Home to just 70 people, but once a year an unusual world championship attracts hundreds to Easdale

RON Long, a man proud to introduce himself as an old tosser, shakes an angry fist at the dank Hebridean sky. “A pox upon it!” he shouts in a strong Welsh accent. The 67-year-old retired fireman is unhappy about the rain and wind. They will not help his bid to become the World Stone Skimming Champion.

We are standing on the edge of Scotland’s west coast, a few miles south of Oban, waiting for the small ferry boat to take us across to Easdale Island, which has hosted the championships since 1997. Ron has been named “Old Tosser” for the last two years after skimming a stone further than any other competitor aged 60 and above. Today he hopes to retain that title and go one better, winning the entire event. But the weather has got him spooked.

Since taking up stone-skimming three years ago, he has become something of an expert on fluid dynamics and does not like the way the wind will create waves on the surface of the flooded quarry where he is due to compete.

“Ideally, the water should be mirror-flat,” he says, rain dripping from his moustache. “It’ll be a matter of technique, skill and a large dose of luck today. But the truth is that the stone will never go any further than you can throw it anyway. You get nothing for nothing in this world, and bugger all for sixpence.”

The ferry arrives. Just a wee boat, open to the elements, but the very thing for carrying a few people on the five-minute crossing from the mainland. Easdale Island is tiny and car-free. The first things you notice as you get off at the harbour are the upturned wheelbarrows, each with a number or Gaelic name painted on the side; these are how the locals humph their shopping back home. A rough signpost made from slate nailed to driftwood gives the distance to various places of significance: Paris, 715 miles; Basra 2,471 miles; Pub, 41 metres.

Easdale has a population of 70: 50 adults and 20 kids, 11 dogs and five cats, mostly living in the terraces of whitewashed cottages which were once home to quarriers. Easdale is one of the Slate Islands, a small archipelago which, from the 17th century until early in the 20th, provided much of the slate used in the construction of homes throughout Scotland and beyond. Easdale slate is known to have been used in Wellington, Dublin, Belfast, parts of Canada and perhaps in New York. By 1794, Easdale alone was producing five million slates each year. An old Pathé newsreel screening in the local museum explains that the island roofed Glasgow and Edinburgh – “only on such tiles will Scottish cats make whoopee.”

A huge storm in 1881 flooded the quarries throughout the Slate Islands, hastening the decline of the industry. The last commercial slate was dug out of Easdale in 1911, exactly a century ago. Many of the quarrymen and their families moved to Glasgow to find work in shipbuilding. The population, which in 1881 stood at 452, dropped as low as four, but since the 1960s has been creeping back up. Many of those who live here now are descendants of the original quarriers, lured back by family history and the attractions of raising kids in a slow, safe, neighbourly place. And it is those same flooded quarries, once almost the death of the island, which are now helping to finance its second life. The World Stone Skimming Championships, played out on the glassy arena of the quarries, will this year raise around £7,500 for community development.

“But really it’s just great craic,” says Donald Melville, known as Mellon, the chief organiser of the championships. “If it was purely commercial, it would be quite a bore.”

Mellon winds red and white tape around the perimeter of the quarry, weighing it down with rocks, to keep spectators and contestants back from the steep edges. The quarry is roughly rectangular, 66 feet long, and divided up today with a string of orange buoys marking the distance of each throw. Distance is the mark of success, not the number of skips, though each stone must bounce at least three times. The water is deep, dark and green, a placid cousin of the nearby roaring Atlantic. Mellon points out neighbouring islands: Mull, Luing, Scarba, the Garvellachs. Hazy through the mist of rain are the crumbling gable-ends of Belnahua, long abandoned by islanders, a fate that might have befallen Easdale had it not been so conveniently close to the mainland.

The start of the competition is still a couple of hours away, but already Ron Long and other hardcore skimmers are down at the quarry, foraging for stones and practising their throws. Stones are provided by the championship organisers, but some competitors prefer to select their own. All stones must, however, be true Easdale slate and conform to a regulation three inches in diameter. They are checked for size before throwing by Mike Cafferty, landlord of the island’s pub The Puffer, who is armed with a piece of wood with a hole in it. “If the stones don’t fit through here, tough,” says Mike. “You’d be surprised by how seriously some people take all this. There was a guy in the bar last night who said he was using one arm to lift his beer and saving the other for the skimming.”

Manuela Kniebsch, the 2010 women’s champion, who has travelled from Aachen in Germany, throws a few. One doesn’t skip at all, instead plunging into the water with a loud plop. Manuela grimaces. “Ooh,” says Ron Long, supportively. “Dead man’s fart we call those.”

Ron lives near the River Severn and practises skimming three or four times a week. During the summer he won the All-England Championship at Ambleside and has designs on the Welsh title. There’s something very whimsical and carefree about stone-skimming, but Ron is ultra-competitive. “I have a dedicated fitness regime. You have to use all kinds of muscle groups to get it done right.” He has been working with a chiropractor and is “on more pills than a German brewery” for the pain in his throwing arm. “I am completely desensitised,” he declares. He is developing a line of artificial skimming stones made from concrete in the hopes that his beloved sport can spread to areas unblessed by Easdale’s natural bounty. One day, he hopes, stone-skimming will feature in the Olympics. “If you can have beach volleyball then why not?”

His main competition for the title is Dougie Isaacs, a 36-year-old unemployed driver from Blairgowrie who looks a bit like Liam Gallagher, warms up with a pint, and spends much of the day disconsolate beneath a large golf umbrella. That said, the man can throw. He has been world champion three times and is looking to keep the title. Yet he shrugs when asked to explain how he does it – “I’ve just got the bionic arm sort of thing, eh?”

The championships get under way at noon. There are a few hundred people gathered on the rocks. The air smells of sea salt and hip-flask whisky. A band plays hillbilly tunes. A frisky Westie called Skye keeps getting in the way of the skimmers and is eventually lifted by her master, the ferryman, and plonked in a rowing boat from which new vantage point she watches the action with an air of great magnanimity. Everyone cheers when the Royal Dutch Stone Skimming Association arrive, eight jolly Netherlanders singing and marching behind their flag.

There are 320 competitors, of which a couple of hundred are men. One group of young women, calling themselves the Skimmy Dippers, psych each other up: “Come on, Cat! Be one with the stone!” Mellon, keeping score and keeping dry in a small wooden hut, is a partisan compere. “Ye big ginger tosssuuurrr!” he bellows when one red-haired local lad, 14-year-old Simon Fraser, achieves a massive throw of 55 metres. Mellon, need I add, intends this as a great compliment.

Everyone skims three stones while standing on a slate podium by the water’s edge. Judges lined around the quarry estimate the distance and convey it to Mellon using megaphones. Good throws are met by oohs and aahs and applause. There was a hoolie the night before in the community hall and several competitors have hangovers. One pale woman skims her stones and then staggers off asking for hair of the dog. I don’t think she means Skye. Possibly Talisker.

In the course of the day, only three skimmers manage to hit the back wall of the quarry – Ron Long, Dougie Isaacs and Paul Crabtree, a tall and lugubrious retired police officer from Gloucestershire in an Irn-Bru polo-shirt. This shared feat means they must compete in a three-way head-to-head for the title. “This is going to be classic!” says one excitable local. “It’s time for the toss-off!”

Bending, swivelling, grunting and chucking in the torrential rain, the three men give it their all. Dougie Isaacs wins the day, champion for a fourth time, the world’s greatest tosser. He raises a clenched fist and heads off up the rocks to the pub. Will he defend his title next year? He’s not sure. He might, instead, enter the mobile phone throwing championships in Finland.

It’s the end of a long day. Time to get the ferry back to the mainland. Let’s give the last word, though, to Larry Phinney, a bald and burly 53-year-old truck driver from Manitoba, Canada, who has come all this way to witness the stone-skimming. “It was really great to see that many people get together and have fun throwing a rock,” he says.