Farewell Mr Puffin

by Paul Heiney

  FAREWELL MR PUFFIN

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 The damp North Sea

  2 The Yorkshire coast

  3 Puffins beyond the fog?

  4 Alone, with the ‘silver darlin’s’

  5 Orkney bound – where the sea can swallow you

  6 Nothing but smiles in the Orkney Isles

  7 ‘The sea goes up, the sea goes down’

  8 Sailing the dragon’s breath

  9 A delicate enquiry

  10 The elves work their mischief

  11 Land ahoy? No, volcanoes

  12 The Viking and the Lad arrive

  13 The saga begins

  14 One slip and I’m in icy waters

  15 The puffin hunt resumes

  16 Plumbing drives me round the bend

  17 A cruel stretch of coastline

  18 Hot tub to cold tub – the best medicine

  19 The Arctic Circle, in shorts

  20 No bleaker sail than this

  21 One hell of a storm

  22 Farewell to the land of the puffins

  Bibliography

  Introduction

  The puffin doesn’t mind people laughing at him because he knows he is a figure of fun: ‘What bird is always out of breath? A puffin! Ha ha.’ Life, he thinks, is not for taking too seriously and so he prefers to leave everyone with a smile on their face. He doesn’t like fights, or disputes, and this leaves him open to bullying by bigger birds, so he avoids them and wants nothing to do with them. He shuns competition and turns the other multicoloured cheek, thinking to himself, ‘they can fight for supremacy if they wish, but I know my place’. It is not cowardice, it is survival.

  He is inclined to portliness, which can spoil his upright and long-legged frame, and selfish too at eating time, when he consumes 90 per cent of everything he catches, leaving only the meagre remainder for the folks back in the nest – a self-centred creature, perhaps.

  He takes few orders from anyone. He is a natural wanderer who will go where the fancy takes him, and that is always towards the sea. This is his real home. He loves cold and chilly waters and the nearer he can get to a snow-bound cliff side the better. Ask him what kind of place he prefers and he will use the word ‘harsh’, which is why you will find him – if you’re lucky, for he is skilled in self-concealment – bobbing along on the curling crests of waves as they travel across the dark and bitter deeps of the North Atlantic.

  But he knows his Darwinian duty is to breed and for that he must come ashore, which he does with the greatest reluctance. Despite having gone missing for months on end, he will turn up always at the same burrow to be met by the same partner. He is a faithful little thing.

  This time ashore is driven by duty and not desire, and when reluctantly approaching land after a spell at sea he is often to be seen attempting to touch down, only to lose his nerve at the sight of so many others. So he takes off again, circles for a time, perhaps several days, then gathers his strength and finally finds the courage to join the throng. He often chooses a day when the visibility is poor so as not to attract attention, unlike most other creatures.

  If he has to endure the land, then he makes sure he picks the most remote and spectacular spot that he can. Islands are best because pests and predators cannot bother him there. Cliffs are good, and wild ocean shorelines even better. And there he will sit, making the best of it, but knowing deep down this is not where he really belongs. As if uninspired by his surroundings, he sits idly around most of the day, twiddling his thumbs, unmotivated, and does very little. If he emerges from his burrow he will walk past others with his head down, hoping not to be noticed – ‘pretend I’m not here’.

  The land is not his real home and his time ashore is a mere interruption in his maritime life. He likes to feel the salt water swirl around his feet; icy wetness holds no fear for him. All he craves is to live a life unseen and unrecorded. Only at sea can he do that.

  ***

  But that’s enough about me. Let us sail north to find the puffins.

  1

  The damp North Sea

  I live on the east coast of England, close by a small harbour through which a torrent of a muddy river flows, changing direction with every tide and allowing the landscape to soak up the sea before spitting it out again in disgust. The sea and the land have never been good friends hereabouts – always arguing, fighting, the land bravely taking the occasional futile stand against the sea, which, over centuries, has proven to be the infinitely stronger of the two.

  To the north is a lighthouse, painted white not only to aid identification, but perhaps to denote the purity of its purpose, which is to give night-time warnings of the many dangers off the shore. At the harbour mouth, red and green lights shine out to guide the very few craft that ever bother to come here. This is where flat, rich farmland gives way to marsh, which in turn becomes sand dunes, then ankle-twisting shingle where it meets the sea. The shore is mean and allows us little golden sand on which dogs can run or in which children can dig.

  This is where my voyage started; a journey that was to take me northwards to the colder, lonelier, more exposed climes of the North Atlantic Ocean – to places puffins might enjoy.

  Boats line both sides of this river – at least, as far as the footbridge that connects the village with its nearest town. Most are pleasure craft, but a few inshore fishermen still inhabit this place – probably for sentimental reasons, or simply for the chase and the addictive, eternal gamble of catching fish; but there is no living to be made from that game any more. The fishing glory has gone. There is a boatyard that builds and repairs, and here can be grabbed the occasional glimpse of a man working wood to patch a hull, using the same tools and skills of centuries ago. But mostly it’s plastic boats, like mine, that come here for their annual wash and brush-up.

  This is where my boat, Wild Song, had spent her winter, undergoing surgery on a scale that, had she been human, might be described as ‘life-changing’. Her keel had to be amputated after doubts about its integrity, then replaced carefully so as to leave no visible scar between it and the rest of the boat. Then her heart was taken out – the engine removed – and a new one transplanted, shiny red as it happens, just like a human organ. But her mast and sails are what really matters, for these were what would drive me along like puffin wings before the breeze. I was well aware that much about her had been fiddled with over the winter during the extensive surgery, leading to uncertainty that she might not work in the ways with which I was familiar. I have probably clocked up nearly 25,000 miles in her and the slightest change in her ways will throw me because there is something about a boat that is more than just a collection of its parts, and by dismantling and putting it back together, like a musical instrument it may be reborn out of tune.

  It was mid June, the days warmer and the nights shorter, and they would become shorter still as I sailed north. Ever since the turn of the year, back in the dark days of winter, I had focused on departure day with the enthusiasm of the child wishing for Christmas. At times, the desire to get to sea can be heart-stopping. I had planned and researched, stocked up with food, gathered my nerve, and it was finally time to drop the lines that held us to the shore. Wild Song would soon be underway again. This brave little ship, which had safely transported me far into the South Atlantic Ocean, to Cape Horn indeed, would now give me a taste of what lay at the other end of that great ocean. I have sailed the Atlantic all the way down to its southern fringes, westwards as far as North America, and only the northern wastes of the Atlantic remained undiscovered by me.

  I had crew with me, an old mate called Ant, who was in many ways the perfect crew. Although it was no laughing matter at the time, we joke now about his life-saving surg
ery, which robbed him of his stomach. I expressed great sympathy with his plight, of course, but it has to be admitted that a crew with a dimmed appetite is every mean-minded skipper’s dream. Some will demand an endless supply of energy bars, chocolate and bacon rolls. Ant, on the other hand, sips soup.

  It was an hour before high water and the tide was still flooding strongly, the bow line hanging slack, apparently having little to do, and I judged it could be let go – a mistake. Ant, who was on the shore, slowly unwound it from the cleat and threw it across, and I heard it land on the deck. I was below at the time, on the radio to the harbourmaster to tell him we were leaving and enjoying a bit of nervous banter as I gave him my destination. Then Ant called with urgency in his voice but sounding more distant than he should. Strange. I scrambled into the cockpit and saw that the tide had caught us and was propelling us backwards at considerable speed away from the shore, and I soon realised that the bow line was not being as idle as it looked. We were being forced into the river by a sluicing tide, pivoting on the stern line now as tight as a violin string, still made fast to the shore. There was much scope for imminent embarrassment and financial disaster.

  There was deep mud close to hand on which we might have grounded on a falling tide and got truly stuck, or on the other hand we could have gone careering into a row of boats, all smarter and more valuable than mine. The heart transplant proved its worth as I slammed the bright red engine into gear, gave it revs, got its pulse racing, and started to drive her back towards the shore. ‘Cast off that stern line!’ I shouted, with emphasis. ‘And bloody well jump.’ Which Ant did, with success. Now in the middle of the river and no longer tied to the shore, heart pounding as heavily as the throbbing engine, I saw I was still gripped by the tide, so I gave her all the revs I dared till the boat rattled and struggled to gather way, for until then I had no steerage. Just as we came to the shallowest part of the river, and just in time, I felt her propellor grip the water and respond to the helm. We were back in control. It was not the smoothest of departures.

  I imagined I heard old men laughing at me, the North Sea fishermen who once lined the banks of this river. Although long dead, I know what they look like, for they built themselves a Reading Room on high ground in the nearby town where they could sit out bad weather and talk, smoke, watch the sea, and keep a careful eye on their fishing smacks hauled up the beach away from the sea’s destructive ways. It’s a museum now, but still called the Reading Room, where the daily papers and magazines are spread out, the leather armchairs are soft and inviting, and the loud tick of the clock ultimately relaxing. Above the models of the boats they used to sail stands a row of curling black-and-white photographs of what were probably the last men to fish from here for a living. These are the men I feel I know. There is a look in their eyes that craves your attention and I can stare at them for hours on end, trying to read their thoughts. They are the faces of men turned hard and crusty by the weather; their clothes remind us that life’s riches did not come their way, but the caps they wear at a jaunty angle speak of good times as well as bad. But the profoundly wise look on their faces is what burns into the memory, for here is the gaze of men who have seen the best and the worst that the sea has to offer. And beside them, as a reminder, stands the list of lifeboat rescues, names of bodies recovered, boats that went down, all in the sparse language of loss at sea. And still the old men look on; immortal is their watery gaze.

  But these were the inshore boys. Once, sailors from this coast ranged far and wide. Centuries before those lads were photographed, ships were leaving here to sail to Iceland, as I was about to, and not just for fishing but for trade as well. To hire a boat for the trip in the early 1500s would have cost £120, which translates roughly to a modern-day cost of £70,000, but the rewards could be substantial and a good trip might return over £700, which is edging towards £400,000 in current money. It was big business. No wonder the fleets were accompanied by the King’s ships for protection.

  The Icelandic dried cod, called ‘stockfish’, was in great demand to feed a rapidly growing population and provide them with protein. The numbers of vessels involved, even from our little harbour, gives pause for thought. Where now it seems crowded with just 30 or so pleasure boats, the Iceland fleet of 1598 numbered 149 ships. This was no small fleet and the season was a long one. Ships would leave for Iceland in tempestuous March with a view to the fleet being back in the North Sea by a more benign August, in time for the lucrative herring season. The Iceland trade was at its height at the time of the Hanseatic League, a trading group born in northern Germany in 1100 and lasting till the late 1400s, and covering 195 cities in 16 countries: European trading partnerships are not new.

  The Hanseatic ships would have been common sights off the East Anglian coast, trading wool and cloth through Ipswich and Yarmouth, importing timber and iron, and in years of bad harvest bringing grain. The trading ship of choice – and it is possible that those involved in the Iceland trade were of similar design, although I can’t be certain – were known as the ‘cog’, built of oak with one or two masts carrying a square sail, Viking style. They were the ‘white vans’ of maritime trade in the Middle Ages: easily built, carried great bulk, needed limited crew and were of shallow draft to give them access to the more shallow harbours on the Baltic and North Sea. They came in various sizes, so a cog that carried two tons of cargo was said to be able to carry a ‘last’, this being the amount that could be drawn by a team of four horses. If your cog could carry 50 ‘last’, this would be equivalent to the weight that 200 horses could pull, and this long before the concept of horsepower as we currently understand it. Their sailing ability must have been strictly limited, for a square sail is never going to give you any drive to windward and you would be relying on fair winds to make any progress.

  Back then, if any men were lost at sea on the Iceland voyages, as was common, a stop was made on Orkney, where a few poor souls were press-ganged into joining for the rest of the passage as replacements for the dead. It was a hazardous trip by any measure, with uncertain navigation and requiring fearsome passages through the Pentland Firth between the Scottish mainland and Orkney with its tumultuous seas and swirling, ferocious tides, described by a writer of the time as ‘the most daungerouse place of all Christendom’. And if you got through that, then you faced the open Atlantic passage to Iceland, which can be no piece of cake, although for comfort they might pass close to the Faroe Islands to confirm their position and from there, in clear weather, it would not be long before the glacial heights of Iceland came into view. Remarkably, some ships did this trip from East Anglia to Iceland in less than a couple of weeks, but if the wind did not serve they would struggle for a month or more. Landfall on Iceland was chosen where high mountains and glaciers provided a landmark a hundred miles distant in clear weather; a huge asset in an age of unsophisticated navigation.

  If they were catching fish, rather than trading, the fish were gutted, cleaned, salted and packed into barrels, each fish requiring two pounds of salt, and they would have to leave home with several tons of salt if they were to cure a season’s fish and preserve it till they were home. When the trade started to falter, it was in part due to the imposition of duty on catches and eventually a salt tax imposed by the Danes, who then had control of Iceland – ah, the fishy stench of politics – together with the rise of Protestantism back home, whose followers did not see the need to eat only fish on Fridays. It is interesting to note that as long ago as the early 1600s, the Danes were grumbling about how close the English were fishing to their Icelandic coastline, so there is nothing new about the cod wars that were last fought as recently as the 1970s.

  But even greater forces than those of governments and churches were at work on our little rivers and harbours at home. Storms shifted shingle, barriers to the sea were created where none had been before and forced a change in the course of our trading history. One coastal settlement, Dunwich, the Anglo-Saxon capital of the ‘Kingdom of the East Angles�
�� – once the size of 14th-century London, and so prosperous that it was part of the Hanseatic alliance – suddenly found itself almost cut off from the sea, its streets flooded and its decline certain. The North Sea had claimed it after two dramatic storms of 1286 and 1287. Yet in its heyday, trade had been conducted from here to all corners of Europe. Most of this once great city is now well out to sea. But trade goes on, if on a less international scale, at the beach chip shop, which is held in high regard.

  Our river, just to the north, was not immune. In frustration at the ever changing and increasingly tortuous outlet to the sea via the increasingly troublesome river mouth at Dunwich, in 1590, men with spades and shovels dug a new channel in the hope that the trade in butter, cheese, bacon, corn, timber, salt and fish could be maintained if they would no longer have to navigate the shoaling intricacies further south.

  It was through that same channel, as straight and true as when it had been dug, that we sailed on that June afternoon, as if emerging from a tunnel that led through a vivid period of our maritime history. The experience is not unlike that of birth, if you can remember that; you slither into the North Sea rather than sail towards it, driven along by a tidal force beyond your control, and with the nail-biting potential for a certain amount of pain to be involved. You struggle to keep yourself on course, but you know you are powerless and must resign yourself to your fate. Shut your eyes and hope for the best. Then something changes as you emerge from between the piers and the tide lets go of you; you emerge, blinking, into another world far removed from the cosiness of the womb-like harbour. Your boat has been given life once again, reborn, at sea.