach to our boats and she loved to show off, rolling onto her back and waving flippers at us. On one occasion she caught a fish and ate it with great ceremony, as it seemed for our amusement.

The Form 8 group went on expedition to Eilean Dubh Mor – the Big Black Isle – and the Form 7s to the Island of Lunga. It was a very stormy expedition with winds blowing at Force 7. As well as climbing to the summit of Lunga and exploring the north-west of the island, the Form 7s explored the shoreline and enjoyed watching the stormy seas crashing onto the rocks below our base in Paul’s Cave. The instructors were excellent teachers of survival skills and everyone learned how to find fresh drinking water in the absence of streams or rivers, how to forage for safe food and how to build and keep a fire alight. That night, with wild wind and driving rain outside, both groups were dry, warm and snuggly quartered in their respective caves. In Paul’s Cave on the west coast of Lunga, we could see the Form 8s' fire a mile away in the mouth of the Quartz Cave on the east coast of the Big Black Isle.

The rain persisted for much of the week, though it never seemed to dampen spirits and it certainly curtailed no activities. To their credit, none of the youngsters complained about it. When it came to the survival exercise at the end of the week, the first-timers went out for one night and the ‘old hands’ went for two nights. William Mackay-Miller and Sebastian Nickols went for two nights to the Little Black Isle, and Cordelia Al-Shaikh, Lucy Crooks, Alice Kirkness and Anna Spyropoulos took on a two-night survival on Lunga. These were brave ‘survivals’ in torrential rain throughout and still a Force 7 blowing. Not cowed by the hostile conditions, these Form 8s were delivered to their respective islands with no food, no water and no adults, to survive for two nights and the time between, basing themselves in suitable caves, foraging for food and water from the landscape around them, and keeping each others’ spirits up. Surely at this age adventure doesn’t get more real than this! And how wonderful it was to see them returning off the boats on the morning after the second night, tired but triumphant, some exuberant and others still coming to terms with the magnitude of their achievement, knowing they had met a challenge few people ever experience in their lifetimes.

At Rua Fiola children learn the value of enthusiasm. They learn to ‘dig deep’ and many find they have greater resources and reserves of character than they realised. The lesson in self-awareness is invaluable and comes at a critical time in their personal development. Small wonder many Rua Fiola graduates regard the course as one of the great formative experiences of their young lives.