Three Ways to Capsize a Boat Page 9

  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 again
st 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.”

  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.
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br />   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.