Move Like Water

Hannah Stowe grew up in a ramshackle cottage on the Pembrokeshire coast of Wales, raised by her mother, an artist and illustrator, alongside her brother. Salt wind, the beam of Strumble Head Lighthouse, and the rhythms of the tides formed her earliest sensory world. She learned to swim at the same time she learned to walk, absorbed tidal cycles as instinctively as telling time, and explored cliff paths and coves with increasing range. She identified an inner emotional current that mirrored the sea: sometimes serene, sometimes tempestuous, sometimes drawn to darker depths.

Her upbringing immersed her in seasonal cycles of marine life: spring mackerel fishing, summer jellyfish blooms and the return of seabirds, autumn seal pupping, and the quiet of winter when the tourist crowds vanished. She witnessed human impact on this ecosystem, from plastic entangling gannet chicks on Grassholm Island to declining kittiwake populations driven by industrial fishing and climate change. At nine, she saw her first whale, a dead pilot whale washed ashore, and felt a desire to know not just how it died but how it had lived. As seabirds departed and seals dispersed, she felt a growing restlessness, as though the migrating creatures took a piece of her with them.

School offered little direction. A careers officer dismissed her desire for naturalist exploration as unrealistic. She spent less time in classrooms and more walking the coast path and swimming in rough winter seas. One morning on St. David's Head, she watched red-billed choughs, birds she calls fire crow, perform acrobatic dives against the sky. The chough, a bird of the coastal fringe that had nearly vanished from Cornwall, became a symbol for Stowe of life on the margin between land and sea. That night, the lighthouse beam no longer felt like a companion but a lure, and she resolved that the time for sheltering indoors had ended.

After leaving school at 18, Stowe worked as a wildlife tour guide around the Pembrokeshire islands, encountering severe gender bias in the male-dominated maritime world. She worked 70-hour weeks with no sick pay, was told to work through a kidney infection or be fired, and had to prove herself repeatedly. She supplemented her income through waitressing, bartending, and selling artwork while volunteering at a sailing school and enrolling in Open University science courses. Her first long passage to Norway on a 95-year-old wooden boat taught her to helm at night despite her fear.

She traveled to Newfoundland to join Balaena, the research vessel of Professor Hal Whitehead, a leading whale biologist. Alongside PhD candidate Laura Feyrer (now Dr. Feyrer), she listened for northern bottlenose whales along planned survey routes using a towed hydrophone, an underwater microphone designed to detect whale sounds. She climbed the mast daily without a harness to spot whales and, one freezing foggy night, was sprayed by a surfacing sperm whale, an encounter that affirmed her place at sea. In the voyage's final days, the crew located northern bottlenose whales in the Gully off Nova Scotia, and Stowe watched the pale grey beaked whales approach the boat.

Stowe enrolled at the University of Aberdeen, living in a camper van by the beach with her collie dog. One spring morning, a bottlenose dolphin rode a wave alongside her while she surfed. A month later, her long-term relationship collapsed. She entered rough surf and was thrown violently. Her ankle healed, but pain in her back and legs worsened: stinging, numbness, and electric shocks on movement. After transferring to the University of Plymouth, she lost all feeling in one foot, a moment she describes as the most terrifying of her life. A private MRI arranged by her mother revealed a compressed disc at L5-S1, the lowest lumbar-sacral level of the spine, and spinal stenosis, a narrowing of nerve canals caused by calcification, which surgery corrected.

The operation succeeded, and the burning pain that had been her constant companion for nearly a year vanished. Recovery proved grueling. She quit all her medications at once, including anti-seizure medication, codeine, and diazepam, and endured severe withdrawal: nausea, shaking, and a deep darkness of self-blame. Gradually, she developed breathing techniques, counting inhales and exhales between lighthouse flashes. In her first unmedicated sleep, she dreamed of being an albatross soaring over the ocean, then of standing alone on a sailing boat and taking the tiller. She woke certain she would sail her own vessel.

While recovering, Stowe scraped together savings and inheritance, painting compulsively and teaching yoga for income. She found a 1964 Nicholson 32 in Plymouth, negotiated the price, and named the boat Brave. She sailed it home to Pembrokeshire, her first long passage as skipper, escorted into home waters by puffins, a minke whale, and bow-riding dolphins. Yet the triumph did not herald a return to her former life; she carried anxiety and used forward momentum as a coping mechanism rather than allowing herself the stability she needed.

She earned her Yachtmaster offshore qualification, a certification to skipper sailing vessels, and joined Song of the Whale, a 21-metre research vessel run by Marine Conservation Research, for a Mediterranean survey of cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises). She returned to Song of the Whale the following year in the Azores, tracking sperm whales by sound through the night during the filming of the documentary Secrets of the Whales.

Throughout the memoir, Stowe interweaves her narrative with explorations of marine biology. These range from sperm whale matrilineal societies and the history of whaling to humpback whale song, the life cycle of the wandering albatross on Bird Island in South Georgia, and the threats of noise pollution and longline fishing by-catch. She draws parallels between sperm whale communities and the women who shaped her life: her grandmother, a working-class woman from the Black Country, an industrial region of the English West Midlands, who never left the UK; her mother, who bought the Pembrokeshire cottage through illustration work; marine biologist Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring; and Dr. Sylvia Earle, oceanographer and founder of Mission Blue.

Her final year at Plymouth brought another back setback, but she persisted, completing coursework aboard Song of the Whale off the North Carolina coast before graduating. Forgoing a Master's degree, she planned an Atlantic crossing on Brave, but the COVID-19 pandemic intervened. She sold the boat, recognizing it symbolized both freedom and pain. With her partner Henry, she bought Larry, a 1907 gaff cutter, a traditional type of sailboat, and sailed from Cornwall across the North Sea, through the Kiel Canal, and into the Baltic Sea. A week after returning, she tore the damaged disc by turning over in bed and once again could barely walk for months. This time, she drew strength from small daily practices rather than grand ambitions.

The memoir closes with Stowe at Pen-Dal-Aderyn in Ramsey Sound, watching porpoise feed as the tide slackens. She acknowledges the damage humans cause to the oceans but invokes Dr. Earle's belief in active hope, arguing that every individual can contribute through science, art, policy, or daily choices. She envisions Larry as a future platform for ocean research but resolves to move gently, understanding now that healing comes through everyday practices: nutritious meals, sleep, gratitude, connection, and trust in herself.