Blue Water

by Lindsay Wright

  Strong tide-flow boosted us through the Cape Cod Canal, and we stayed at Provincetown for our last night on United States soil. In many ways we were sad to leave the States. Old Glory had been good to us, and our dearest friends still live there, but we both felt that the materialistic values inherent in American society did not agree with our own. We certainly did not want to raise children there. Perhaps greedy, materialistic old US of A is really the spearhead of Western society, a society which seems to be totally incompatible with the reality of existence on planet Earth.

  By now it was mid-July and pods of whales swarmed through the Gulf of Maine between Cape Cod and Nova Scotia. Hot on their tails, brightly painted and rowdy tourist boats criss-crossed our path. Any sadness we felt in leaving the United States dissipated immediately as Elkouba rolled and crashed in their wake.

  Canada’s Maritimes, as they call the western island states of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, have a history of fishing and seafaring under very exacting weather conditions. Not a lot of yachts venture this far north, but the biggest hazard, for those who do, is the unbridled hospitality of the local populace.

  ‘Screech’, I soon found out, was raw rum brought back from the West Indies by the fishing-schooner captains who traded their summer catch of dried fish for rum right up until the 1930s. When the wooden rum casks were empty they were filled with water and left to steep for a year or so. The result is ‘swish’, a libation barely less potent than the cask’s original contents. The local’s solution to this slightly reduced potency is to drink more of it, we discovered the hard way at a succession of ‘screech’ and ‘swish’ parties in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.

  We worked our way from fishing port to fishing port, up the craggy, rock-bound coastline, and stopped at the minuscule French colony of Saint Peirre and Miquelon, where we tasted a morsel of la vie française, queuing for our morning croissants and baguettes. French government vandals had just bombed Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand and we expected a cool reception, but in this neck of the woods anyone who comes from the sea is hospitably received; regardless of politics, all are seafolk. The locals launch their gaily painted dories from slipways on the gravel beach to fish and ferry goods between the islands. Fog was commonplace, gale-force winds frequent, but the scenery was spectacular and the people remarkably welcoming.

  St John’s, Newfoundland, was a particularly hard place to bid farewell to. People gave us canned moose meat and fresh blueberries, seal flipper soup was served at a restaurant down the street, and the rugged little ships, sealers, ferries, trawlers and freighters that work the Arctic came and went about their business. Jim Winterer, who worked for a local fishing company, befriended us and loaned us his car to drive around the Avalon Peninsula where St John’s is situated. As we left he pressed an audio tape into my hand. ‘Put it in the player just afore ye get out o’ town,’ he said. We took his advice, and the tape played a wonderful and eclectic selection of music as a soundtrack while a backdrop of wild and sensational landscapes unfurled in front of the windscreen.

  Years before, in Wellington, New Zealand, I’d been flatmates and friends for several years with a lesbian from St John’s, Mary Bailey. Lean and acerbic, Mary had a wicked wit and a wonderful personality, and through her I’d had a unique insight into the lesbian life of the capital. I’d also met Sandy Puttle, a former lover of Mary’s from St John’s, who had spent time with us. After ringing a few Puttles from the St John’s phone book I tracked Sandy down to the St John’s Rape Crisis Centre and Women’s Shelter. ‘Ye’ll have to be comin’ round for dinner,’ Sandy said, and a few days later we took up her invitation. Sarah and I walked into the centre and were seated at a big table with a crew of women who looked like they’d learnt their dress sense from Rambo movies. Every microgram of testosterone in my body quailed as the evening progressed, and several times I almost grabbed my crotch protectively and fled through the door. Some of my dinner hosts would vehemently attack every word I said; some wouldn’t even look at me; and the moderate ones addressed all their conversation to me via Sarah, along the lines of: ‘Oh, does he like cooking?’ I used the toilet just before we left, and left the seat defiantly up — probably for the first time in years.

  ‘Port rot’ began to set in. We talked about finding work and staying for the winter. About 1600 nautical miles of cold, grey, stormy North Atlantic stretched between us and Iceland, but in St John’s one ‘swish’ party followed another.

  It is an eternal paradox of seafarers, I suppose, that while we are at sea, we long for the smells, fresh food and opportunities of the land; but after an extended period ashore, we long for the sea. In our case, as Ishmael in Melville’s Moby Dick puts it, we were getting ‘hazy about the eyes’ and it was ‘high time to go to sea’ before we began to vent our spleen by knocking people down in the streets.

  The North Atlantic was kind to us. As we navigated Elkouba out through the spectacular entrance to St John’s harbour, the wind died, and all night we motored in the direction of Iceland. In the morning a moderate northerly wind sprang up and Elkouba maintained good speed for almost the entire 16 days until we found our way through the breakwaters into Reykjavik harbour.

  South of Greenland, young puffins bobbed about on the waves, spending the first year of their lives at sea. Whales spouted all around us. We had heard the stories about whale–yacht collisions at sea, and how it was generally the whales that swam away from them; but somehow we didn’t feel threatened.

  At one stage a large fin whale surfaced with her calf about 15 feet off our beam, but my excited clamouring for Sarah to come and see must have scared her off. By the time Sarah burst through the hatch and arrived on deck, the whale had languidly cruised on. We had one chilling reminder that there was a crowded world to the south of us when two grey and menacing jet-fighters popped over the horizon and swept low towards us, appearing to be practising bombing runs on Elkouba. The little hairs on my neck stood up in apprehension. Their high-pitched whine broke the gentle rhythm of the boat, the sea and the wind-strained sails. One swept by at what seemed like mast height, just a few metres off our stern, and I glimpsed the pilot in helmet and black, blowfly-style goggles giving me the thumbs up.

  Reykjavik was a modish Continental city where beer was illegal and pubs almost non-existent. Both of these drawbacks have since been remedied, but at the time the Icelanders’ solution was to serve legitimate non-alcoholic ‘near-beer’ in a pint mug with one healthy dram of whisky and one of vodka. This diabolical concoction was served to anyone who asked for a pint of beer — definitely a trap (or a trip) for new players.

  The Icelandic language is the original Norse tongue, as spoken by the Vikings, and any incursion of new words is discouraged. The Icelandic word for television, for instance, translates as ‘flying picture’, and children at school read verbatim from the Viking Sagas written centuries ago. This all makes it a bit difficult for a foreigner who wants to buy half a kilo of butter at the local supermarket, because the Icelandic word for butter bears no relationship whatsoever to ‘butter’ in any other tongue. Most people, however, also speak English, which helps reduce the confusion for us monolinguists.

  Reykjavik is called ‘the city of clean air’ because geothermal steam is piped into the city for heating. Coal is absolutely unavailable so I scrounged around the docks, hatchet in hand, chopping up every little bit of wood I could find and lugging it back to the boat in sacks to fuel our pot-belly stove.

  From Reykjavik we had a stormy sail to Heimaey in the Westman Islands south-west of Iceland. Waves broke across Elkouba as we battled to gain an offing from the low-lying and shallow coastal waters. The large ferry that services the islands came close by to leeward, and from his bridge high above the stormy seas flashed Morse code ‘-. -’, the international signal for ‘I wish to communicate with you.’ I turned on the VHF radio and heard the ferry skipper ask, ‘Little ship … little ship … is you all right?’

  ‘Little ship to ferry,’ I replie
d, ‘We are wet, but okay, thank you.’

  ‘What is your destination?’ he asked.

  ‘Heimaey,’ I replied.

  ‘Aahh,’ he said. ‘We will watch for you there.’ Suddenly Iceland felt a lot warmer. The ferry steamed off towards the low, grey islands now visible in the distance, and we battled on.

  When we arrived in Heimaey several hours later, the word was out and a reception committee of fishermen was there to meet us. Many hands caught our mooring lines, and they quickly made us fast alongside a big wooden trawler.

  Several years before, the Heimaey fishing fleet had evacuated the island’s entire population of 5000 people overnight after the volcano Eldfell, just behind the township, erupted. Eldfell’s eruption dumped half a million cubic metres of ash on the township and the lava flow threatened to close the harbour, its main source of income, off. Fire-fighting tugboats from Scandinavia, Europe and North America helped locals spray cold water on the lava flow and stopped it from completely closing off the harbour, so now it makes a new breakwater almost encircling the port. When the eruption stopped six months later, one man was dead and Heimaey had grown by 2.24 square kilometres.

  The Islanders returned and excavated their village from beneath about 10 metres of volcanic ash and dust, and now the simmering volcano is the only reminder of the eruption.

  Fishermen dropped bags of fresh cod fillets on Elkouba’s decks, and many of the town’s merchants refused payment for goods we bought. I spent a frustrating morning tramping the streets trying to find kerosene for our lamps, until I discovered that it was called ‘steinolia’ in Icelandic. The man at the petrol station then gave me two gallons, and a gallon of engine oil. When I protested at his refusal to accept payment he put an arm around my shoulder and steered me towards the exit. ‘In Heimaey we are all men of the sea,’ he declared, and he smote his chest with a clenched fist. ‘We know how it is.’ And he gently pushed me through the door.

  The people of Heimaey are a hardy lot. One young man visited us on Elkouba and told how he’d been watchkeeping on a trawler when it sank, in midwinter, eight kilometres south of the mainland. He was the sole survivor and swam ashore, scaled a cliff and staggered across farmland until he came to a drinking trough for stock. He smashed the ice in the trough with his fists, took a long drink of water, and headed towards the lights of a distant farmhouse. At the farmhouse, he hammered on the back door which was eventually opened by the farmer in bed clothes and overcoat. They stared at each other for a few seconds and the farmer, thinking that he was drunk, slammed the door in his face. After finally getting medical attention he had spent weeks in hospital being treated for hypothermia.

  By now it was the end of September and the days were beginning to get shorter. ‘You leave?’ the fishermen asked. It was not a polite indication that we’d overstayed our welcome, but sound advice from people who knew the sea. When I replied in the affirmative they nodded approvingly, then said ‘One month too late,’ and walked off down the wharf shaking their heads. Eventually, a long, settled spell of weather was forecast, the trawlers began preparing for sea, and we sailed Elkouba out past the smoking volcano and headed south. Heimaey, and the cone of Surtsey, the southernmost island of Iceland which erupted into existence from 130 metres below sea level in 1963, fumed a grey plume from the horizon behind us until dusk blacked it out.

  After dark the wind came up from the north and we began a six-day sleigh ride to Scotland. We passed Rockall, the lonely granite pinnacle north-west of Scotland, on a tarry, black, moonless night with only the acrid odour of bird guano to warn us of its presence. It was an anxious night — the overcast skies had prevented me from obtaining reliable sextant sights and we were sailing hard on dead-reckoning — educated guesswork using a position obtained from compass course and speed/distance. I’d plotted a course to take us well clear, but the immigrant ship SS Norge hadn’t been so lucky when she piled into the rock in June 1904 with 727 passengers bound for a new life in New York. Of the passengers and the 68 crew members, 635 died. Many other wrecks are piled on the sea floor.

  The next day Elkouba covered 186 nautical miles of ocean to record our best day’s run. Grey clouds swirled and tumbled overhead and wind knocked the tops off the waves as they reared up astern, but the little red yacht, under double-reefed mainsail and storm jib, soared before it like the seabird she was. We heard later that a freighter and a trawler had been lost off Iceland in the same blow.

  Four and a half days from Heimaey, we raised the craggy profile of Inishtrahull Island, off Northern Ireland, at dusk, and worked our way overnight round the Mull of Kintyre to Campbelltown where we could clear British Customs and Immigration the next day. A breezy, cheerful officer came aboard and hurried through the paperwork so we could take a stroll ashore. A typical Scots fishing village, I thought, with its dour stone houses hunched around the harbour and a curry house and Chinese restaurant side by side with the fish and chip shop in the main street. Both townsfolk and fisherfolk were friendly, but our long-term plans lay in the south; so, after a week or so, we set out again.

  Britain was languishing in a warm, calm Indian summer as we meandered down the Irish Sea. We stopped at the Isle of Man, a cold, draughty place at that time of year. Without the throngs of holidaymakers from mainland UK, it was a bit like a school playground after all the children have gone home.

  We tackled the Bristol Channel’s massive 12.2-metre tidal range in two day-long legs, locking into Swansea marina overnight. Looking out over the bay, we watched the seascape turn to landscape, with the few boats moored outside the marina sitting in the mud, and then back to seascape with the incredible tidal range, all in a matter of hours.

  Next morning, on the flood tide, we steamed out of Swansea and up the Severn River with the pleasantly green, rolling farmland of Wales and Somerset converging on Elkouba’s bows as we approached Portishead, near the head of the channel. We anchored overnight off a sandbank called the English and Welsh Grounds while the tide ebbed, and anxiously kept watch as the anchor rope thrummed with the force of the water coursing down the channel. Discarded truck tyres, household furniture and assorted debris swirled past and Elkouba’s log recorded about 22 miles overnight — or an average 3.6 knots of tidal flow.

  Next morning, feeling thoroughly frazzled after an anxious night on watch, we motored into the Avon River to lock into Bristol’s historic harbour for our winter lay-over. The river was a pathway into history; willows and farm cottages crowded the banks and it all seemed so improbably populous after the Arctic. Tour boats forged past with cackling commentaries, as did family cruisers with lightly clad Englanders out enjoying the sun. After rounding a bend in the river we approached the Clifton Suspension Bridge which straddles the stream near the city. Completed almost 150 years ago, it was the maiden work of legendary engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel who left a legacy of brilliant engineering feats throughout the United Kingdom and the world. We both almost fell over backwards peering up at the great structure as we passed beneath it, and laughed sheepishly.

  It was time to replenish the cruising coffers, meet Sarah’s family, cultivate some steady friendships, partake of all the opportunities a steady mailing address provides, and prepare Elkouba for her next bout with the open ocean.

  My father was English, and I expected some sort of connection with his homeland but was badly disappointed. English society has developed a smugness, perhaps resulting from the dismal weather and being so closely surrounded by untrustworthy foreigners ‘gabbling’ in strange languages. The class system, which I had learnt about at school and thought to be a quaint old anachronism, is in fact alive and well. As a ‘colonial’, I was hard to categorize. ‘Quite a presentable chap, you understand, but he does have that odd accent.’ Working-class people despised me because I owned a yacht, though this gave me an entrée with the middle class — who sniggered and made snide jokes about colonials. As George Bernard Shaw observed in his preface to Pygmalion, ‘It is impossible for an English
man to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.’

  The dedicated sailors were a different kettle of fish, though, and our mutual love of boats and sailing transcended all class barriers. Bristol Docks was packed with good people living aboard their boats and working towards next summer’s sailing in the channel or further afield. They were endlessly innovative and resourceful, and soon introduced us to the black market where most goods had ‘fallen off the back of a truck’ and could be made available for a fraction of the true cost.

  We spent eight months tied to the clammy, moss-clad walls of Bristol Docks while Sarah nursed old folk at a local home and I worked fitting out a 43-foot ketch at the boat yard. We quickly found out that at $300 per winter, only working people stayed on the dock walls. Live-aboard people on social welfare benefits lived in the relative comfort of the marina and had their dockage, $900, paid by the unemployment benefit. Bus fares, swimming pool charges and theatre prices also favoured the unemployed.

  When we first arrived in Bristol we began by buying coal, but other boat people advised us to help ourselves from the huge coal bins beside the docks. One dark night I crept around behind the bins, darkly dressed, and darted from shadow to shadow, an empty sack in hand. I rounded the corner to find a queue of people filling sacks by torchlight. ‘Oh,’ they said. ‘We wondered how long it would take you to catch on to this.’

  After a few months, our thoughts turned towards Spitsbergen. Nowhere else in the world can a small, unstrengthened boat sail to such high latitudes. Because of a current of warm water which splinters off the Gulf Stream and heads north, the west coast of Spitsbergen is generally ice-free all summer, making it very appealing for exploring by small boat.