by Paul Heiney
And now the navigation must start, for the places through which you can sail in this part of the North Sea are narrow, yet as well defined as the lanes on a motorway. To a casual observer gazing out from the shore, it might appear as a vast lake over which you might sail in whichever direction you wished. The truth is that it is not unlike tiptoeing through a minefield. Where the tide runs fast the water is deep, but where it slows and drops its cargo of silt it creates shallow sandbanks that might not have insufficient water over them to allow you to float, especially at low tide. Also, ‘sandbank’ is a deceiving word, for it implies something as soft as the beach at Bournemouth. In fact, the North Sea sandbanks are as hard as iron and to run into one of them in a yacht at speed would be not unlike driving into a concrete wall. If you were unlucky and a turbulent sea had been running, each wave would pick you up and drop you with the force of a piledriver on the hard sand beneath your keel. The crunch would be sickening, wreckage the likely outcome. So you navigate with great care, follow the buoys that mark the deep water and the dangers and if you have to ‘switch lanes’ you do more than just look over your shoulder and head off in any old direction; you check the chart, keep an eye on the depth sounder, look for a change in the colour of the water, observe the surface of the sea. All these provide vital clues. Sailing is as much about looking as it is about doing.
With the ropes coiled and stowed and the fenders put away and Wild Song tidy once again, the kettle was placed on the gas flame to commence its never-ending comfort-giving. I have often thought that the kettle and the stove are every bit as important to safety as lifejackets and flares and all the other things we carry. The hissing of the gas and bubbling of the boiling water are the background music of this boat.
Like all departures, it was a relief when it was over. I remain convinced that the worst part of any voyage is the first five minutes or the last, for this is when time is spent in the hard concentration of either getting away in one piece or successfully coming back. The number of times I have done this are probably now beyond counting, but on a safe return it always crosses my mind that I might just have got away with it, but might not be so lucky next time. I believe that about all my voyages, especially the one that was to come.
Ant asked me for the course.
I shouted back. ‘To the land of the Vikings, towards the ice, to the land of volcanos and cod. And most of all, to see the world of the puffins.’
He wasn’t impressed by my theatricality. ‘Roughly north, then,’ he replied grumpily.
2
The Yorkshire coast
Why sail to Iceland, apart from the obvious joy of seeing puffins along the way? Or perhaps to find out what all the fuss is about. Everyone wants the Iceland ‘experience’, whatever that might be. As wasps to a cracked jar of jam, tourists have mounted an invasion of military strength on this little volcanic island, which lies just short of the Arctic Circle with a meagre total population of only 335,000 people – roughly the same as Coventry. If this tourist assault were a military invasion, the Icelanders would now be seriously outnumbered, given that at the last count (2017) they were just short of two million visitors a year. At least there’s plenty of room for them, with a population density of just nine people per square mile – it’s hardly shoulder to shoulder in Iceland. Why do all these tourists go there? And why now?
Remoteness? Wildness? The feeling of being on the edge of a different world? Or perhaps to see a rugged landscape shaped out of black, spewed lava, which is so jaw-droppingly mesmerising that your mouth might never close again.
It’s like taking a stroll on the moon. There are raging rivers running faster than the wildest Icelandic horse, still and deeply dark lakes, glacial valleys, towering sea cliffs. This is the world of high-energy brochure-speak, where there are simply not enough adjectives to go round.
But all these things were there long before tourism was invented, so why do they get the attention now? Thirty years ago, going to Iceland was considered an expedition, not a holiday. What’s changed? Might it be because tour operators have made it so very easy for us to poke our noses into every corner of the globe, giving us a thirst for the distant, the rich and the exotic? How we’ve gorged on what they’ve offered. But have things changed a bit now the future holds so many uncertainties? Have we ditched the doughnuts and put ourselves on a more sparse, less luxurious diet of thrill-seeking? Have we been carted around a five-star world for too long and now feel the need to take steps on our own in order to feel a bit less safe, organised and pampered? If you want a fleeting taste of life on the edge, Iceland is the place to go. I wonder if people have decided it’s time to chew on a raw carrot of an experience, rather than sup on the truffled broth that much of world tourism has become.
Cruising sailors who voyage to remote places, like Iceland, think of themselves as travellers, not tourists, not led by anybody’s hand. We are more like hikers, climbers or cyclists than holidaymakers, all free spirits blown by the wind; that’s the gang we belong to and we go our own way, solve our own problems, expect nothing laid on for us. We expect no support systems (certainly not in Iceland) and so we connect with communities in a completely different way to the throng who arrive by air. That’s not to say we think of ourselves as better than them, just different. Perhaps we feel a little pity for them, though; sad that they can’t get the perspectives that we enjoy, or the glimpses into the real lives of communities that we meet as we sail through. You can make real friends very quickly in small Icelandic harbours if you need to go shopping for engine oil, gaskets or plungers to unblock your boat’s lavatory, but there’s little real connection if you’re only buying a souvenir puffin and a plastic Viking helmet. So that’s one reason I wanted to sail to Iceland – to see the undoubted wildness and majesty of this place but on my terms and to my timetable, and to meet its people face to face, shaking hands with them as one who, like them, has a relationship with the sea.
There is another reason. I simply love the smell of the north wind. I love anything with the word ‘north’ in it. I adore the air that blows in northern parts for its freshness and its tang. I can sup on it as if it were a glass of the finest claret. The true north wind is the tastiest of all and best when it is close to frigid. That damp, cloudy waft that covers England when the wind is from the south-west, a wind that has travelled across the warm, muggy waters of the mid Atlantic, tastes stale to me. It’s a grubby kind of breeze, a wind that feels as if it hasn’t washed its hands. It clings and makes me sweat and wraps itself around me like a warm sweater that I don’t want to be wearing but can’t pull off. It dulls the mind, kills any inspiration, and squeezes every last bit of ambition out of me. I just want to go to bed till it has passed. If there is one word that fills me with dread, it is when the weather forecast talks of ‘mild’. It is a hideous word and I never speak it.
The writer CS Lewis found comfort in things northern while coming to terms with the death of his mother:
‘Pure “Northernness” engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity … and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago. … And with that plunge back into my own past, there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country…’
To understand and be inspired by the idea of ‘north’ requires you to think of it as your ‘own country’. And I most certainly do. Those who see it as being only cold, bleak and barren will never understand why there is a spirituality to be found by heading in the direction of north. Let the wind swing away from south and I am instantly reborn. The air now becomes clear and in that clarity landscapes have a renewed sharpness, and leave a more profound impression as detail and contrast emerges. Instead of the murk that hangs like a net curtain across the view, the window is now wide open and we can s
ee for miles and miles. My thoughts are clearer and crisper too; my mind clears of damp fog. The north wind is demanding of energy, though. To cope with it, your stride must lengthen and your arms swing that bit further to keep you warm, so the blood flows faster and the brain’s mechanisms shift up a gear. Eating food becomes more urgent, returning it to its rightful position in our lives as a necessity: food you really need, rather than just fancy, is the finest tasting. Everything improves when the north wind blows, and when it drifts back towards the south things are in decline and I get miserable again, my energy drowned in sweat, and the body and mind go limp like a mouldering lettuce. Miserable stuff is a south wind. I bet puffins don’t like it much either.
***
We had been at sea for almost 12 hours, stumbling along slowly with only a light breeze. Darkness had fallen; the single light at the top of the mast had been switched on to betray our position to other ships. It was the only light visible, till Ant spotted something.
‘What’s that buoy ahead?’ he shouted from behind the wheel. He had spotted a navigation mark sending us a flashing signal in the night. I asked him to count the flashes, carefully. ‘Lots of flashes, I think, and then a long one.’ Not the precise answer I required. I turned to the chart.
‘Smiths Knoll, probably,’ I replied. This lonely navigation mark, 30 or so miles north-east of Great Yarmouth and once a lightship, is now a floating lattice tower, painted yellow and black, with cones on top to indicate to which side it should be left to guarantee safety. We saw none of this in the darkness, other than the flashing of its white light – six quick flashes and then a long one – the characteristic of a mark that you should pass to the south. The Smiths Knoll buoy marks the southern end of a long finger of treacherous sand, one of many that cling like a necklace round the top edge of the bulge of East Anglia, and I would not be sorry to put those sandbanks behind us and sail into clear water. Their names are intriguing, and in no small part romantic, hereabouts – there’s Little Dotty, Haisboro’ Tail, Indefatigable Bank, Outer Silver Pit. But for all the romance they are not nice places to be, and far less inviting than their beguiling names would suggest. The water here churns as Thames Estuary meets North Sea and the tides carry you into places you don’t want to be. The sea looks open and free but the submerged dangers are ever close and, like crocodiles, they can spring from the depths and devour you before you even see them coming. Let it be over soon, I thought, as I turned up my collar and sat behind the wheel, wondering how long it was before it was Ant’s turn to stand watch. I looked at my watch. It’s always longer than you think.
Do I love the coastal waters of East Anglia? I find that I can wax lyrical about the romance of them, but I’m not certain I believe it. As the North Sea was the first bit of coastline I saw as a child, and since it was the Thames Estuary where I had my first sailing adventures, and since I live by it and see its waters nearly every day, then I ought to adore it. But there are times when the murky brown of the churning sea, the shallowness, the spitefulness of its tides drive me crazy and leave me longing for the deep blue of our western coastal waters. So do I love it or hate it? Depends. At this particular moment I would not be sorry to see the back of it.
A shiver ran down my spine. ‘Time to put the kettle on again?’ I got the usual supportive reply, heard the gas burst into hissing life, soon to be followed by the sweetest music of the whistling kettle.
I could have done with a little shut-eye with a long night ahead of us, but the trouble is that there is no stretch of safe, clear water round here. Danger lurks. Even when you are past the sandbanks, the waters between East Anglia and the mouth of the River Humber have in recent years become more industrial estate and less North Sea, where it can feel both desolate and crowded at the same time. It is the land of gloomy, silent gas rigs, which drill deep to deliver gas to a massive shore station at Bacton on the Norfolk coast through which pass millions of cubic metres of gas a day. Beneath us, unseen, lay a web of pipelines linking rigs, gas fields and the shore, some stretching to the continent as part of that tangle of pipework and politics that allows us to suck gas from as far away as Russia.
For the navigator, it presents one more calculation in the already concentrated business of sailing the North Sea. Rigs have to be avoided – I think 500 metres is the exclusion zone – and if you stray too close, which is easy to do if you are being swept by the Humber tides, the detached voice of a guard ship skipper will boom over the VHF radio asking where you are going and what your intentions are. It is all conducted in civilised maritime fashion but the message is clear: ‘Stay clear of my bloody rigs.’
We came abreast the mouth of the River Humber, yet another of the east coast’s lethal places. It is famously a maze of shifting sands and fast-flowing tides; the change in the sandbanks and the channels is often so rapid and unpredictable that the pilots who direct massive ships to the oil terminals on the south shore move the navigation marks on a weekly basis.
A little bit of the River Humber flows through me too. Early in my working life, besotted with the idea of broadcasting, I came to Hull, 30 miles inland on the north shore of the river, to help open one of the BBC’s early local radio stations. At the time, it was not considered the most desirable of places to work. The old joke was doing the rounds – the River Humber is the arsehole of England and Hull is 40 miles up it! But despite the poor pre-publicity, I remember that for my 20-year-old self it was one of the most exciting periods of my life as I surfed a steep learning curve, turning me into technician and broadcast entertainer at the same time. It was totally unregulated, other than by an expected dilute kind of Reithian approach. The truth was that London bosses had no idea where Hull was and didn’t care, and as long as there were no complaints they were happy. The people of Hull, on the other hand, were ecstatic. This was a time when the world was turning its back on this once prosperous city; the fishing industry was soon to become extinct. It was the period when we were fighting the cod wars with Iceland (of which more later) and the writing was on the wall for the massive fleets of Hull-based trawlers. The glory days were over and the people knew it, so anyone who gave them the slightest attention was going to be welcomed – which we were, with open arms.
Hull fishermen were known as the ‘three-day millionaires’ because they were only ashore for three days at a time before scuttling back to the distant, northern fishing grounds. If the trip had been a profitable one, the celebrations required three full days of partying, the highlight of which was a drunken Sunday lunchtime in a fisherman’s club with a stripper, before being carried back to their ships at the end of the day. Then it was back to sea, threading the Humber once again, turning left at Spurn Point and making for the northern fishing grounds. Behind them they left the shoreside workers who sorted fish and mended nets, and the ‘bobbers’ who helped unload the fish, bobbing out of the way as the baskets they were packed in swung through the air between ship and shore. It was all in its final death throes when I was there. The disappearance of three trawlers in quick succession in 1968 with a loss of 58 lives helped to knock the stuffing out of the place. I remember Hull as a sad and increasingly pointless spot, unloved and forgotten.
But the arrival of its own radio station showed that someone, somewhere, cared and we were taken into their hearts. Being young, all I wanted to do was play records, like a real DJ, and be famous, and couldn’t fathom all that public service stuff the BBC insisted on, like council meetings and the local magistrates’ court. ‘Chirpy Chirpy, Cheep Cheep’ was my kind of anthem. Thank God that broadcasting dissipates the instant it emerges and doesn’t hang around forever like a cinema film or a book. Whatever tripe I spouted evaporated the instant it hit the air, and for that I am grateful. It was only ever so much hot air.
***
Spurn Point, unseen in the poor visibility, started to bear south of west and we were clear of the shallow mazes, relieved to be making progress. Deeper water lay ahead, and more relaxed navigation. We had been sail
ing on and off in a faltering breeze, suffering from the rattle sails can make as they slat to and fro when there is not enough wind to fill them. The engine kept up speed when necessary.
By dawn, the visibility was even worse; thick and claggy droplets of cold water were falling from the rigging, giving us even less chance of seeing the shore. Just before sunrise is always a bleak time on a boat, and far removed from any wistful, lyrical ideas of ‘ah, the dawn at sea’. It is deeply damp and eternally chilly, you are tired and breakfast seems a long way away after a night of broken sleep. I avoid a dawn watch at sea if I can.
The new breeze, rather than heralding clearance, brought with it even thicker fog, which was quite the reverse of what I’d expected. I had hoped to see this stretch of Yorkshire coast, which meant so much to me as a child, from the deck of my own boat, and would have been proud to do so. There is a broad, sweeping bay stretching from the Humber to Bridlington and onwards to Flamborough Head where the low, crumbling and fast-eroding coastline gives way to the impregnable chalk cliffs at Bempton, the tallest in England. I have a fondness for it that I will never lose. Childhood holidays were spent here. My first remembered maritime experience was as a six-year-old in a wooden rowing boat with my Uncle Jack, tooling round Bridlington Harbour unaware that the pleasure boat, the substantial wooden-sided Bridlington Queen, was heading directly towards us. The concerned face of a seaman, who was clad in a fisherman’s Guernsey, urgently peered down at us from what seemed to be an immensely high bow. ‘Pull on your port oar!’ he urged us. He might as well have been speaking in a foreign tongue for all we understood him. Port? Which was that? We laughed about that for days. That boat seemed vast to me, as huge as the Queen Mary, although I imagine she was really quite small. She sank in 1966 after hitting a rock to the north of Bridlington Harbour and when ferry boats were sent out to rescue the passengers, everyone on board was saved without even getting their feet wet. But she was not the pleasure boat of which I was most fond; it was the Boy’s Own that captured my heart. I sensed even as a child that there was something I later understood to be a class divide. The Boy’s Own was more the blue-collar boat and, instinctively, I felt more at home there. The Boy’s Own was the boat that people like me, from working-class Sheffield, went to sea in, while the Bridlington Queen was probably stuffed with stuck-ups from Leeds. The likes of us Sheffielders didn’t mix with Leeds folk, most of whom, thankfully, preferred Scarborough. Anyway, the Boy’s Own was my favourite and I loved her cream hull, and especially the accordion player in whose memory I still play recorded accordion music on Wild Song to this day. Most precious, though, for a boy, was being able to stand in the companionway and sniff the boozy air and glimpse the exotic goings-on in the bar below and gaze upon the mysterious things that grown men did down there. A few years ago, a television programme gave me the chance to drive the Boy’s Own. Yes, she’s still there and I steered her! I couldn’t have been more chuffed if I’d been a train spotter slung on to the footplate of the Flying Scotsman itself. Having said that, she was a bit of a bitch to steer, with a stiff and heavy wheel that required her to be driven every inch of the way. And the smell of stale beer rising from the below decks bar didn’t seem as exotic as it did 50 years ago. Much gets lost in the passing of time.