A pilot gig is a boat with very little patience for individual glory.

Six rowers. Six oars. One coxswain.

Everybody can be strong. The boat can still be slow. The trick lies elsewhere.

Timing. The catch. The drive. The recovery.

Six bodies agreeing, for a few seconds at a time, to make the same movement. That became important while I was writing An Improbability of Puffins.

At first, gig rowing belonged to the islands because it should. Boats, crews and racing are part of the rhythm around Scilly. Then the rowing began doing something else. Ellie Pentreath is very good at carrying her own weight. Perhaps too good.

She has spent years leaving before anybody can ask her to stay. When trouble arrives, her instinct is familiar: hold tighter, work harder, depend on less. A gig offers a different argument. Pull harder than the person in front, and you can damage the rhythm. Rush the catch and the blade goes wrong. Lose timing and everybody pays for it. Nobody gets to win the race alone.

I liked that.

The boat never needs to explain the theme. It simply behaves. The cox calls. Six blades rise. The crew answers.

There is another reason rowing belongs in these stories. On an island, boats join places that water keeps apart. A gig carries old work in its shape. Rescue, competition, pride, rivalry, memory. Wood remembers hands. Oars collect scars. Crews inherit habits without always knowing who started them. Then a new rower gets in. The boat adjusts. 

That is family too, perhaps.

Not everybody enters at the same time.

Not everybody pulls with the same strength.

Someone loses rhythm.

Someone else holds it.

The best crews I know do not look dramatic when they are moving well. That is the beauty of it. Noise falls away. Blades feather. Six backs move and the boat runs.

For a novel filled with people trying to keep hold of things, the gig gave me another possibility.

Sometimes you hold the line by letting other hands take it too.

A light on a coast should be simple. There is danger. Then there is the light. A beacon of hope perhaps.

Except stories have always been suspicious of lights. A lantern where no house stands. A beam seen from the wrong bearing. A harbour light appearing on the wrong side of a boat. Something bright enough to trust and wrong enough to wreck you.

That idea found its way deep into my novel. The wrong lights in the novel are fictional. What interested me was not building a catalogue of supernatural tales. It was the smaller question beneath them.

What happens when something trustworthy becomes unreliable? When you can’t trust a chart, or a memory. What about a family story or an official record. Or the beam from a lighthouse.

That is where folklore becomes useful to fiction. It allows people to carry an impossible event without solving it. One generation calls it weather. Another calls it bad navigation. Someone in a kitchen tells a different version at lunch than they do in the pub after midnight. Eventually the versions rub against each other. Something shows through.

Scilly feels particularly suited to such stories. Islands make bearings matter. A short crossing can change character in minutes. Fog removes distance. Weather closes a route everyone used yesterday. Land appears, disappears, then returns exactly where it was. Mostly.

In the novel, wrong light became connected to wrong history. Records insist on one version. People remember another. The sea offers something less tidy. I like that friction. Not because facts do not matter. Because they do. 

A false light becomes dangerous precisely when somebody trusts it. And sometimes the hardest thing is recognising that the thing guiding you is the thing that has led you wrong.