Farewell Mr Puffin

by Paul Heiney

  ‘Hail, then, thou great mysterious Pow’r

  Who guid’st us through affliction’s hour!

  Thou who, delighting to dispense

  The bless’d reward of innocence…’

  The women of Staithes, who traditionally wore ‘hood bonnets, bed gowns and skirts, and stockings without feet and old shoes’, had a particular reputation for hardiness. When coal ships arrived off Staithes, it was the girls who took the day off school to haul the coals ashore. One visitor to Staithes in 1904 reported:

  ‘The men were for the most part watching their womenfolk at work. [The men] were mere spectators in the arduous work of hauling the cobles one by one on to the steep banks of shingle … with a last “heave ho” and with casual male assistance, the women laid hold of the nets … and prepared them for stowing in the boat again.’

  Another common sight was the ‘flither pickers’, swarms of women who worked their way along the rocky foreshore gathering limpets to be used as bait. Given the exposed nature of this coast, and little natural protection for Staithes, loss of life was common. Writing in 1896, one resident left and moved to the West Country, saying, ‘I can’t stand constant tragedy any more’.

  ***

  ‘What’s pigeon got to do with anything?’ Ant eventually asked.

  I explained I’d been reading this local history book and it revealed that it was an old tradition in Staithes to take a pigeon, remove its heart, pierce it with needles and burn it over a charcoal fire. This would bring better luck to the boat. Ant shrugged and dropped sausages into the pan. No sense of romance.

  There were aspects of the boat that were beginning to niggle just a little. Having been completely taken apart over the preceding winter and put back together again by the lads at the boatyard, I guessed that not everything would have fallen back into the correct place, and I was being proved correct. It’s not that they hadn’t done their job properly, it is simply that everything about a boat becomes so personalised that your relationship with it is as intimate as with your bedroom drawers. You couldn’t expect a boatyard worker, no matter how well intentioned, to recreate that kind of familiar relationship. The slides that hold the mainsail to the mast didn’t look as though they were sitting quite right, and the mainsheet, with which you let the mainsail in and out, wasn’t running freely and I simply couldn’t figure where it was binding. At the back of the boat, on the stern, sat my faithful self-steering, which relieves me of the burden of having to hold the wheel and steer. It takes its power from the wind and uses it to hold the boat on course. It is as good as having another crew member on board who asks no questions, tells no lies, neither eats nor sleeps and never grumbles. On my Atlantic odyssey to Cape Horn and back, this tangle of stainless steel and string steered me non-stop for over 60 days as I made my way homewards, sailing alone apart from this wind-driven robot clinging for dear life to the stern of the boat, never letting go and never letting me down. But over the winter I had completely forgotten what it looked like and I found myself viewing it with uncertain eyes, which it must have sensed because somewhere off Whitby it started to allow the boat to wander, something it had never done before. It clearly didn’t like being ignored and was teaching me a lesson. So I gazed at it for quite a while, checking that I had correctly attached its lines and that its windvane and paddle were free to move. After a dose of flattering attention, it seemed to behave a little better.

  We burst into welcome sunlight, dazzling us after days of gloom. Ahead, seen clearly now, was the old industrial harbour of Blyth, where Ant would be allowed to jump ship. It has to be said that this is a place that needs all the uplifting sunshine it can get. We passed between the high, latticed wooden piers, threatening by virtue of their size and strength, through which the once bustling coal, shipbuilding, salt and fishing trade used to pass. Now it’s all wind turbines and paper imports from Scandinavia. Tucked away in a corner, out of sight, you find the Royal Northumberland Yacht Club, which sits within a dreary industrial quarter embraced by sinister wire fencing and heavy steel gates requiring codes to give access. Yet the clubhouse, looking like the relic of a pirate ship, is in fact the oldest floating timber lightship still surviving. It was one of 54 lightships on this coastline, flashing light signals to passing ships, marking dangers. No lightships are now left hereabouts, all of them replaced by less characterful solar-powered light buoys. She was built with the strength of a fighting ship, double planked with three-inch-thick teak timbers on heavy frames of oak. A stout ship for a tough job.

  What misery life must have been for the men who worked these lightships before the word ‘automation’ was even invented. This remnant of a lightship, now the clubhouse, would have been manned by 11 men, living rough in close quarters with a captain, mate, lamplighters and fog signal drivers. The fog signal! Imagine what life must have been like for those trying to get sleep while the fog horn belched its deafening roar every 30 seconds, or whatever the signal happened to be. Men were paid a supplement for the hours the signal was sounding and judging by our recent experience it could have been bleating for days on end. For me, no money could compensate for a roaring earful minute after minute through a long, chilly and sleepless night. But uppermost in those men’s minds must have been the nagging thought that these were engineless craft, towed out to sea and anchored to mark rock or shoals close by. In the event of a failure of the anchors in an extreme storm, the men would be helpless as the dangers they were marking turned into their nearest enemy. The thought of it must eventually pull you down and memoirs by lightsmen do not portray them as a happy bunch.

  Blyth looked sad, and its people looked even sadder. I watched them in Asda as they hobbled round the aisles, propped up by their trollies stuffed with low-value, poor nutrition food, turning over everything looking for the price, panning for the gold that is the bright yellow sticker offering a bargain. I’m no doctor, but many of the far-from-happy shoppers looked unwell. Is there a disease of which the only symptom is greyness? Perhaps it’s called poverty, for which we are still seeking a cure. On the pavements they buzz along on their mobility scooters with faraway looks on their weary faces; people with nothing to look forward to. Even the young look old before their time. ‘It’s where the folk from Newcastle come to get their drugs,’ the taxi driver told me, bringing me back to the boat. Everything about the place spoke of ‘getting by’, of surviving, limping from one day to the next. I spent a morning strolling around, taking an egg on toast in a cafe stuffed with hefty builders buying their stores for the day – cans of sugary drinks, pies, pasties and chocolate, breathing in to get their bellies through the narrow doorway. Down side streets, young lads cowered in the entrances to shuttered shops, following me with their sunken eyes, wondering if I was a dealer, or plain-clothes police officer, perhaps. On the steps of the Post Office was a young woman who looked so sad and helpless, so clearly forced by poverty into a life she had no desire to lead, that I felt great pity for her. You could see it written across her face. She was simply broken.

  ***

  There comes a time in every cruise where you cross an invisible boundary and sail from one world into another, and I sensed a frontier ahead far more defined than the arbitrary line twixt England and Scotland that I was soon to cross. I was sailing on my own now and had to step up into a higher gear of self-sufficiency. I am no stranger to it, but it takes a little while to adjust when you have been sailing with crew. The temptation lingers to shout, ‘Can you just…’ before you realise there is no one else to lend a hand.

  I sailed out between those daunting wooden stagings of Blyth Harbour and turned the boat northwards, but this time in bright sunshine, helped along the way by a puffy and welcome south-westerly wind. This would be the first time for over 18 months that I had sailed alone and all the muscles, both physical and mental, that solo sailing demands had long since turned to jelly.

  The Farnes are 15 islands at high water, which turn into 20 at low as underwater rocks emerge, and despit
e their modesty have made a huge imprint in our history, from Lindisfarne and its monastery and Gospels to Grace Darling, Victorian heroine of the Longstone lighthouse that stands guard. As with all such bleak, barren and storm-ravaged lumps of rock along this coastline, the religious took to them in a big way. One supposed resident, Saint Cuthbert, in 651 introduced special laws to protect eider ducks, thus making it probably the first ever piece of wildlife legislation. Now the supposedly saintly RSPB is in charge of these islands. The good news from my point of view, as a seeker of puffins who was still living with the painful disappointment of not seeing any so far, was that a few years ago a survey showed there to be 36,000 breeding pairs on the Farne Islands. Surely the puffin voyage would begin here and that snub they had given me so far would now be remedied.

  I have seen puffins before on the Farne Islands, plenty of them, when I came to film them here as part of a television assignment. I was slightly shocked at the time by the casual way in which the National Trust wardens simply pushed their hands into the burrows and pulled out a chick, like a magician might pull a rabbit from a hat. But the wardens knew what they were doing, for the chicks didn’t seem to mind, even when we thrust a camera at them. There was something so trusting about the way the chicks gave in to the firm grasp of a human being, and impressive how they instantly resumed their former lives once released, shrugging off what I assumed would have been a traumatic experience. But I suppose a creature built to weather winter storms in the North Atlantic is made of strong stuff, and a bit of handling by a lad from the National Trust was all part of a day’s work – water off a puffin’s back.

  The way puffins build their burrows displays great architectural skills, employing beaks rather like the way we use a pick-axe, while their clawed feet do a lot of shovelling. Cleverly, they build into the burrow an immediate turn on entering, like going right or left down a corridor, presumably so that hungry gulls can’t make easy picking of the chicks. The lads from the National Trust reported that if you try to put your hand down a burrow in which a mother and chick are resident, the mother immediately turns her back to the burglar’s hand rather than trying to peck it. Their instinct is to hide, not attack. Scientists have observed the way the chicks feed. The adult returns to the nest with a beak full of small fish, which might be sand eels, small herring or capelin, all spilling out of the sides of their mouth as if, rather like a greedy child, they have bitten off more than they can chew. Capelin are unfortunate little fish, always destined to die to satisfy the hunger of others, in particular the greedy cod as well as seabirds, the puffin among them. The most remarkable thing about the sight of a puffin beak overflowing with fish, which cannot fail to win the hardest of hearts, is the way in which the fish are often packed in neat order, head to tail, like the contents of a tin of sardines. Does the puffin have an innate sense of tidiness, or is it simply more efficient that way? It is one of many things about puffins that has baffled science so far, but there is a theory, so far unproved but one that makes sense, and it is that when the puffin first spots a shoal of small fish, it heads towards them. Sensing danger, the fish then line up in straight lines, head to tail, and dash forward like an army sprinting in formation. The speedier puffin, catching up with them, first tacks in one direction and grabs a fish, then tacks through 90 degrees and grabs another. The puffin knows that it can’t capture them from dead astern because there would be no way of holding them in the beak – they have to lie widthways. By taking one from the left and the next from the right, that’s how you get your beak full of fish, neatly head to tail. I like the idea of a puffin speeding underwater, tacking hard, like we do, to make progress. Also, that dazzling beak that the puffin sports (you can tell the age of a puffin by observing the ridges on its nose: no ridge means the bird is under two years old, one ridge and it is fully grown) is as intriguing on the inside as the outside, for its mouth is lined with backward-facing spines that prevent any captured fish from escaping.

  Once caught and brought back to the burrow, rather than dropping them and telling the family to sort their own supper, the chicks take them directly from the parent’s beak. The call for ‘dinner’s up!’ seems to be a gentle clicking sound. The chicks swallow the fish whole, gobbling them as fast as they can, but the impatient parent soon gets fed up and drops the catch on the floor of the burrow and sort of shrugs, ‘Oh, get your own dinner! I’ve had enough of standing here.’ Then off the parent goes, back to sea to catch more feed for the ever hungry chicks. It was reported that in the 19th century, on the Isle of Man, puffin flesh was considered closer to fish than meat and so could be eaten during Lent.

  ***

  The Farne Islands change dramatically as the rocks cover and uncover and I was far from certain if I was steering into the favoured anchorage, called the ‘Kettle’, or into a rocky trap that might ensnare my keel if I got it wrong. I have a modern aid that shows a chart on a small screen with a dot indicating my current position, but even relating that to what I could see around me was not always easy. So I crept in like a cat stalking a mouse, trying to exude confidence, bidding good day to the skippers of the tripper boats that were moored up while their passengers went ashore before returning them back home to Seahouses for fish and chips. I bet they all saw puffins, having paid good money. Perhaps the puffins knew they had bought a ticket and I hadn’t.

  Anchoring when alone always ends up with you sprinting forwards as if your life depends on it, which it might, actually. You get your boat into the position you want it to come to rest, bring it to a standstill with a burst of reverse gear, then like a bullet from a gun you dash to the bow to release the anchor, which then rattles to the seabed. The stronger the breeze, the speedier you must be or the boat will be easily blown out of position. You can now take a breath as the anchor bites into the seabed and allows the wind to take charge and blow you backwards. When the slack in the anchor chain has been taken up, there is a jerk as the anchor digs in and the bow ends up pointing into the wind. You now watch the shore carefully to be certain you are not ‘dragging’ backwards because the anchor hasn’t dug in for some reason, but once you have satisfied yourself that you are secure you turn once again to the vital work of putting the kettle on.

  I was on my way to the galley when the depth sounder caught my eye. We had drifted into a patch of water insufficient to allow us to float when the tide was low in a few hours’ time. Up came the anchor and the process began all over again. But the anchor did not come as smoothly as it should and jammed in the electric windlass. I sprinted back to the wheel and gunned the engine to drive us forward to prevent us piling up on the rocks behind. Then a dash forward to free the anchor, back to the wheel to drive us forward a little more, back to the bow with a spanner to free the chain. This ballet was being closely followed by an amused tripper-boat skipper, who asked if I needed any help. Just at that moment, the anchor chain came free, the chain rattled to the seabed, and calm descended once again.

  My first visitor was a seal, slinking its shy way past me, possibly thinking I might have a juicy herring I could sling in its direction – a trick employed by tripper boats to guarantee their punters a bit of wildlife. But this seal sensed the only fish I had on board was a tin of tuna and gave me a look of disgust when nothing was forthcoming. Terns flew high in the sky, squealing their warnings, reminding us that this is their place and all intruders are at risk of a severe pecking on the head: the advice is to wear a stout hat.

  The tide ebbed and the rocks around grew higher, till we were almost enclosed in perfect shelter. There can be no greater calm than that of a perfect evening safe at anchor, with no threat from wind or wave. At sunset the seals on the outer rocks started to moo and bark, the Longstone lighthouse came to life and its beam swept the islands like one of those sabre lances seen in space movies, flashing every 20 seconds its warning of danger, or signal of comfort, depending on your position at the time.

  The air, though, was undeniably thick with the corrosive stink of bird
shit. It was piled high on every rock, baked hard in the sun then melting in the rain to release once again its suffocating stench. The poor old boat smelled like a public toilet whose blockage had not been attended to for many weeks.

  Sitting in the cockpit, propped on cushions, watching the rotating beam of the Longstone light, was the perfect place for providing the required atmosphere for watching puffins. I put the binoculars within reach and waited. As dusk turned to darkness, surely the little creatures would poke those glorious beaks out of their burrows and have a buzz around just to see what was going on. I waited, and waited. It fell completely dark and no puffin had I seen. Not a single one of the 36,000 could be bothered to pay me a visit.

  Somewhat saddened, like a child who had been promised lions at the zoo but saw none, I climbed into my bunk. It stank awfully of stale lavatories, birds and fishy seals. Everything did.