Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat (18 page)

Keeping watch on the forestay was different from being in the cockpit. There was no shelter for a start; you were right out there on the front of the boat, peering keenly into the mist. You had to see the growlers and bergs; it was simply a question of life and death. This made me feel very important, and feeling important kept me good and alert for at least fifteen minutes. But then the intense cold and the tedium of the thing began to kick in. There didn’t seem to be any more growlers in this particular patch of sea. I turned round and grinned at Patrick, who was at the helm. He waved back. Then I jumped up and down a bit, to see if I couldn’t get some circulation going again. Next I leaned my back against the forestay and recited the whole of “The Dong with a
Luminous Nose,” then I did “The Jumblies.” And then I saw the growler.

It was a hundred yards away off the port bow, so it didn’t pose any threat to us. “Growler off the port bow, Pat,” I said in a seamanlike way, mainly in order to give the impression that I was alert and doing my job. We watched it as it bobbed away into the mist. That’s what growlers do: they move with the waves, in contrast to an iceberg, which sits foursquare and serene. Growlers are chips off icebergs or broken bits of pack ice that have fled south on the winds and tides. They tend to be somewhere between the size of a small room and a big house, and they get scattered all over the northern oceans. Of course, to a great ship of iron and steel they barely represent a hazard, but to a small wooden boat like ours a collision with a growler would mean the end of the line for us all.

I resumed my watch; there was nothing to see as we butted on through the mist. I stared and stared as hard as I could, and soon there seemed to be wraiths and plumes of swirling cloud in the enfolding whiteness, and then shadows of gray that might be the walls of soaring icebergs just ahead, or more likely just the play of the breeze in the mist. I looked down into the bow wave to reset my vision. I looked up and there was a growler dead ahead.

“GROWLERDEADAHEADPAT!!” I yelled. “HARD A STARBOARD NOW!”

Patrick swung the wheel hard over, and the growler slipped along the port side. It glowed and gleamed in purest white and turquoise and froze the very air around it. Patrick spun the helm back and the sails took up the wind once more.

“Blimey, that was a close one,” I said, as I wiped the mist from my glasses. “I think it’s your turn up on the front now, Pat. I’m about frozen solid.”

“You’ve another fifteen minutes, by my reckoning.”

I grumbled quietly and wrapped myself tightly around the forestay, peering still into the mist. There was something out there, something enormous.

“WHAT IN THE NAME OF HEAVEN IS THAT, PAT?” I shouted.

“What, where?”

“That bloody great thing lying on the water over there, look at it!”

“Holy mother of God, it’s a whale. It’s a bloody great whale!”

Patrick stood up and looked openmouthed at the apparition, then shouted down the companionway: “Whale ahoy!” Then he felt a little self-conscious about what he’d just shouted and said, “There’s a whale up here, lads, come and have a look,” but this time more quietly.

Now, the whale was not like the dolphins; it wasn’t horsing about, it was much quieter, more dignified. Then it blew, a great wet
whoomph
from its blowhole, and over all the Labrador Sea there spread a great miasma of marine flatulence, a thing with overtones of krill and plankton and seaweed and whole hosts of the fishy animalcules of the northern oceans.

By now everybody was sitting on deck in awed silence. It was as if we had just seen God.

“Pooh,” said Hannah, pinching her nose, then thought better of it and joined in the awe.

The great creature swished its flukes idly and drifted
through the water, easily keeping pace with us. It was bigger even than the boat, probably sixty feet or more. It was a finback, one of the most enormous creatures on the planet. There we were drifting in perfect silence alongside one of the few remaining survivors of the great whales, for man has pursued and hunted these peaceful creatures to the very verge of extinction. I had seen film of the appalling things we do to whales, of the pilot whale cull in the Faroe Islands, where they corral hundreds of these small whales into a shallow bay, using motorboats and nets. Then, when the poor confused creatures find themselves in water too shallow to maneuver, they are set upon and butchered by scores of men wielding axes and flensing hooks. The sea runs literally red with their blood. And this is done not as a matter of survival, nor of necessity, but as a ritual for men to prove their manhood.

Two hundred years of whaling doesn’t seem to have convinced whales of the evil intentions of men, and they have retained their peacefulness and their curiosity. For a long time our finback kept station with the boat, as if it were interested in us. Then eventually it sounded again and dived, leaving us with a flourish of its colossal flukes, shiny, barnacled, and running with seawater.

NIGHT BEGAN TO FALL
as we ran toward the coast of Newfoundland, a deeper, darker night than we had been used to, for the summer was drawing on, and by this time we were a lot farther south. Once again the port and starboard lamps glowed red and green against the mainsail.
The wind had come round behind us at last, and we were loping along in great bounds across a long lazy swell. There was a mood of high anticipation onboard, as after nineteen days at sea it looked like we might at last see land.

Tom was on deck, staring ahead into the falling darkness; I was at the helm with Patrick perched out on the bow. There was still a risk of the occasional growler, and we had recently picked up a signal on our radio direction finder, a series of four beeps followed by a silence, like the flashes and occlusions of a lighthouse. The pattern told us that the beacon was on the coast of northern Newfoundland. Unfortunately, because we couldn’t get another signal, we had no way of establishing exactly how far we were from the coast. We knew the line down which we were sailing to reach the coast, but had no idea of where we were on it. We hadn’t had a reliable sun sight for several days because we had been sailing through mists, probably caused by warm air currents colliding with cold air currents or some such thing.

Anyway, Tom didn’t like it.

“We’re running down onto a lee shore with a big wind up our arse, night falling fast, and no way of knowing how far off we are. It’s a classic recipe for disaster. No one’s going to like this, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to turn around and head back the way we’ve come.”

We looked gloomily into the rushing dark. So near and yet so far. We had all been looking forward so much to the land. On land there were women and there was beer and bars, and flowers and trees and a certain undeniable solidity
to things, which was conspicuously lacking at sea. We all wanted it … and we wanted it tonight.

“Pat,” called Tom to the shadowy figure hanging from the forestay. “I think we’re going to have to beat back out to sea. What do you reckon?”

“Well, I tell you what, skipper: I think you’d be crazy to keep running in toward this coast in the dark. I may be hallucinating out here on the bow, but I keep thinking I can hear the sound of waves crashing onto rocks. We could be fifty miles off … but we could be no more than half a mile away.”

“OK, Chris,” ordered Tom. “Bring her about. Pat, you come back here and haul in the foresail sheets.”

I swung the wheel and the boat described a great curve away from the longed-for land. Tom hauled in the yards and yards of mainsheet, and we resumed our more usual motion of beating hard into an oncoming sea.

And so all the long dark hours of that night we fled from the land, for if there’s anything more terrifying than the fathomless depths of the ocean—and, let’s face it, they’re pretty terrifying—then it’s the hungry rocks of the land. If worldwide there is a big ship lost at sea once a week (for that is the figure), then the figure for ships wrecked on the rocks must be many times that.

At dawn, however, we turned again and ran toward the south. I was asleep when the lookout spied the land, at first the faintest of blue lines on the southern horizon, and by the time I came on deck there was a distinct line of low, green hills. It was still a long way off but we could already smell it. I had thought this was the most fanciful
of notions—the belief that sailors can smell the land long before they see it—but take it from me, you can. We were all on deck in the early morning, bundled up against the cold and sniffing the air like a pack of dogs. I could smell flowers (which is what you’re supposed to be able to smell), and I could also smell bread and women, and cakes and hay. It seemed extraordinary, and I wondered about it for a bit, and came to the conclusion that we were closing with an entire continent, and that from Halifax to Vancouver there were countless bakers baking bread and cakes, and millions of women scented and powdered, and prairies of new-mown hay drying in the August sunshine. All these scents were rising on the cushion of warm air above the land and falling to earth over the cooler sea, where they drove mariners insane with longing for the loveliness of the land.

N
OW, THE IMPORTANT THING
when you make a landfall, as I well knew from my experience in Greece, is that your boat looks good. The wind and the tides were on our side and we were able to make our approach into the bay of Quirpon all standing, which means with all the sails up and looking pretty damn good for the benefit of any nautical-minded folk who might be watching. At the last minute we rounded up, dropped the bags, and, with the skipper standing proud at the wheel, edged in to the long wooden jetty. Mike sprang across the narrowing gap with the head rope; I took the stern line and we made fast to a couple of bollards.

Then we climbed back onboard and joined in the general preparations for going ashore. This meant folding the sails tight and neat in a “harbor stow,” flaking down all the ropes and lines, and generally tidying up the boat.
Then we washed and shaved in salt water from buckets on the deck, and finally dressed ourselves in clean, dry finery for that great moment when we would march along the dock and greet the natives. It was pretty exciting for Mike and me, as neither of us had set foot on the soil of the New World before, and we were unsure what to expect.

On the jetty were a number of men all dressed more or less alike in dungarees, thick checked shirts, and baseball caps. They were bent intently over what they were doing … mending nets, I shouldn’t wonder, as it’s fishing that makes things tick around these parts. Not one of them so much as raised his head at our arrival; to our surprise, and indeed chagrin, they took not the slightest bit of notice. It was hard to believe: you’d have thought that the arrival out of the northeast of a boat that looked like something out of a romantic historical drama, with all her sails set and flags flying, would have excited a certain interest. But no—these were the most phlegmatic of men.

“Right,” said Tom. “I guess we’d better go and make ourselves known to these good people.”

We all climbed over the rail and onto the dock. Together we took two swaggering strides and promptly keeled right over … all of us in a chaotic and undignified heap. At this, one or two of the fishermen almost imperceptibly raised their heads and mumbled something with the faintest play of a smile. We picked ourselves up and, with circumspection and intense concentration, stumbled on. You get your sea legs, but when you’ve been at sea for days on end you lose your land legs, and so our first longed-for taste of terra firma was letting us down;
the land was rolling and lurching, so it seemed, all over the place.

Tom staggered toward one of the fishermen. “Good morning to you. We’ve just come from Iceland …” He left a pause for the enormity of this statement to sink in.

The man looked with great deliberation up at him from beneath the peak of his baseball cap, while we wobbled about on the dock behind our skipper. Eventually, after perhaps a minute, he said: “Iceland, huh? I guess that’s a mighty long way off.”

We were clearly in a land where words and ideas were accorded their full due dignity; snappy badinage was not what these people did.

“Yup,” continued Tom. “Nineteen days and headwinds all the way.” Behind Tom we simpered modestly as one, but this statement failed to elicit a response. Then the man rose to his feet and held out his hand.

“Y’all welcome to Quirpon,” he enunciated.

Wobbling still, but wreathed in grins of jolly bonhomie, we clambered over one another in our eagerness to shake our fisherman’s hand. This was a big moment.

Tom continued: “I guess we’d better report our arrival to customs and immigration.”

Our man mulled this over for a bit, while we busied ourselves looking around at what we could see of Quirpon. It didn’t look like the sort of place that would have a customs and immigration: there was the jetty and a few sheds of a lowly sort, and a clapboard shack or two. In confirmation of which, our new friend said: “Ain’t no customs and ’magrayshun in Quirpon.” Then, by way of explanation: “Jus’ too darn small.”