Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat by Chris Stewart Page B
Authors: Chris Stewart
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started to make its appearance in ever greater numbers.
Gannets are bigger than fulmars and more slender and graceful. They dive spectacularly from a great height; they fold up as they hit the water and down as far as two hundred feet they can give a fish a run for its money. To my mind that should class them as amphibians, although this is not generally conceded. But to see a flock of gannets fishing, plummeting from sixty feet up in the air, racing among the schools of fish and then launching themselves from the waves again for another high dive, is one of the unforgettable sights of the sea. And then there’s the strangeness of the gannet’s cry, for it sounds just like a raven, a sound you associate more with the loneliness of heather-clad moorland than with the rolling wastes of the ocean. “Gark … gark,” they cry.
Gannets fly vast distances but go home to their nests most nights for a kip. Fulmars, on the other hand, are a tougher lot. They are pelagic, which means they live almost entirely at sea. They will go for months, even years, without touching land; indeed the only time they do touch land is when they lay their eggs and rear theiryoung. In the case of the fulmar, she doesn’t lay her first eggs until she’s eight years old, so once a chick leaves the nest it spends the next eight years of life at sea. It’s hard to imagine this companionable creature spending so many years with nowhere to perch for comfort and warmth other than the waves of a high sea.
“If we were off in the southern oceans,” Tom told me one morning, “you’d see albatross, and just the sight of an albatross will wrench your heartstrings. They’re big and graceful and they range over all the oceans of the world, and they live in terrible loneliness as if there really were a curse upon them, just like in the poem.” Sadly, albatross rarely come north of the line, so we didn’t get to spot one, and I fear that a certain restlessness has now descended on my soul—in that special place where we keep our thwarted ambitions.
Along with the bird-watching and sextant studies, Tom and most of the crew had a passion for the Vinland sagas, the ancient Icelandic tales of Leif Eriksson’s discovery of Vinland. Indeed, Tom’s expedition had been premised in part on a desire to follow the journey of Leif Eriksson, who in about AD 1000 set out from Iceland for Greenland, but was blown by storms way to the southwest. As a consequence, Leif was the first European to discover the Americas, which he called Vinland. The saga about his voyage recounts at great length the dastardly exploits of—and I am not making these names up—the unappetizing Ragnar Hairybreeches, the loathsome Erik Bloodaxe, and our hero Leif’s mother-in-law, the redoubtable lady Thorbjorg Ship-Bosom.
For myself, I was never entirely taken with the Vikingsaga and its rawboned fare. Instead, I buried my head in a volume of Edward Lear’s nonsense verse, which I found in the ship’s library. I began with “The Dong with a Luminous Nose,” which I learned by heart during a day’s watch, to entertain Hannah. But it was “The Jumblies” that captured the imagination of everyone onboard, with its chorus:
Far and few, far and few
,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue
,
And they went to sea in a Sieve
.
Being a vintage wooden boat,
Hirta
had a tendency to leak in a heavy sea, so the appositeness of this was lost on nobody. Indeed, it wasn’t long before most of the crew could reel off quotes for appropriate occasions as well as chant the chorus. And so the time fairly zipped by—and in five days we had reached Norwegian waters.
This was, according to Tom, “good passage-making.” We had averaged roughly five knots, which is about the speed you back your car into the garage, or toil uphill on a bicycle slowly. Now you might well consider this and conclude that such a journey is a waste of time, and on the
Gannets are bigger than fulmars and more slender and graceful. They dive spectacularly from a great height; they fold up as they hit the water and down as far as two hundred feet they can give a fish a run for its money. To my mind that should class them as amphibians, although this is not generally conceded. But to see a flock of gannets fishing, plummeting from sixty feet up in the air, racing among the schools of fish and then launching themselves from the waves again for another high dive, is one of the unforgettable sights of the sea. And then there’s the strangeness of the gannet’s cry, for it sounds just like a raven, a sound you associate more with the loneliness of heather-clad moorland than with the rolling wastes of the ocean. “Gark … gark,” they cry.
Gannets fly vast distances but go home to their nests most nights for a kip. Fulmars, on the other hand, are a tougher lot. They are pelagic, which means they live almost entirely at sea. They will go for months, even years, without touching land; indeed the only time they do touch land is when they lay their eggs and rear theiryoung. In the case of the fulmar, she doesn’t lay her first eggs until she’s eight years old, so once a chick leaves the nest it spends the next eight years of life at sea. It’s hard to imagine this companionable creature spending so many years with nowhere to perch for comfort and warmth other than the waves of a high sea.
“If we were off in the southern oceans,” Tom told me one morning, “you’d see albatross, and just the sight of an albatross will wrench your heartstrings. They’re big and graceful and they range over all the oceans of the world, and they live in terrible loneliness as if there really were a curse upon them, just like in the poem.” Sadly, albatross rarely come north of the line, so we didn’t get to spot one, and I fear that a certain restlessness has now descended on my soul—in that special place where we keep our thwarted ambitions.
Along with the bird-watching and sextant studies, Tom and most of the crew had a passion for the Vinland sagas, the ancient Icelandic tales of Leif Eriksson’s discovery of Vinland. Indeed, Tom’s expedition had been premised in part on a desire to follow the journey of Leif Eriksson, who in about AD 1000 set out from Iceland for Greenland, but was blown by storms way to the southwest. As a consequence, Leif was the first European to discover the Americas, which he called Vinland. The saga about his voyage recounts at great length the dastardly exploits of—and I am not making these names up—the unappetizing Ragnar Hairybreeches, the loathsome Erik Bloodaxe, and our hero Leif’s mother-in-law, the redoubtable lady Thorbjorg Ship-Bosom.
For myself, I was never entirely taken with the Vikingsaga and its rawboned fare. Instead, I buried my head in a volume of Edward Lear’s nonsense verse, which I found in the ship’s library. I began with “The Dong with a Luminous Nose,” which I learned by heart during a day’s watch, to entertain Hannah. But it was “The Jumblies” that captured the imagination of everyone onboard, with its chorus:
Far and few, far and few
,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue
,
And they went to sea in a Sieve
.
Being a vintage wooden boat,
Hirta
had a tendency to leak in a heavy sea, so the appositeness of this was lost on nobody. Indeed, it wasn’t long before most of the crew could reel off quotes for appropriate occasions as well as chant the chorus. And so the time fairly zipped by—and in five days we had reached Norwegian waters.
This was, according to Tom, “good passage-making.” We had averaged roughly five knots, which is about the speed you back your car into the garage, or toil uphill on a bicycle slowly. Now you might well consider this and conclude that such a journey is a waste of time, and on the
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