Farewell Mr Puffin
Page 22
But before the puffins start licking their lips at the feast to come, remember that the sand eel might well be one of the Atlantic’s least appreciated creatures, but is hugely important. Their natural home is on the sandy seabed, which is exactly the place where industrial fishery of the kind practised by those mighty Icelandic trawlers, of which I have seen so many, reaps its greatest profits. Bad news again for sand eels, as if finding themselves in a hot bath wasn’t already too much for them. But hang on: the exploitation of sand eels, which go mostly into cat food (a hideous waste) and fertiliser (unarguably useful), has now come under some kind of environmental control, which might go at least some way to helping the hitherto unstoppable depletion. Except there is some research that shows that by banning fishing you leave untouched those species of fish that predate on sand eels, leaving them at the mercy of just another enemy. How difficult it is to seek a moral pathway in all this and do the right thing.
There seems to be nothing to do that is right for every creature, be they puffin, eel, or human. There seems to be no direction in which to turn that does not lead us up a blind alley. Might the only way to deal with it be to learn from those Vikings on the Lofoten Islands for whom forced change was the greatest driver in their development, and simply embrace what is to come and fathom some way to turn it to advantage?
I’m not going to worry about the puffin. I shall continue to love it, and admire it, and thank it for the company it has given me on many voyages, if not on this one. We can only hope that when it comes to managing these matters, the puffin knows better than us.
The point of the puffin, the reason we love them, is that they are the jokers of the seabird world. Otherwise, why would they clothe themselves in that fancy face mask of multicoloured beak and that piercing, clown-like eye rimmed in black? I have now seen the North Atlantic at its summer best and have no wish to confront it when it is in a winter frame of mind. It is a stark and desolate place, yet upon its vast rolling greyness the colourful puffin remains the only thing that shines out and never fails to raise a smile.
If it is true that the puffins are disappearing and numbers declining, and my optimism is misplaced, then what a grievous loss it will be. For the jokers will have gone.
And then things really will get serious.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barraclough, Eleanor. Beyond the Northlands (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Booth, Michael. The Almost Nearly Perfect People (Vintage, 2015).
Butcher, David. The Driftermen (Tops’l Books, 1979).
Comic Sagas and Tales from Iceland (Penguin Classics).
Couzens, Dominic and Sisson, Mark. The Secret Lives of Puffins (Bloomsbury, 2013).
Davidson, Peter. The Idea of North (Reaktion Books, 2004).
Frank, Peter. Yorkshire Fisherfolk (Phillimore, 2002).
Hjálmarsson, Jón R. A Travellers Guide to Icelandic Folk Tales (Forlagið, 2009).
Lavery, Brian W. The Headscarf Revolutionaries (Barbican Press, 2015).
Lawrence, Rachel. Southwold River: Georgian Life in the Blyth Valley (Moxon, 1990).
Laxness, Halldór. Independent People (trs. J.A. Thompson) (Vintage, 2008).
Lockley, R.M. Puffins (Dent, 1953).
Mackay Brown, George. Portrait of Orkney (John Murray, 1988).
Nilsson, Magnus. The Nordic Cookbook (Phaidon, 2015).
Parker, Rowland. Men of Dunwich (Paladin, 1980).
Robinson, Robb. A History of the Yorkshire Coast Fishing Industry, 1780–1914 (Hull University Press, 1987).
Schei, Liv Kjørsvik and Moberg, Gunnie, The Faroe Islands (Birlinn, 2002).
Sigmundsdóttir, Alda. The Little Book of the Icelanders (Little Book Publishing, 2014).
The Sagas of Icelanders (Penguin Classics).
Wilkes, Andrew. Arctic and Northern Waters (pilot book, 2nd edition) (Imray, 2020).
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Paul Heiney is a well-known writer and broadcaster, and has been for the last forty years. His sailing career, however, started in his early twenties in unsuitably small boats that were hardly fit for his ambitions, which he describes as ‘wanting to see what is over the horizon’. He has cruised the coastline of the UK extensively over the years, often with his wife, Libby Purves.
In 2005 he decided to test himself against the north Atlantic and took part in the OSTAR, the famous singlehanded race from Plymouth, UK to Newport, USA, but he found that after a great deal of eff ort, he still came last. Undaunted, he’d developed a taste for adventures and in 2011 he set off again, this time into the south Atlantic, towards the infamous Cape Horn. It was a round trip of 18,000 miles, of which he sailed 11,000 miles on his own – the longest leg being Uruguay to the Azores, for which he was at sea for 62 days and awarded the Rose Medal by the Ocean Cruising Club. This voyage featured in his book, One Wild Song, which was described at the time as a ‘small masterpiece’.
His appetite for wild waters next took him towards Iceland, which provides the inspiration for this book.
Despite an apparently active sailing life, he says that, like most boat owners, he seems to spend an awful lot of time sitting on his mooring on the River Dart, fiddling around, and dreaming of new adventures.
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First published 2021
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