Blue Water Read online

  Over the 1650 rhumb-line (straight) miles of Norwegian coastline, there are actually 12,000 miles of navigable waterways. It was then that we were lent the charts and books by Warren Brown, skipper of War Baby. He asked us to insure the piles of charts. We couldn’t afford to insure Elkouba, and no underwriter would have borne the risk anyway, but this request seemed fair enough.

  ‘It is dangerous up there,’ Warren said, eyeing us searchingly over a whisky and soda. ‘Fall in the water and you are dead within minutes.’

  Back in Bristol we began to look for a second dinghy. I had bought Taff, a plywood Optimist dinghy that had been used to teach Bristol Boy Scouts how to sail for several years and was then retired, but we really needed something more stable for detailed inshore exploration. I wrote to several manufacturers to see if they would lend us one for the trip in return for publicity pictures of their products in the ice, but drew a blank on all fronts and ended up buying a bright-orange Metzeler. We quickly came to nickname this hapless vessel ‘the fizzler’ for its unerring ability to deflate whenever it was required to go near water.

  Various items of Arctic apparel found their way aboard, mostly from the black market — our only sponsors. Felt boot-liners and leather mittens from a BBC film team’s Antarctic project, woollen balaclavas and scarves. We stocked up with sacks of rice, oats and wholemeal flour from the local organic shop in case we were iced in for winter, and cases of tinned food came aboard to supplement our own preserved meat.

  The end of April is the start of Bristol’s boating season, and one Friday night most of the seaworthy boats, and a few of rather dubious buoyancy, too, had gathered in the outer lock waiting to burst out into the wide waters of the channel after a winter’s confinement in the port. The pub Nova Scotia, located next to the lock gates, was crowded with excited boating people and, at 6 a.m., the lock gates opened for the first non-commercial traffic all winter, and the small armada streamed out to sail, motor and steam the five miles downriver, past Avonmouth and into the Bristol Channel. Elkouba was free.

  We forged through the muddy brown water and moved gently to the small wind-driven wavelets in the river. It wasn’t open ocean — but man, it still felt good.

  III LOCKED IN FOR WINTER

  Across the Bristol Channel, in Wales, there doesn’t seem to be the same preoccupation with accent and class as in England. It’s rugby country and, as a New Zealander, I felt more at home. Society is much more relaxed, we found, as we worked on Elkouba at the boat yard in Barry. The nearby Cardiff Yacht Club soon took us in hand, and pretty rugged and keen sailors they were, with hardly a blue blazer or a brass button among them. The clubhouse cook was Samoan and he, too, was happy to see someone else from Oceania — so we ate really well.

  After a week’s work Elkouba was painted aloft and below and we had seen to all the little maintenance chores she needed below the waterline. Gleaming like new, she slid down the steep slipway into the water, and we set off on a brisk overnight reach to Lundy Island, 10 nautical miles off the coast. Next morning we climbed the island and had an interesting time watching bird-watchers watch the puffins this rocky little island is famous for. We tasted the local brew, and spent a rolly night in the open anchorage before retrieving our anchors and heading west across the sea to Ireland. Our first port of call was Dunmore East and, as we approached the harbour, the engine began to produce a thok … thok … thok noise which by now had become familiar. We limped into the picturesque harbour where, to the clamour of kittiwakes breeding in the cliffs around the port, the lifeboat mechanic and I spent an hour or so shaking our heads over Elkouba’s recalcitrant engine. Björn, the mechanic, was a Swede who’d served his apprenticeship on Volvos, but eventually he too shook his head over Elkouba’s mechanical aberration. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the later models had sodium-cooled valve seats — maybe this is why?’ The Volvo had revealed a streak of malice and would, on odd occasions, bend push-rods. There was neither rhyme nor reason to it — they would be from different cylinders at different times and under quite different conditions. I had taken the three cylinder heads off, had them planed and the valves re-seated, but this had no effect at all on the miscreant engine’s behaviour. It had got to the stage where I had all the tools to hand and could remove a push-rod, straighten it on the bread board (much to Sarah’s dismay) and replace it in about 12 minutes.

  When it comes to things mechanical, I am a total paranoid — it’s always seemed a miracle to me that hundreds of metal parts can all whizz around together at totally unnatural speed, under extreme pressure and high temperature, to produce propulsion. It just doesn’t seem right — what’s to stop one of those whirring little components from deciding to take a break and causing its colleagues to blow themselves to pieces? And they do, frequently; I’m absolutely sure of it.

  The commercial fishermen who taught me my early seamanship always gave a wide berth to any lee shore or possible hazard, ‘in case the engine breaks down’. But in this age of smooth and reliable small diesels, people treat lee shores and such with cavalier disregard and operate on the assumption that their engines will go forever. But not me — an engine is still an enemy in the boat as far as I’m concerned, poised to stab you in the back at a time when you need it most. I began to wonder if the problems were psychological, and tried beaming good, positive thoughts to the lump of inert green metal.

  According to all the oracles, a northbound sailor in the Irish Sea can expect moderate south-westerly winds for most of spring. I had planned a gentle downwind waft past the emerald-green fields of Ireland, with perhaps the faint strains of harp music drifting out across the water of an evening as we coasted our way towards the north. In reality we beat to windward for the next month, with stops at Wicklow and Dun Laoghaire in Ireland and Portpatrick in Scotland. It seemed that every time we turned, the wind turned with us, and by the time we reached the Hebrides I reckoned I had put in more tacks than the average carpet-layer would in an entire lifetime. I publicly revoked every blasphemy I had uttered in the past four years, dropped donations in Salvation Army collection boxes, and helped old ladies across roads, but still the wind stayed right on the nose.

  We beat on up through the Hebridean Islands, west of Scotland, where we managed to get some very nice sailing conditions in the sheltered waters between islands. The Hebrides are more like the rugged, isolated country we both enjoy, so we spent time walking and climbing in the heather-draped hills to harden ourselves up for the Arctic. Our polar trip would not be the daily slog of Amundsen or Peary, trudging towards some distant apex of the globe, but nevertheless our research and our talks with Warren Brown and other modern-day explorers had taught us that only fools go to the ice unprepared.

  We continued north, cruising our way through the Hebrides and up Loch Linnhe to the Caledonian Canal entrance at Fort William. All of this harbour-hopping was in direct contrast to the tactics of the well-known English high-latitude climber and sailor, HW Tilman, whose concise and practical books on Arctic cruising we had both read and re-read. Tilman quoted the captains of American whaling ships, who often did four-year trips, putting into port only when it was absolutely necessary for provisions or water. ‘It is an example I have found it advisable to follow, insofar as avoiding a call at any port on the way out so that the crew have neither the temptation nor opportunity to desert.’

  One very definite aspect of this policy is that one would not be tempted to transit the Caledonian Canal en route to the Arctic. The canal is a four-day saga in itself, a waterway through the Scottish Highlands, the length of Loch Ness and out into the North Sea at Inverness. There are about 30 miles (55.5 kilometres) of canal — some bleak, some beautiful — and, it seems, almost as many lock gates. In spite of our proximity to Loch Ness, the only monster we saw was the charter-fleet operator who sold the diesel in the canal — for twice the going price. Many of the lock-gate operators could also qualify for monsters in their own right, for their reluctance to open the lock gates and ease our pas
sage. A particularly pedantic Customs officer at Fort William held us up for half a day while he tried to decipher our inward clearance from Ireland. Luigi the cat, who strutted the decks with his nose in the air, sniffing out Scottish mice and rabbits and filing their whereabouts in his feline brain for later reference, was the problem. Our man was determined that Luigi should be in quarantine — no matter how many times we pointed out that he was a Scottish cat, even if we were a New Zealand boat. Scottish cat, Kiwi boat, one UK passport, one Kiwi passport … it was all a bit foreign. Maybe we should have changed Luigi’s name to Bruce or John for the transit.

  We had a wonderful sail the 22-nautical-mile (40-kilometre) length of Loch Ness, marred only by the thought of more lock gates ahead, and anchored for the night in a little bay tucked beneath the ruins of Urquhart Castle. The lake holds more freshwater than all the lakes of England and Wales combined and cleaves up to 230 metres deep into the highlands. Anything could be lurking beneath that peat-blackened water. Next morning a fog writhed down the valleys, and the low hills hunched over the loch to heighten the air of mystery.

  Eventually we reached Inverness where, as we approached thelock gates buffeted by the strong currents, the entire staff decided to knock off for a cup of tea.

  I had developed a nervous tic every time I saw a lock gate, and my dreams were full of lock keepers flailing their arms frantically in the River Styx en route to hell. Perhaps a lot of the keepers’ recalcitrance was simply the English working class despising the ‘yachting class’, because most of the keepers were English. Or perhaps our New Zealand flag was too similar to the British ensign, so that the Scots keepers mistook us for an English yacht and were venting their historic hatred of the English. Either way, it might just pay to cruise the canal for its own sake, without a schedule. In a vessel en route to somewhere else, like we were, it was fraught with frustrations.

  Before leaving Bristol, I had written to the Norwegian Sysselmannen (governor) of Svalbard, and his reply, in the form of a small booklet, caught us up in Inverness. One of his recommendations for extended trips ashore in the archipelago was that we carried a sports rifle, of at least .308 calibre, for protection against polar bears. Pressing the point, he added, ‘If attacked by polar bear shoot for the body; if you shoot for the head and miss you will not get another chance.’ With this advice ringing in my head I tramped off to purchase our arsenal.

  To my mind, a gun is something like a reformed madman. Things can go along quite nicely for years until the thing is pointed in the wrong direction and the trigger is pulled, and then it can become a murderer. After a day of rebounding from the gun shop to the police station and back again, I was finally the trepid owner of a nasty-looking BRNO .308 sporting rifle and an official blue permit stating that I was authorized to use it ‘for the purpose of protecting the crew of the yacht Elkouba from attack by polar bear’. I hate myself for it, but I do love to hold guns. The craftsmanship is appealing, the latent energy and the illusion of power and authority — one grows 6 inches (150 millimetres) and takes on an instant immortal-movie-gunman persona in one’s head. They should be banned.

  I imagined the policemen, back at the Inverness station, sniggering into their tea cups and laying odds on the polar bear.

  Inverness is the last big township in Northern Scotland, so we stocked up there with cases of fresh fruit and vegetables, and topped up on other provisions that we might need for an eight-month sojourn in the ice pack if we were accidentally stuck in Norway. Provisioning in Norway is prohibitively expensive and we did not want to buy more than absolute essentials there.

  We were getting close to kick-off time for the Arctic, and the advice of Warren Brown and others about using satellite navigation began to prey on my mind. Unlike many yachtsmen, I do not think that sailing without a satellite navigator qualifies as foolhardiness. The only electronic navigation tool we have in Elkouba is the 24-mile Furuno radar. I had really sweated over parting with the $US1500 it had cost us in the States, but several times in the north, sailing in perpetual shades of fog from haze to pea-souper, it had really paid for itself and saved us time and anguish.

  Celestial navigation has never been easier than it is now. Sextants are lighter and more accurate, and reduction tables for navigation are now simpler and quicker to use and leave less opportunity for mathematical errors than did older tables. To me, celestial navigation — locating your whereabouts on the ocean in relation to the rest of the universe — is an integral part of being at sea. Observing the interaction between human, boat, sea and sky is one of the great satisfactions of the seafaring life. I do not particularly enjoy having a machine flash little green co-ordinates at me, although I do appreciate the convenience it offers for freighters with a schedule to keep and there have been many times when I could have made safe harbour, rather than bobbing about hove-to at sea for the night, had we been using a satnav.

  Most cruising yachts now are skippered by people who have always been owner/skipper and who have learned to sail from books and videos. Sail-handling is made easy with roller-furler devices, and navigation is mostly electronic. Most locations on the yacht-cruising routes are well documented, and worldwide radio or satellite contact is routine. This has engendered a low quotient of seamanship in the average cruising yachtsperson, and a high amount of dependence on shore-side facilities. This is the very antithesis of the self-reliance which seamanship is all about. I’m pleased to have experienced an age when a landfall was an achievement, and a good landfall a source of pride, not merely a vindication of an electronic navigator’s accuracy.

  Seamanship is not a science of definitives, but a test of one’s ability to cope with a wide range of variable conditions. Boat-building technology, design advances and sail-handling aids, along with excellent cartography and electronic navigation tools, have made modern cruising yachts much safer than their predecessors, but have also contributed to a corresponding decline in the seaworthiness of their crews.

  IV ICEWARD BOUND

  Elkouba began her lengthy trip to the ice from Inverness by bashing her way stoically through the short, sharp seas of the Moray Firth until, just after dusk, we followed a well-lit trawler into the port of Wick, at the north-eastern tip of Scotland.

  Tied up among the fishing boats, we found a society of like-minded souls. These hardy northern seafolk employed whisky, mixed with conversation and humour, to ease a condition cured by water elsewhere in the world.

  Wrenching ourselves away from Wick a couple of days later, we continued north to the Orkney Islands. My most memorable experience there, and perhaps I am being unfair, was that of a hairy-legged woman police constable standing above me on the wharf and ordering me to lock up Luigi, the ship’s cat, in case he contracted rabies from the German yacht tied up alongside. Try reasoning with logic like that! I suspect her brother was working as a customs officer at Fort William.

  Out of the capital, Kirkwall, the islands are quite beautiful — low-lying and pastoral — and we cruised our way slowly through them on our way north.

  Our next destination was Fair Isle, a craggy little outpost famed for its woollen wear and bird life. We found the resident fauna to be almost outnumbered by ornithologists; young men, as a rule, easily recognizable by their green parkas, walking boots and the binoculars slung around their necks. Their movements were erratic, as they stopped every few minutes to peer through their binoculars and scribble in scruffy little notebooks. I can’t really comment on their mating habits, but it seemed like there were few hens among them and those that were would have daunted the randiest rooster.

  We sneaked a hot shower at the bird-watch centre, and walked back to Elkouba where we found that an anonymous benefactor had left two freshly caught fish in our cockpit for dinner. On our way back to the boat we had our first encounter with skuas, the birds the islanders call ‘bonksie’. The skuas dive-bomb anyone approaching their nesting area and can hit hard enough to draw blood. It explained that species we were calling the ‘gr
eater yellow-headed ornithologist’ — bird-watchers in construction helmets. After a leisurely dinner, we set sail for Shetland in the soft evening light of the northern summer.

  The Shetland Islands originally belonged to Norway, but were pawned to Scotland by Christian I of Norway and Denmark who needed some ready cash for his daughter’s dowry. A clause in the contract gave future crowned heads of Norway the right to redeem the Shetlands for 210 kilograms of gold or 2310 kilograms of silver, but nobody took it up. The Scottish parliament passed an Act in 1669 to make the islands a crown dependency.

  The Shetlanders’ dialect is a mellifluous (though not always readily decipherable) mix of Norse, Gaelic and English. Most people earn their money from fishing, and the hospitality is overwhelming. After tying up to the dock at the capital, Lerwick, we were presented with the key to the yacht club for hot showers and cold beer. Norwegian and English whaling expeditions and merchant fleets often stopped to recruit personnel in the Shetlands, and until recently, they were the only place in the world where seamanship and boat construction were compulsory subjects for college boys.

  Many Shetlanders have found their way to New Zealand and, on seeing our New Zealand ensign, people often came down to Elkouba with the names and addresses of their relatives in New Zealand to see if we knew them personally. I renewed an acquaintance with one Shetlander who had worked for the Wellington Harbour Board while I had been crew on the scow Success. Oddly enough, it seems, there is quite a flow of people between Shetland and New Zealand, these two clusters of islands at opposite ends of the earth.

  One visitor who came aboard in Lerwick was Sandra Bruce, a New Zealand hairdresser who’d been working in Lerwick when she’d met and married Alistair Bruce 12 years previously. ‘I heard that there was a Kiwi boat in,’ she beamed, ‘so I had to come across and have a look.’ Her New Zealand accent was the first I’d heard in years, and we spent an evening talking about her life in Shetland and Titahi Bay, her New Zealand home.