Blue Water

by Lindsay Wright

  ‘We’re having a party at the Burra next week — why don’t you come?’ she asked. I still had memories of the Newfoundlanders and their ‘swish’ affairs, but I gingerly accepted the offer and shuffled through the pile of charts to find one for the Burra. From it we saw that the Burra was a peninsula on the western side of Shetland; the anchorage looked to be a place called Banna Minn, which was wide open to the west, and we began to plot a passage round the rock-bound coast.

  We motorsailed Elkouba around Sumburgh Head to Burra in a flat calm, startling a few sleeping seals on the way. We picked our way through a narrow entrance and dropped anchor off a crescent of golden sandy beach at Banna Minn, but the anchor was most reluctant to grab hold of the shingle bottom. Within 30 minutes, one of the local fishermen, Duncan, came striding over the hill and down to the beach with a small tow-headed boy trotting in his wake, and gave us a hail. I rowed ashore in Taff. ‘Ye dinnae want t’be in here if the weather cams frae the west,’ he said. ‘I’ll tak’ ye roond the corner.’ He had never been aboard a yacht before, and was intrigued by Elkouba and our lifestyle. Sipping on a cup of tea (though I’m sure he would have preferred something stronger), he piloted us between the jagged reefs and rocky promontories to the mainland side of the peninsula. He instructed me, meantime, on the way to leave the bay. ‘Y’see … ye line up the road there o’er the roof of the hoose until ye can open up the bush on a bearing of about due north.’ In a place like Shetland where trees are rare, a scrubby bush becomes a landmark.

  Once inside Burra, we fastened Elkouba to a mooring owned by Russell, Duncan’s brother-in-law, in the little, landlocked harbour below Ali and Sandra’s house at Papil. A few metres away, sheep grazed the rolling meadows and shaggy cattle raised their heads to observe the bright-red spectacle which had arrived in their midst. We could hop in Taff, push off from Elkouba, and glide to the shore.

  Then the party began. The Shetlands dialect is a treat to the ear, a lilting language that is part Norse, part Scottish. As one progresses from dram to dram and the long evenings of the ‘Simmer Dim’ flow over the heather-draped hills, actual comprehension of it becomes less of an issue. The ‘Simmer Dim’ happens in the summer when the sun has migrated north and dips below the horizon for a mere few minutes a day.

  We spent one of the best weekends we could remember at Burra, and left with aching laugh muscles and a tendency to break into bursts of mirth when we recalled things that we’d seen and done. Luigi, the ship’s cat, stayed on and took up residence in a barn at Ali and Sandra’s, from where he could terrorize the local rodents and feline population, until our return from the Arctic. We hoped this would prevent any recurrence of the quarantine hassles we’d already had in the UK.

  After a brief stop at Lerwick to top up provisions, diesel and fresh water, we sailed out into the Norwegian Sea. The grey stone wharves of Lerwick boat harbour hosted a fleet of Scandinavian yachts, which were loading up to the gunwales with duty-free liquor. ‘A case of whisky that is $50 here is $187.50 a bottle in Norway,’ one smuggler told us as he gleefully stacked cases of finest whisky in his forepeak. Trucks full of whisky boxes disappeared into the yachts, with just enough room left for their crews to wriggle into sleeping bags on top of the cargo for a quick kip. I wondered if we’d encounter many boats full of befuddled Norsemen wandering around the North Sea after broaching their cargo.

  We met another Norwegian who had sailed to Spitsbergen, and who shook his head when he saw we had no satellite navigator. ‘You is crazy,’ he said. Warren Brown had also advised us to obtain satellite navigation because of the fog, and the overcast and rough weather of the Arctic Sea which often prevented navigators from obtaining reliable sextant readings to fix their position from. I’d figured, rather pig-headedly perhaps, that if the early explorers had done it without the reliable timepieces to fix longitude or the accurate charts we had, then I ought to be able to, too. And anyway, the sun is above the horizon almost 24 hours a day and ought to give me heaps of opportunities to grab sextant sights.

  I remembered, too, a discussion I had had with Russell at Burra who had fished these waters all his life. ‘A gale at sea should be an inconvenience — not a danger,’ he had said. I recalled his words frequently in the months ahead.

  A constant lookout is necessary in the heavily travelled, fished and oil-rigged waters of the North Sea and Arctic. Sarah and I maintain a pretty thorough watch system anyway. I had spent 56 days at sea, crossing the Pacific Ocean, without seeing another vessel, and the previous year we had been 16 days between Newfoundland and Iceland and seen only whales and jet aircraft; but it pays to bear in mind that in 1895, when there were only two automobiles registered in the entire state of Ohio, they collided. There are stories, quite common these days, of tankers and freighters arriving at their destination, tying up to a wharf and discovering that they have the mast and rig of a yacht dangling from their anchor. Good watchkeeping is good seamanship.

  The 580 miles from Shetland to Bodø, the northern Norwegian city on the shores of Vestfjorden, were about the slowest we have ever sailed. The wind blew hard from the north for the first two days and Elkouba smashed her way through the steep, grey waves, tossing water by the bucketful across the deck. Then the wind dropped to almost nothing so we slatted and banged on the remaining waves. After the gale I discovered that the engine had ingested a dose of salt water. I hurriedly removed the fuel injectors and turned it over to pump the water out, but the Volvo was recalcitrant. My resolve to be nice to it faded and the resulting tirade encompassed Volvo, Sweden, machinery in general and engines in particular until I ran out of invective.

  ‘Beaut,’ I thought, as I slumped on a settee. ‘Here we are running into a mountainous and rock-bound coastline in the Arctic Circle with no engine and not enough battery power to run the radar for more than a few hours.’

  As we inched northwards across the chart, it got steadily colder. That pub back in Bristol, with its bed of coals burning red in the grate, became a more wistfully attractive memory with each mile of northing Elkouba made.

  After we had crossed the Arctic Circle at 66 degrees, 39 minutes north, the sun never set, but that did not have the disruptive effect on us that we had anticipated. We maintained our two hours on, two hours off nightly watch regime because of the cold, and napped during the day when we felt like it. Neither of us regretted the last of those long, freezing hours on deck after dark. The sacks of peat given to us in Shetland simmered in the pot-belly stove and made Elkouba’s interior into a snug, dry haven from the conditions on deck.

  Elkouba fortunately heaves to very easily even in moderate conditions. With the storm jib hanked on the inner forestay and backed to windward, and the tiller lashed hard alee, she bobs along quite comfortably. Quite often we would heave to in the middle of a long passage, and have a ‘Sunday’. This involved a hot dinner, a bottle of wine and a few hours’ relaxation. Then, refreshed, we sheeted the sails on and got her sailing again. We didn’t really keep a logbook, as such. I work out all my navigational sight reductions in school exercise books, each of them including Greenwich Mean Time and our dead-reckoning position and intercept, so I can always refer back to them and work out roughly where we were at any given time and date. I often write down the barometer reading at the sight time, and keep an eye out for any radical changes, a practice almost gone by the board in favour of weather facsimile maps and radio weather forecasts.

  Finally, the sharp granite needle of Røst pierced the horizon. Røst is the southernmost of the Lofoten Islands, which border Vestfjorden to the west, and we altered course to close with the Norwegian mainland. Visibility is almost endless, it seems, in the clear Arctic air, and landmarks that look five miles away are often 10 times that distance. So it was with the snow-covered mountains of Norway. At first we excitedly pointed landmarks out to each other, but soon the sight of so much grandeur just overwhelmed us and we sat side by side and gaped, while the coffee we had forgotten to drink became cold in our cups
. Tall, jagged mountains rose like flames from the sea, their snowcaps dyed a dozen shades of red by the midnight sun at our back.

  We picked our way into the ‘leads’, as the Norwegians call the channel that runs between the reefs and islands off their rugged coastline. Creeping gingerly towards land, we sailed into a channel — but what channel? It was well marked with buoys and range marks, but they didn’t seem to tie up with anything we could find on our charts. We were hopelessly lost. We looked for people on the craggy coastline to give us directions, sailed around in circles, and pored over the charts trying to pinpoint our whereabouts. Suddenly a loud roaring noise echoed from the shores behind us and a big hydrofoil ferry swept around a nearby headland, peeling back two great rolls of water with its bow. I walked out onto the foredeck and waved my arms above my head until the ferry turned towards us, while Sarah hurriedly looked in Warren Brown’s Norwegian/English dictionary to find out how to say, ‘Where are we?’

  The ferry settled into displacement mode, about 10 metres from Elkouba, its roar subsiding to a muted rumble. Curious faces stared from the big glass windows, and a uniformed officer walked out on deck. Holding the dictionary in one hand, I spoke my lines in what I thought was passable Norwegian. A veil of bafflement covered his face; then it lifted. ‘Ah, you want to know where you are?’ he said in perfect English. ‘You are not far south of Bodø — that’s Fugløya over there. Okay?’

  I nodded sheepishly and he walked back inside. Within seconds the ferry roared on her way, while her passengers turned back to their magazines, and, as I stood on the foredeck feeling totally silly, one old lady gave me a shy wave.

  Even the most spectacular scenery in the world palls after you have spent 18 hours trying to nurse 12 tonnes of steel yacht to windward in light air up a 300-metre-wide channel. The Volvo refused to function, no matter what I did to it or whatever diesel engine deity I appealed to. In a fit of desperation I flung Taff, our plywood dinghy, over the side, and taking Elkouba in tow began rowing to a jetty just visible on nearby Fugløya (Bird Island). Rowing is one way of keeping warm in the Arctic, and by the time we had Elkouba tied to the jetty I was well and truly steamed up. At 2 a.m., in broad daylight, I tore open the tool kit and, muttering dark threats against the Swedish engineers and Algerian boat-builders who had landed me in this position, I began to operate on the reluctant engine. Sarah, who knows me well, stood back to watch, and soon a crowd of bemused Bird Islanders had gathered to join her, some clucking in sympathy.

  I pulled the injectors out, pumped more salt water out of the cylinders and changed the oil, muttering furiously the whole while. Finally, with a jump-start from an old Massey Ferguson tractor, the islands’ sole terrestrial conveyance (if you don’t count wheelbarrows), the Volvo spluttered into life. The crowd on the dock had become a bit concerned during my frantic performance, probably wondering where they’d left the straitjacket since the last person had gone crazy on the island, but when the engine spluttered to life a collective sigh went up and a smile ran through the audience like a yawn through an opera house. I rummaged out a bottle of duty-free whisky and we all drank a toast — well, several toasts actually, to this small triumph of man over the tyranny of machines.

  Later, oriented and mobile, we motored into Bodø (pronounced ‘Budda’) to find the city in a festive mood, enjoying an un-forecast heatwave of 10 to 15 degrees Celsius. As we chugged into the harbour clad in boots, hats, jumpers and foul-weather gear, motor boats roared past us draped with partying people dressed in bikinis and bathing costumes. Obviously we still had a bit of acclimatizing to do.

  Like many cities on Norway’s north coast, Bodø was pulverized by Nazi bombers in World War Two and most of the buildings were only two or three decades old. We inadvertently became embroiled in a campaign that some local yachtsmen were waging against leisure yachts having to pay harbour dues, and I suspect that we didn’t really say a lot of what was attributed to us in the story which was written by the earnest young reporter who interviewed us for the local newspaper. It was all in Norwegian, however, and we could not understand most of it, and anyway, it was in a good cause.

  My alcoholic proclivity was immediately dampened in Bodø by the cost of beer: about $8 per pint. In spite of this very obvious drawback, the city manifested more drunks than any other place I had ever been. We rafted-up to a heavy ferro-cement Colin-Archer-style ketch that had just returned to Norway from a Caribbean cruise with a crew of young local sailors, and reminisced about cheap rum and reggae bands.

  A week later, still boggling at the scenery, we sailed across Vestfjorden to the Lofoten Islands, and picked our way through this remarkable archipelago. The islands are what remain above water of a submerged mountain range. They are peopled by about 2600 hardy souls who eke a living out of cod fishing, whaling and tourism. Most of the harbours are entered through crevices in cliffs, which then open out into sheltered little mini-fjords with wooden houses and jetties clinging to their precipitous shorelines.

  I am not really a great landscape buff; the scenery of the tropics, for example — white sandy beaches, turquoise water and swaying palms trees — just leaves me cold. But here in Lofoten, I just could not stop marvelling at the scenery. It is absolutely majestic, literally breath-taking and, on a more sober note, emphasizes one’s mortality, one’s utter insignificance in the context of life on Earth.

  In Svolvaer, capital town of Lofoten, we admired some wooden whale-chasers, their purpose betrayed by the lofty crow’s nests and harpoon guns mounted on their bows. We watched a stocky older man holding a young boy up to fire blanks from the forward harpoon gun, until he heard the click of Sarah’s camera shutter. ‘Oohhh … Greenpeace?’ he turned and asked tiredly, putting the boy down on deck.

  ‘No,’ I replied, and explained that we were just people who liked boats and were admiring his stout catcher, Kromhout. His face transformed from a frown to a wide smile and he beckoned us aboard. So we met Ernest Dahl, the 68-year-old doyen of the Lofoten minke whale fleet. Next year, he told us, the minke whaling would be banned and for the first time in 45 years he would not be going to the far north.

  There are not many of this breed of seaman left, men who go to the edge of the ice pack to hunt mammals almost as big as their boats, and then dodge the ice floes to bring the meat home where it is the traditional staple diet of many northern Norwegians. As society becomes steadily urbanized, these men — hunters, seamen, explorers and adventurers — are in danger of extinction.

  Captain Dahl went to sea at 14 as deck-boy in a whale-chaser skippered by his father Ragnvar (Sea Rover) Dahl. His first trip, from Norway to South Georgia in the South Atlantic, and from there skirting the edge of the Antarctic ice pack in search of whales, took 14 months. He asked where I was from and, when I told him, said ‘Ah, David Lange — strong man.’ Lange had recently faced the might of the US military down by banning their nuclear ships from New Zealand’s harbours. Like most Scandinavians, it seemed, Captain Dahl agreed with the former New Zealand Prime Minister’s anti-nuclear policy.

  We ate steaks of hvalbiff (whale beef), and talked ships and sea. ‘You,’ he said, laying his hand on my shoulder, ‘are sea rover like my father.’

  He invited us to bring Elkouba to the small cove where he, his brother and his son all kept their whale-boats tied to docks at the front of their houses; just a few steps from the front door. We moved Elkouba around and spent our evenings with Captain Dahl while, over hvalbiff and whisky, he taught us some of the lessons he had learned in a lifetime of ice navigation. Every day he phoned the weather station at Bear Island, and when the right forecast came up he said, ‘The weather is good for you — you must go.’ It was a sailor’s farewell. He cast off our lines and we left. As Elkouba negotiated the fjord’s rocky entrance, he blew one long, doleful blast on Kromhout’s horn, and we left the fjord, full of freshly redundant whale-catchers, astern.

  I felt a bit sheepish about all this telephoning to Bear Island for weather forecasts. It
did not fit in somehow with my own image of man against the Arctic. All the books and magazines I had read were about battling the unknown with nary a mention of weather forecasts. This, perhaps, is the myth of the north and, to a lesser extent I suspect, of Antarctica too.

  People who go there envisage themselves as explorers, testing themselves against the worst that Nature can throw at them. The reality of twice-weekly commercial air flights, radio and telephonic communications, and fast, safe helicopter travel does not somehow fit in with the explorer image. The real Arctic, this century’s Arctic, is not the same wilderness trekked by Nansen, Amundsen and Peary. The ice, solitude and hardship are still there, and the Arctic is still quick to exact the ultimate penalty from anyone who treats it lightly, but all the fruits of today’s technology are there too, to ease the danger and the hardship. It is difficult to research the reality of what one can expect in the Arctic, because latter-day accounts of voyages are frequently embellished with the authors’ illusions of what the Arctic should be like.

  Heading north through the fjords to Tromsø, we stopped at the cliff-sided Trollfjorden and, clambering up the rock wall with a can of spray paint in my mouth, I painted Elkouba’s name beside those of other boats that had passed that way. I justified it as ‘creative vandalism’ and was almost caught wet-handed by a tourist ship that cruised by as I slid back down the cliff face. Years later, a friend who had taken one of these tourist boats sent us a photo of the name, still painted on the rock face.

  We sailed and motored on, past deep fjords and snow-white mountains, colourful villages nestled by the water, and ragged glaciers, to Tromsø.

  Standing on the dock in Tromsø to help tie Elkouba up were the German crew of the yacht Freydis, whom we had met in St John’s and Reykjavik the previous year, and who were now engaged on their second trip to Spitsbergen. Freydis is owned by a co-operative of owner-skippers, each of whom uses her for so many months each year. This adventurous team, and their assorted crews, have sailed extensively in Antarctica, North and South America, Africa, the Caribbean, Greenland and the Arctic. This year, with a crew of eight men and women, Freydis was on her second attempt at circumnavigating Spitsbergen. We drank vodka and tonic, the vodka coming from jerry cans marked ‘water’ to foil Norway’s eagle-eyed customs officials, while they retold the story of their trip to Svalbard the previous year and I passed on some of Ernest Dahl’s ice advice. Then we cast off their lines, and they headed north. The skipper, Eric, asked us to accompany them so we could take photos of each other’s vessels in the ice, but we doubted our ability to keep up with Freydis, which is 3.6 metres longer than Elkouba. Freydis, with her eight-person crew, is also equipped with an array of electronic navigation and radio equipment, so we thought it best to bumble on alone.