Loneliest man on the planet
Meet the dad living on a storm-tossed rock hundreds of miles off Scotland with only birds and whales for company. Oh, and his food’s just blown into the sea!
FANCY getting away from it all this summer? Well, you could do worse than rockall, the most remote island in the North Atlantic. Although it’s officially part of Scotland, it’s a very long 290 miles west of the Scottish coast.
This l i ttle remnant of an extinct volcano is distinctly short on amenities, as its one occupant can tell you — if you can hear him over the howling gales that batter the tiny chunk of granite day and night.
In a bid to raise £10,000 for the charity Help for Heroes, Nick Hancock, a 39-year- old chartered surveyor from Edinburgh, is bidding to break the 40day solo record for staying on rockall.
He landed there with his tiny yellow ‘house pod’ on the morning of June 5, and has just hit the 30-day mark.
But his dreams of staying for 60 days have been shattered by a force nine gale on Tuesday night.
‘It was the scariest night of my life,’ he says via a satellite phone he uses to speak to his support team, his wife and 2½-year-old son.
‘The pod was shifted by the gale, despite being held in place by bolts.’
Until then, Nick had been very lucky with the weather. ‘But the storm came out of nowhere. Both the wind and the waves came from the south, which is really unlucky because the pod’s on the south side.
‘It’s only 15 metres above water — and the waves were up to five metres high. They hit the rock, then the wind took the spray right up to my level.’
Nick had thought the pod was watertight but it sprung a leak in the hinge of the top hatch during the storm. To stop more water from coming in, Nick has had to close his ventilation hatches. As a result, the temperature inside soared to 30c — not helped by the fact he couldn’t get out to stop a wind turbine he uses to produce heat.
Worse still, the storm blew three of Nick’s food barrels out to sea.
Initially, he had two months’ worth of supplies, including gas canisters to cook his meals of vacuum-packed dehydrated army rations and hot chocolate.
But having lost so much food, he will not be able to stay for his target of 60 days — though he still hopes to make it to 45 days and break the world record.
‘I’ve got plenty of water, and if I really eke out the food I should make it,’ he says. ‘ I’ve already alerted my team to ask them to pick me up early. And, if they can’t land their boat, the coastguard will collect me by helicopter.’
The storm also ripped away a useful piece of equipment — the bucket Nick used as a toilet. ‘It’s not pleasant without it,’ he says. ‘But needs must!’
Suddenly, getting away from it all doesn’t sound so much fun. It’s not like there’s much to do either, even on sunny days.
rockall is a sharply angled chunk of stone, shaped like an arrowhead that soars out of the sea. This means there are only two flat surfaces — the one at the top of the rock is used for Nick’s telecommunications equipment and wind turbine; the lower one houses his pod, which was shipped over on a 15-hour journey from Leverburgh on the Outer Hebridean island of Harris.
There isn’t much exploring to be done: the island is the area of just two tennis courts — 25m (82ft) long from north to south and 22m (72ft) wide from east to west — and 18m (59ft) at its highest. And that’s only when the sea is flat, which it very rarely is.
Much of the land is too steep and rocky to be accessible. When Nick strays more than a few steps from his pod, he wears a harness and attaches himself to the rock with a strong lifeline, so he won’t slip and fall or be blown over the edge.
The little area that his pod rests on is just 3.3 x 1.2 m (11 x 4 ft). There are no bushes or trees — just seaweed, algae and a single black lichen.
Twenty species of bird and six species of animal have been recorded on or near the island, but human beings have never been in abundance.
THE first recorded landing was in 1811 by a royal Navy officer called Basil Hall, who gave the name Hall’s Ledge to the flat area where Nick has anchored his pod. In 1955, rockall was claimed by a group of royal Marines who hoisted the Union Flag there — worried that foreign forces might invade the island and use it as observation post.
Then the 1972 Island of rockall Act was passed by Parliament, formally declaring it to be part of Inverness- shire, even though the nearest permanently inhabited settlement is 228 miles away on North Uist.
Over the years, Ireland, Iceland and Denmark (on behalf of the Faroe Islands) have each lodged competing claims. In 1974 the Navy landed again, then in 1985 the
former SAS soldier Tom McClean set the 40-day solo occupancy record, living in a wooden shelter. In 1997, three Greenpeace members set the group record of 42 days.
But signs they were there didn’t last long. Although the team installed a solar-powered beacon, it was ripped away by a storm.
With this complete absence of civilisation, is Nick going out of his mind with loneliness? ‘No, not really,’ he says in his plucky, calm way. ‘I keep busy. I’ve been reading eBooks on my laptop.’ He wanted to read War And Peace but hasn’t started it yet. So far he has tackled three autobiographies — by the Oxford University-educated drug-smuggler Howard Marks, the rapper Ice T, and Nelson Mandela.
Describing a typical day, Nick says: ‘I get up at 8.30 or 9am, and message my team and my family to say I’m OK. Then I manage to make breakfast stretch for an hour.’ This usually consists of dried fruit and cereal, though of course there is no fresh milk.
For the rest of the day, Nick is dependent on the weather. If a howling gale is due, he won’t be able to get outside — and will lose reception on his phone. ‘When the weather’s better, I get out and check on my kit and do measurements of the island,’ he says.
Lunch is at 2pm, and dinner at 7pm, when Nick chooses from a selection of unappetising-sounding vacuum-packed curries, stews and fish dishes. ‘Then I do more reading and try to go to bed at ten, but it’s so light here that it’s difficult.’
Due to the island’s northerly location, the sun doesn’t set until 11pm at the height of summer — and Nick says the light never really disappears before dawn at 5am.
Not that there’s much to see — apart from the ocean. Like the Ancient Mariner, doesn’t Nick get driven mad by the endless sight of water, water everywhere?
‘Oh no — the sea changes all the time,’ he says cheerfully. ‘Trawlers come by and I wave at them. Or I speak to them on the radio.’
Nick was never much of a birdwatcher before coming to Rockall, but now that his principal companions are feathered, he is enjoying observing them.
Kitti wakes, s hear waters, pigeons, puffins and guillemots fly past the rock, and gannets nest there. ‘One of them has laid eggs in a nest made of seaweed,’ he says. ‘But it’s been gone for two or three days now, searching for fish.’
Nick’s other companions are seals and minke whales, which come as close as 30ft to the rock. When they are hunting at his feet, blasting air through their blowholes, Nick is in a rare position of privilege.
But otherwise, it’s hard not to agree with the writer and Scots Labour peer Lord Kennet, who said of Rockall in 1971: ‘There can be no place more desolate, despairing and awful.’
To make Nick’s bravery even more impressive, this isn’t his first time on this godforsaken rock.
He landed for a couple of hours in 2012, ‘to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and also do a recce for this trip’. And last year, he tried to break the record but the attempt had to be cancelled due to bad weather.
Not surprisingly, Nick is something of an outdoorsman in his normal life — keen on marathons and mountain-climbing.
‘I’m not an adventure-junkie but I was originally planning to sea-kayak to St Kilda [a slightly less remote Scottish island],’ he says. ‘Then I came across Rockall and thought I had to try it.’
What he’s really motivated by, though, is raising money for Help for Heroes, a charity for wounded servicemen and women. So far, he has amassed £5,491 — more than halfway to his target.
Nick comes from an Army family — his mother served with Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps during the Gulf War. And Nick himself planned on joining the Army after university, until a knee injury scuppered his plans.
Yet it’s hard to think of a more miserable, scary way of raising money for this worthy charity. No wonder Nick’s wife is frantic with anxiety. ‘She’s very worried, but I do ring her or email her every day,’ he says.
Rockall, it turns out, has very little to recommend it — apart f rom t he whales and t he island’s regular mentions in the shipping forecast.
So, if you happen to be listening to that forecast tonight, spare a thought for its lone resident, no doubt being buffeted by severe gales, and pray that the outlook is good.