Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat (13 page)

As we slipped behind the outer islands and entered the more sheltered archipelago, the sea became calmer, and
Hirta
churned along unimpeded by the waves of the open sea. We lay around on the deck oohing and aahing at the beauty of the place … the little green valleys, the cliffs and waterfalls and huge ranges of snowy mountains all reflected in the deep, still waters. But the serenity of the scene was, apparently, quite deceptive. According to Tom there were winds that could all of a sudden rush down the mountains and knock a boat like ours clean over. Katabatic winds, he called them, that could spring at you from the still and silent landscape like a wild beast breaking cover. And they could rush the other way, too (these were called anabatic winds), knocking boats like ninepins as they raced from the water straight up the mountainside.

We mulled this over silently. Fortunately neither wind made a showing that day, and we moved on uneventfully through the baffling maze of islands and fjords that hide the entrance to the port city of Bergen. And there we did what sailors do, which is go to a bar and drink beer, our faces full of wind and our bodies swaying with the memory of waves. Norway was ruinously expensive back then, and the beer was well beyond our modest means, but we had to have it and, believe me, it had never tasted so good. We felt special, in the way that you do when you come in off the sea, or down off a mountain, or out of the wild … we existed on a slightly different plane from those around us.

Not long after, we slipped our moorings and headed south, and after a day of cruising easily in the flat water of the fjords, we dropped anchor in the bay of Norheimsund, a little town on the Hardanger Fjord. It was apple blossom time, and there is simply nothing, as Tom had said, quite like the Hardanger Fjord in apple blossom
time. The fjord itself is a place of heart-stopping beauty, with its sheets of deep calm water spreading inland for a hundred miles among idyllic valleys, backed by snowcapped mountains. In early summer this effect is heightened by the glowing mists of pure white blossoms that shine from the apple orchards as if bright patches of snow had lingered in the warm green valleys, and beneath the trees the meadows are a dense carpet of wild flowers. It made you wonder why anyone would want to leave such a place, especially to head out on the desperate sea route to Vinland.

We were in no hurry to leave the fjords, as we were waiting for the late summer melting of the ice pack, so we wandered, wafted by gentle breezes, from harbor to harbor and fjord to fjord, marveling at the beauty of it all. We ate pollock, because it was too expensive to buy anything to eat in Norway, and the fjords were alive with pollock. We kept a line trailing from the stern of the boat, and we lived off pollock stew and pollock curry and pollock fried and baked and boiled. To accompany it, we drank whisky from the ship’s stores as, after our first experence, we knew we couldn’t afford the beer. Pollock and whisky … well, you could do worse.

And then one night, moored to the fish dock in some wind-blasted town way out in the outlying islands, we were invaded by drunks who had smelled the whisky. The Norwegians have a weakness for this sort of thing; it’s the long gloomy Nordic winter coupled with a general Scandinavian propensity for the bottle, a hangover no doubt from the Vikings. The first inkling of the drunks’ presence was a crate of beer that appeared through the skylight
and then was lovingly lowered on to the saloon table. After this display of good intent, we had to invite them down, and there they proceeded to make ruinous inroads into our whisky supply, while regaling us with incomprehensible stories in Norwegian. Eventually Tord, their ringleader, stumbled over to the galley to see what we were going to eat.

“Vot is dis?” he asked, poking a pollock with distaste.

“That,” said Ros defensively, “is what we’re going to have for supper. It’s pollock.”

“Pollocks!” spluttered Tord, his great beery red face aghast. “Pollocks? Nobody eat pollocks. I tell you not even cats don’t eat pollocks. Why you eat that fish?”

“Well, it doesn’t cost anything,” countered Ros. “There are plenty of pollocks in the fjords.”

Sobered a little by thoughts of our desperate diet, Tord sat down, took a big slug of whisky, and said: “I get you some proper think to eat. I work in der meat biznis.” Nothing more was ventured about the preponderance of the pollock in our diet, and after another hour or two of heavy, heavy drinking, interlaced with forays of meaningless twaddle in Norwegian—the sort of session you wish had never got started—he and his cronies finally crawled ashore, leaving us to slump crapulously into our berths.

The next morning, when we had a mind to continue sleeping, there came a stumble and a thump, some feverish shuffling and a whispered oath. It was Tord coming back, as he had promised. The skylight darkened (it gets light at about two in the morning in June this far north), and the familiar beery face peered in and guffawed. With a crash a heavy piece of unidentifiable meat hit the
saloon table … then another … and another … and finally a fourth.

“Ho … vid dis stuff you don’t haf to eat no more pollocks. Open up de door; I need some more drinking …”

We weighed this option up. There was not a man among us who felt inclined to continue the drinking session with our benefactor … but then there lay in a heap on the table four enormous legs of smoked mutton. This was proper Viking fare—they had been big sheep and their legs would do us all the way across to Vinland without the need to troll for more pollock. To take a drink or two with Tord was clearly a moral obligation. Tom dug up the loose floorboard and fished forth another couple of bottles of whisky … and off we went again. It transpired, in the light of the illuminating conversation that ensued, that Tord had nicked the mutton from the meat works where he was employed. It didn’t matter much anyway, he said, because he had just been given the boot … oddly enough for drunkenness and pilfering.

The smoked mutton, shaved thin with a hasp knife, was the most delicious thing you could imagine … well, at any rate better than pollock. Tord had at a stroke raised the gastronomic level of our journey from desperate to something close to gourmand.

For some reason that escapes me now, the four legs of mutton were hung in the heads. The heads, as nautically minded readers will be aware, is the boat’s lavatory. Ours was a tiny curved compartment containing a small porcelain bowl decked with a baffling array of levers and plungers. On the wall, now unfortunately obscured by the mutton, were the instructions that told you the order in
which these things had to be operated and how … and, to a certain extent, why. Curiously enough, the ceaseless thumping of those muttons on the wall of the heads remains to me one of the most enduring memories of our Vinland voyage.

IN NO TIME AT
all it seemed that May had given way to June, and July was looming. It was surely time to cut loose from the tiny and hospitable harbor towns where we had moored and throw ourselves once again upon the mercy of the open sea. Yet, although we all claimed to be champing at the bit to be off, there was a discernible note of reluctance among us sailermen (as the locals called us) to wrench ourselves away from our newfound friends—whole families we had got to know in the waterside towns had welcomed us into their homes—and cast ourselves on the mercy of the North Atlantic. So we stalled for a few days by putting in at one of the outermost islands, ostensibly to make some small repair, but in reality storing up a last bit of comfort from the warm, dry land before committing ourselves to the horrible icy cold and danger that we all knew lay ahead. The island was too small to have cars. It had a toy-town port and a cluster of colored wooden cottages linked by neatly tended gravel paths. A dozen or so sodden sheep looked at us without interest, and the postman, with his little trolley, kept his head down against the wind and rain and ignored us altogether. It didn’t seem quite real.

Leaving this last reach of land, heading west toward
Iceland, we listened gloomily to the forecasts: “West Viking, Faroes, Southeast Iceland, westerly force seven increasing eight occasionally nine, driving rain …”

“Right on the nose,” grumbled Tom. “Just our luck; the prevailing winds ought to be out of the east at this time of year. It’ll be tough setting out into the teeth of that … but I think we’ve got to go.”

And thus we left the safety of the fjords and set course to the west and out into the trackless wastes of the North Atlantic. Neither Mike, the youngest of our crew, nor I had ever sailed across a proper ocean before. The English Channel and North Sea, for all their bluster and rage, were a municipal duck pond compared to the vastness of the ocean we were about to navigate. Perhaps in recognition of this I slumped over the rail and vomited copiously to leeward into the gray water; further forward, I saw Mike was doing the same thing.

John, that quiet and dependable man of the sea, emerged from below with mugs of hot tea and, catching sight of the pair of us, turned pale, banged the tea down, and dived for the last available space at the rail. Vomiting is like yawning: you see somebody else doing it and immediately you want to do it yourself. Tom, striking a seamanlike pose, and Patrick at the wheel, grinned knowingly at each other as they calmly sipped their tea and helped themselves to our ration of chocolate digestive biscuits. Being sick is rarely agreeable, but when you are on the first leg of an ocean voyage, and you are wondering why you are there anyway, it somehow makes everything even more ghastly than it already is. And it was pretty ghastly however you looked at it. With
the mainsail up and sheeted tightly in, we were motoring, as there was not much wind yet and what there was was dead against us. The sea was unrelieved gray, and there was a nasty chop crossing the swell that was coming in from the high winds to the west. Hence the vomiting: the motion of the boat was horrible. Behind us stretched for half a mile or so our track of flat water and bubbles, punctuated by swiftly dissipating dollops of vomit.
The pollock will enjoy that
, I thought miserably to myself.

There’s not a great deal you can do when seasickness hits, except wait it out in the knowledge that it’ll soon be over. For me, pills and wristbands just dull the ache and block the reflex to heave. But mercifully, after a few hours, the worst of it fades and a bit of energy and optimism returns, like welcome gusts of fresh air. Chores become manageable rather than heroic endeavors, and small pleasures take on a special sweetness—the warmth of the first sip of a mug of tea, before the wind and the spray instantly turn it to ice; the deliciousness of the chocolate spread thin on the top of a digestive biscuit; the peaty burn and the welling of inner warmth that comes with a sip of whisky; the comforting sound of “Sailing By” and the shipping forecast; the warmth in Ros’s voice below as she read Hannah a story, and Hannah’s own absorbing accounts of the excitement of each day.

Night fell … or rather it didn’t fall, this being summer up toward the Arctic Circle. There was just an intensifying for a couple of hours of the various grays that seemed to compose our world. There were no stars to steer by, so I was bobbing back and forth between the binnacle and
the wheel, while Patrick busied himself below with some charts. It was too cold to sit the whole four-hour watch on deck, so we took it in turns to go below and thaw out by the little potbellied stove that warmed the saloon. The rain had stopped and the wind had come round a little to the north, which meant that we could sail more or less on the course we wanted to get to Iceland.

Hirta
was heeled well over, slicing smoothly now through the waves; the choppy sea had calmed with the onset of night, making her motion far less unpleasant. Recovered by now from my bout of seasickness, I was enjoying the pull of the wooden wheel and peering into the twilight and thinking how lovely the land would be when we reached it. Reykjavík … I knew nothing about the town and had never expected to visit it. In fact, Iceland itself had a magical ring to it. But eclipsing this by a long way was the thought of sailing to the New World. Can anything ever beat that for romance? I had never been to Newfoundland or Canada or even America before and had never felt particularly drawn to those lands on the other side of the pond. Though in a way that hardly mattered: it was the journey that was the thing … to buy a ticket and get on a plane was all very well, but to navigate your way across the perilous ocean, driven by the winds in the centuries-old manner. Well, it was one hell of a way to get to a place.

“Hey, Patrick,” I called, lonely at the helm and eager for a little improving conversation. “What are you doing up there on the deck?” Patrick was lashed by his safety harness to the mast, and slithering about with the bucking and rolling of the boat, making the most minute adjustments
to the unfathomable array of ropes that constituted
Hirta’s
running gear.

“I’ll be with you in a minute,” he gasped as he panted and puffed at the hauling of some particularly weighty lift. “Bring her up on the wind a touch, will you? … While I get this throat purchase tightened up.”