Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat (14 page)

Obediently I heaved a little on the wheel, and
Hirta
lost her speed, her sails flapping uselessly as she lay head to wind.

“Right, that’ll do. Pay off again and we’ll see how she goes …”

I spun the wheel back, the boat heeled as she caught the wind again and surged forward just the tiniest bit more swiftly than before. Patrick lurched back into the cockpit, wiped the spray from his face with his hand, and wedged himself in beside me.

“Is it really worth it, Pat … all that buggering about you do up there?”

He looked at me kindly and grinned.

“Well, it keeps me out of trouble … and it sort of makes me happy.” He looked up squinting at the billowing red sails, black against the gray of the arctic night.

“Wait a minute … no, look at the staysail. See where the front of it is slack? Well, that’s because the jib is curling the wind round and spilling it onto that bit, so the staysail is having less effect in driving us on. Now, if I slacken off this rope here just the littlest bit … like this …” He grunted as he slipped a loop from the catch, or cleat, beside the cockpit, let it run a couple of inches, and then cleated it up again. “Now the staysail’s full of wind and tight; the ship’s working just that little bit more efficiently.”

“OK,” I said. “I see.”

“And the thing is,” continued Patrick, rather pleased to be able to impart this nugget of arcane nautical information, “when you’re sailing twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week, the tiniest bit more efficiency can make a big difference to your journey time. At full speed we’re doing about seven knots,
*
so if you can up that by just a quarter of a knot, you’re really getting somewhere. Also it’s a matter of pride: you want your boat to be sailing as good as she can. And what’s more important, you want everyone else to see you’re doing the thing right.”

I peered into the pale cold light, where not the slightest speck or flicker of movement denoting any other vessel could be seen.

“Not out here, of course not,” he continued, “though when Tom comes up, the first thing he’ll look at is the sails, and if they’re not pulling as they should, he’ll think we’re a bunch of farmers … if you’ll excuse the expression.” Patrick grinned at this and slapped me playfully on the back.

“Here, give me the wheel for a spell and I’ll see if I can’t make something approximating a straight course.”

I slipped down the companionway into the warmth of the galley and boiled a kettle for some tea and smeared some marmalade onto a handful of digestives. It’s scarcely documented the comfort that can be derived from this
unlikely combination of raw materials. But they played a big part in the simple happiness that Patrick and I shared, munching and sipping as
Hirta
, all her sails full bellied, taut, and pulling at optimum efficiency, surged through the towering seas toward the distant New World to the west. Below, everybody else was wrapped in the sweet com fort of sleep while Patrick and I, in hushed tones despite the rushing and roaring of the waves and the wind, exchanged views on the subjects of war and women and the way to live a rewarding life.

WE PUT IN TO
Iceland, instead of sailing straight past, because it’s not every day you find yourself high up in those latitudes, and we had a yen to visit the place. But also because Tom wanted to consult the experts on the Greenland ice pack, the belt of sea ice that girdles the coast, to see if we could chance an approach, and the ice-monitoring station was in Reykjavík.

There wasn’t a marina for yachts in those days in Reykjavík, so we tied up at the fish dock, which (as you’d expect) smelled nauseatingly of fish, with heavy overtones of diesel. But if the truth be told, we didn’t smell too good ourselves, and we were pleased to have anywhere at all to dock after a couple of weeks at sea on the passage from Bergen. What we all needed was a drink … and a bath.

Now the first of these was harder to find, as although Iceland had won independence from Denmark back in
1944, the draconian drinking laws imposed by the colonial power seemed still to be in operation. The only place you could buy a bottle of even the mildest liquor was the state booze monopoly—I forget the Icelandic term for it—and this unappetizing establishment was only open at times when normal working folk had no possibility of getting to it. On the odd occasion when it was open, there were long, long queues of shamefaced Icelanders, shuffling along in the bone-crunching cold out on the street. When you finally made it to the counter, you had your identification checked by the sort of humorless, boot-faced assistants you’d expect to find running the show in a funeral parlor. The simple joy of just slipping out and buying a special bottle of wine to share with a loved one or some friends just wasn’t an option. No wonder these people were driven to distill their own grog at home.

The laws were relaxed if you were going to have something to eat, so we ended up at a pizzeria, and a very good pizzeria it was, too. The speciality of the house, and the dish that has made the place for me ever memorable, was horse pizza … that is to say, a pizza that, along with the more traditional tomato and mozzarella and oregano, had horse on it. Horse can be a little on the fibrous side, but is much appreciated by the Icelanders, who are the most pragmatic of people.

In terms of personal hygiene, things had come a long way since the days of Ragnar Hairybreeches, for even the most cursory reading of the sagas indicates that fastidiousness in matters of cleanliness did not figure high with Vikings. For us things were bearable so long as we stayed within a certain radius of the fish dock, but as we moved
farther afield we became horribly conscious of the unspeakable miasma that followed us. In the horse pizzeria, for example, we had not failed to notice a certain ripple of disdain among the other customers.

The reason for our disgusting state (and I do not include the much more wholesome Ros and Hannah in this) is that it was just too damn cold at sea to wash. The only man among us who was bold enough to strip off and wash in a bucket on deck was Patrick … and that was because Patrick had been in the army for years and was hard as a brick. The rest of us sort of let things slide and, as a consequence, each of us was encrusted in a layer of sweat and dirt, trapped inside damp wool, unwashed socks, and underwear that was best not mentioned.

Fortunately within hours of landing, Ros had managed to find the public baths, and we all trooped along armed with lotions and potions and unguents and sundry instruments—abrasive cloths, scrubbing brushes, pumice stones, and sponges. The public baths in Reykjavík were, it turned out, pretty special—a great steaming hot lake, heated by geothermal energy. There was a huge glass wall that you could dive beneath and come out in the chilly open air among the crowds of happy Icelanders, gaily disporting themselves in the steamy waters, for it seemed that, at any one time, half the population of the city was in there.

We soon discovered that going to the baths was about the most fun to be had in the city. Keeping clean seemed to be a national obsession. So we, too, wallowed in cleanliness; we scrubbed up like cherubs and came out of there pink and gleaming. During our stay in Iceland we would
sometimes go there as often as three times a day, perhaps in the clearly erroneous belief that the cleaner we got, the longer it would last us on the next leg of our journey.

It seemed we would be remaining on dry land for at least a week—anything to put off the awful inevitability of our next stint at sea. So I decided to head off and see something of the island. I stuffed some dried cod and some bread and chocolate inside my sleeping bag … and of course a slab of the ubiquitous mutton … slung it over my shoulder and trudged off along the road that leads north out of Reykjavík. I didn’t know where I was going—I didn’t even have a map of Iceland—but I was young then, and full of confidence that one road or another would lead me back to my friends and the boat.

Iceland, it appeared, was an elemental sort of a place, warmed by fire and steam, but lashed ceaselessly by fierce winds, a part of the earth that had remained more or less the way things were before the fishes had crawled from the sea and started their long journey to becoming people.

I saw geysers, pools of evil-smelling sulfurous sludge that boiled and bubbled in a sinister way and then all of a sudden ejaculated a plume of hot smelly water into the sky. You don’t get more elemental than that, I mused. Then I found myself at Gullfoss, which is a waterfall, colossal beyond dreams, that filled the dark, treeless country around with drifting mists and fearful noise.

But most wonderful of all was Thingvellir, the site of the Althing, the first Norse parliament. Here was a deep quietness, and a mystery such as I have never experienced
anywhere else. It was a curious landscape lying between a rocky fault line and a shallow lake; everywhere were still clear pools and utter silence. The only building was a little white wooden church down near the lake, the only sound the haunting cry of the arctic tern, which occasionally you would spot, hovering over the pools like a delicate white swallow. I sat for long hours as evening fell, completely bewitched by the sheer strangeness of the place.

Later, hitching back toward Reykjavík, I was driven along the shore of a fjord. Steep green fields ran down to the edge of the furious wind-lashed water.

“That’s my uncle’s place,” said Gudrun, my driver, a stocky young woman with widely spaced green eyes and straggly blond hair. “He’s been trying to set up a free-range chicken farm for years, but the chickens keep getting blown off the hill and into the fjord.”

“I’m not surprised,” I said, thinking about the curious, crabbed gait of the few chickens I had seen who were braving the elements. “Back there on the road there were times when I could hardly stand up against the wind myself; it must be hell for a hen. So how is your uncle dealing with the problem?”

“He ties them to rocks,” she replied. “The rocks are big enough so the wind can’t blow the chicken away, and yet small enough so that the chicken can drag them about. Look, there’s one over there.”

I turned to where she was pointing and watched, entranced, as a fine speckled-white hen dragged a rock laboriously up the hill through the grass, occasionally lifted
bodily and tumbled back by the wind. Two others soon hobbled after her.
These people are survivors
, I thought to myself.
Survivors and stickers and lateral thinkers
.

Getting a lift in the back of a pickup truck heading toward Reykjavík, I was overtaken by a dust storm. The world disappeared in a whirling brown mist, and I emerged caked from head to toe in the finest volcanic dust. This gave me an excuse to go and wallow one more time in the public pool before I rejoined the boat, where Ros had cooked us up a stew of horse, and the news was that we were putting to sea the following morning.

We were about to embark on the last, the longest, and by far the most dangerous leg of the journey.

N
OT LONG AFTER WE
left Iceland the wind dropped altogether and the sea calmed to a long glassy swell—the ocean equivalent of rolling prairie land. We had turned on the engine and were chugging at a steady pace with the chill light breeze, created by our forward motion, competing with a rare burst of sunshine. It was one of those interludes where all the men coincided on the deck: Patrick and Tom checking their sextants, John manning the cockpit, while Mike and I lolled about for a few moments absorbing a little of the sun’s wan rays.

This was not exactly sunbathing; you’d have been a fool to take off your heavy weather gear, gloves, and woolly hat, but even the palest of suns peering feebly through a lowering arctic sky can impart a certain warmth to body and spirits. There was a perceptible change of mood on the boat, a lightheartedness that seemed to spread and infect
us all. You’d hear bursts of song, snatches of poetry, and the most inane jokes.

Hannah appeared on deck dolled up in thick layers of wool topped off by the red mackintosh and wellies. She was clutching Rowena, whom she placed carefully inside a coil of rope near the cabin door, while she arranged a new bed for her. Behind her emerged Ros with a tray of tea and some flapjacks that she and Hannah had just taken from the stove. She sat with us on the edge of the cockpit, enjoying a rare moment of relaxation while we polished off the plateful. Throughout, though, she kept one eye on Hannah and the other on the surrounding sea, scanning it for the first signs of the change that we all knew would be coming. For a calm does not last long in the North Atlantic, and although there was a feeling of relaxation and ease, there was also a sense, not quite of dread, but of anticipation.