Farewell Mr Puffin

by Paul Heiney

  I caught a dawn flight from Luton and a few hours later I was crunching my way down what was the now familiar cinder track to the clubhouse. My heart in my mouth. Would the poor, neglected boat’s batteries be flat, the water pipes burst after freezing, the engine seized? I had thought through all these disasters on the outward flight and decided what I would do if any of them had actually occurred, expecting that all of them probably would. Even when I got there, a thousand problems crossed my mind: what if they’d changed the locks and I couldn’t get into the clubhouse? What if I managed to find the girl in the workshop above the supermarket who said she would give me a card key to the pontoon and it didn’t work? My panic was all-consuming.

  And pointless. Wild Song was as good as the day I left her, if untidy. You will remember I had ended the previous season with bruising sufficient to make a hospital doctor blanch, and every movement was a painful effort. After the Lad had fled for his plane, Alan and I motored the ten miles round from Reykjavík, spending a mystical early morning on a totally calm sea. It was so haunting that neither of us spoke, just looked out to sea. The sky was steely grey and the sea a similar shade, making it impossible to discern where sea and sky met. We were sailing in a bowl of silvery greyness with no horizon, and the artist in Alan’s soul lit up.

  Once back in Hafnarfjörður, we took the boat to bits, removing sails, folding them, remembering a cabbage that was lurking in a locker, and some leftover milk. No matter how carefully you lay up a boat, there’s always one thing that gets forgotten and you return to find a hairy piece of salami smiling up at you from the bottom of the only locker you didn’t clean out.

  I thanked Wild Song for looking after us and stomped my way across the bleak lava fields towards the airport, deeply sad to be leaving.

  A whole winter later, I was looking at her once again. She was standing proud on her supporting legs and looking every bit like the handsome boat I remembered. I walked around her and found everything to be in good shape, then grabbed a ladder and clambered aboard, hoping as every rung passed that a horror scene wasn’t waiting for me when I opened the hatch. There wasn’t. Not even that hairy bit of salami, although there was a lump of vintage butter that looked distinctly unhappy.

  I started work to get her shipshape again, getting bedding out of tightly sealed bags and feeling deeply relieved to find it not at all damp. The water tanks were empty and had to be filled, and I took an extension lead to the clubhouse, plugged in, and soon the electric kettle was singing. I nearly cried with relief at being back.

  Fearing the worst, I’d booked myself a bed close by for the night and as I walked across to it the rain started to fall, soon becoming sleet and eventually light snow. Council workmen were setting out benches in the hope that one day summer might come. It was, of course, very early in the year to be expecting any real warmth; it was the second week in May, after all, so still winter. Already the days were long and it didn’t get fully dark till long after I was asleep. In winter, daylight arrives by 11 then it’s dark again by three, while all the time cold and damp. Climate like that must shape people’s frames of mind. I am told that the inhabitants of the Shetland Islands, who have similar daylight hours, are the life and soul of the party all summer but go up there in the winter and they retreat into private spaces and hardly give you the time of day.

  I wasn’t there to see the boat hauled out, but I was certainly going to be there when she went back into the water. Marcús had fixed for a crane to arrive on the Sunday, three days away. I busied myself with cleaning and tidying, and put a great deal of effort into getting the essential diesel heater to roar into life. In the mornings, the decks were covered with frozen sleet and the chill penetrated through as many layers as I could put on, making the need to fix the heater ever more urgent. When things got desperately cold I would dive into the clubhouse, which was heated to the temperature of a Turkish bath, employing the cheap and plentiful energy the Icelanders harness from the geothermal rocks beneath them. The showers were steaming hot too and so I got by with little discomfort.

  As I learned on the previous year’s visit, essentials like diesel and gas can be problematic. For example, my gas bottles didn’t match their gas bottles and so I had to contrive a way of buying a full one and emptying it into mine. Warning – don’t try this at home. I managed to make up a connecting pipe with some fittings that I had in the spares box, then placed the empty cylinder on the ground and suspended the full one above it. Although it is called ‘gas’, in reality it’s a liquid and it dribbles from one bottle to the other, very slowly, getting slower as the pressure equalises and then you’ve got to call it a day. I did this in a wide open space with a fresh breeze blowing and survived to tell the tale.

  On the advice of a friend who’d sailed here before me, I learned not to look at the prices of anything. If I need bacon, I need bacon, and that is that. Shut your eyes and cough up. My friend had become so utterly sick of his crew coming back to the boat and announcing ‘Do you know how much I’ve just paid for a cabbage?’ that he banned any references to the price of food. I learned to do the same. Even so, on the day before the launching was to take place, I was invited to the clubhouse to share cakes and hot coffee with a handful of the members, and the talk was of the economy and how it was sure to crash again and it was going to be 2007 all over again. ‘I don’t understand your economy,’ I said. To which they roared, ‘We don’t understand it either!’

  ***

  On the Sunday morning, as arranged, a crane big enough to lift the dome off a cathedral arrived. Lifting yachts in and out of the water is a novel business here, and although Marcús showed great skill, he wasn’t as relaxed with the process as someone who worked in a boatyard and was doing it all day long. Interestingly, there is no such thing as a boatyard anywhere in Iceland that a yachtsman would recognise, and certainly no marine engineers who might tackle a small boat engine, or riggers to work on masts. For all its sophistication, it is a lonely place to sail a yacht and you must be reliant on your own strengths every bit as much as if you were heading for the wilds of Patagonia. The lift started to go well but the lifting strop started to bear on the mast, which wasn’t good. Lifting came to a frustrating halt. All this must be set against the movement of the tide, which had started to go down, making launching even trickier. Then the balance wasn’t right and we had to start again, placing the strops in different places. The tide was ticking away like an unstoppable clock. Finally came the order to lift and slowly the strain came on the lifting strop.

  I heard a crack.

  ‘Stop!’ I screamed.

  By a chance in a million, a fitting on the strop had caught one of the stanchions holding the wires that form the guardrails. The result was that the boat’s entire ten tons was being carried by this puny little fitting, not much stronger than a safety pin. I could hear it pleading for mercy under the strain. We lowered her again, eyes now even more focused on the ebbing tide and wondering if there would be enough water left to float her. In the end, there was, and the engine started first time, and once the lifting strop was removed I felt her bobbing around – the best feeling in the world of a boat being reborn. I put her in gear and motored the few yards till she was alongside the same pontoon where I had left her six months before. She was alive once again, in commission, ready for the next leg of the adventure.

  Apart from a short stroll to the local swimming pool for some steamy relaxation at the end of every day, there was always plenty to do to pass the time, even if some of it required a certain amount of pluck. The crazy foods that the Icelanders relish are infamous and to people of normal appetites the mere mention of them is enough to make them gag. They scoff disgusting stuff in Iceland.

  Top of the list must come the stinking shark. The recipe is straightforward, even if the swallowing is beyond human endurance. You take one Greenland shark, which is poisonous if not cured properly (this alone should set alarm bells ringing), and you gut and behead it. Then you find some s
andy soil, dig a hole, and drop the carcass into it. You shovel the sand back on to the shark, then pile heavy stones on top of this grave, the idea being that the weight will press the fluids out of the shark’s flesh. Yum yum. You can leave it there for up to three months. Then you hang it up to dry until a brown crust forms and you cut it into strips and, yes, eat it. I am told it stinks of putrid fish and reeks of ammonia. What else would it smell of? Roses? Did I try it? Did I hell. You are advised to pinch your nose before tasting, as the smell is worse than the taste; to get rid of both, you must anaesthetise your digestion by swallowing a hasty shot of local aquavit, a potion close to antiseptic.

  The Icelanders are robust in their eating, some of which would have protesters on the streets in other parts of the world. One restaurant advertises, with no shame, a Whale Menu, which offers Whale Pepper Steak with fried vegetables. There’s also a Puffin Starter, which is smoked puffin in a raspberry vinegar, and if you wish you can move on to grilled puffin breast and spuds. No wonder the Icelanders are turning to fast food.

  Lamb grows in abundance here, the well-drained, rich, lava-based soil making this a great country for sheep. You can buy sheep meat smoked, but however you take it you find a depth of flavour that is missing in more intensively raised sheep. If you want a non-meaty snack, they have found a way of taking dried fish and turning it into something that looks like a potato crisp. For the full effect, you smear them with butter. There are one or two other delights, such as the blood pudding and the ram’s testicles, and all these can be washed down with a tub of yoghurt-like skyr, which is in fact a kind of soft cheese and is consumed in the street in the way other cultures might lick at an ice cream cone.

  I chose none of the more extreme ‘delicacies’ on offer and bravely selected, wait for it, the half sheep’s head. Yes, you read correctly – I bought half a sheep’s head, ready cooked and still warm and just right for eating, from a supermarket hot counter. There were piles of them, all smiling up at me, and they were selling like hot cakes. You can even get sheep’s head at drive-throughs, like burgers, and the Icelanders would think nothing of driving out for a Sheep’s Head and Coke.

  As I turned it on to my plate from the burger box in which it came, I had no idea where to start. What do you do with a dead and lightly cooked sheep that stares up at you from the plate? On examination, its brain had been removed, then the deprived head had been boiled. It still looked like a sheep. I took a fork and started to pull the rubbery yellow skin away from the cheek area and found a couple of forkfuls of juicy rich meat beneath, just the couple. It tasted good and was tender, but amounted to not much more than a single mouthful. Where next? I worked my way down to the nose but the meat started to run out and I approached a wall of gristle, which might have been the nostril. Still hungry, having had only two mouthfuls so far, I flipped it over. The tongue! Or at least, half of it. I pulled that away from the skull bone and attacked it with a knife and fork. Quite tasty, actually, with the texture of liver. It was only when I arrived at the eye, which had burst in the boiling process and was now shrunken in its socket, did I flinch. Some say this is the best bit. I can offer you no report.

  16

  Plumbing drives me round the bend

  New crew, new ways of doing things, new habits to get used to. Alasdair had sailed many miles with me before, notably down the coastline of Brazil on my way to Patagonia a few years back. He’s a useful sort, having galley skills as well as being a software engineer, which blesses him with a certain skill in logical thinking. I’m more of an instinct man and we enjoy the debates about which method of problem-solving is likely to lead to the most satisfactory conclusion: do you sit and think things through, or get out the problem-solving hammer and start hitting things? I incline towards the latter. We both agreed we were missing our old companion, Mike. My late brother-in-law, who had died the previous year, was invaluable on a boat for his casual approach to almost everything, which helped preserve a certain calm within the ship. You didn’t sail with Mike for the skill he brought with him, but for the certainty that whatever happened there would be a laugh at the end of it. However, he never refused a request and I remember, when the spinnaker had got horribly caught around the mast and rigging on a previous jaunt, he was up the mast without so much as a backward glance. This more than compensated for the fact that I relieved him of any galley duties when it became clear, almost 40 years ago now, that he was biologically unsuited to anything more than washing up plates. We missed him and spoke of him often.

  The second member to join, but for only a few days, was James, a doctor. I joked that, like the President of the United States, I now travelled everywhere with a full medical team. While waiting for him to arrive, Al and I moved the boat round the corner to Reykjavík harbour, from where James would be able to board speedily from the airport bus.

  The snow showers that had punctuated the fitting-out period of the previous week had disappeared to be replaced by a cold wind, which is the default position in late May. We moored beneath the Harpa concert hall with which I had fallen in love on my previous visit, although I can’t say there was much love lost between me and Reykjavík generally speaking. I really couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Perhaps I’m too old. The population here is very young; the median age is only 36.

  James arrived as his usual affable, competent self. His first job, though, was professional. Alasdair was being troubled by a seriously inflamed eye, red and swollen like the character in a Disney movie that always makes kids scream. His bulging eye allowed him no clear vision and not much sleep either. James, the GP, was asked for his advice. I hate asking off-duty doctors anything medical. I know how much I hate being cornered into a conversation I’d rather not be having about my work. James said we should keep an eye on it – our eyes, not Al’s. Let’s hope it’s not catching or there’ll be no working eyes left.

  The next couple of days involved a certain retracing of steps as I set sail again for my beloved north, to lands where the air would be better, the seascape more demanding, the landscape more inspiring, and people less subservient to tourist needs. The weather freshened and the wind came ahead and we found ourselves with a stiff beat, boat leaning well over, cold Arctic water swilling down the decks to chill the cockpit and us as it poured down our oilskins.

  The Icelandic Coast Guard requires, all vessels to report in every two hours by radio and give an ETA at the next destination. This I had done and said we would be there by seven. When it got to seven I should have radioed again and revised my arrival time as we were running late, but I was distracted. Both James and I were well sick, and the bucket that Alan had so bravely clutched the previous summer was soon taking another hammering, this time by all of us. It was getting colder and although the sun was breaking through and we were sailing in sparkling conditions, we were tired and wanted to stop. Al’s eye was becoming worse, almost too much to look at, let alone look through. He looked like a goblin and in some distress.

  When we eventually came alongside in a miserable little harbour (ladder rungs broken), we were met by the bulky, cheerless harbourmaster, who looked down at us and growled through his Viking beard.

  ‘The coastguard says you are overdue. He asked me to look out for you.’ There was such seriousness in his voice that I soon realised something close to a crime had been committed. I radioed the coastguard and apologised. He didn’t seem to accept it and went on a bit too long, too strong, too loudly, and delivered too much of an earful for a tired sailor. I kept my temper and apologised again. ‘Sorry, but I had other things to do,’ I said feebly, which might not have been the best choice of words. He snapped back, ‘And I’ve got other things to do!’ This was turning into a real domestic and James and Al stared at me with frozen expressions as the exchanges became more pointed and more direct. What a chippy bastard, I thought, and was about to tell him so. All the other coastguards I had spoken to were cheery, wished us well, were happy to hear from us, cut us some slack. But needl
ess aggro like that cuts deep with me and I spent an angry evening alongside a slimy harbour wall where the ladders were too dangerous to climb and the constant running of water from a nearby hose made it feel as though we were sheltering under a waterfall. A hellhole.

  Al hit the phone and started to search for flights. To my amazement, in this wilderness he found an airport – in reality not much more than an airstrip – and even a bus to it, which he could catch a short walk from where we were tied up. It would be the shortest Icelandic sailing holiday on record.

  Before he left, we had a little fun and games. The sanitary aspects of running a boat are hardly ever mentioned, but there are times when they become of supreme importance. Such a moment arose. No amount of pumping by any of us would empty the lavatory bowl. Although liquids might get through if you put effort into it, removing solids was now in the realms of the impossible. A thought occurred. I had the best crew a chap could wish for in the dire circumstances. James, a doctor, must be familiar with blockages in pipework, either in arteries or colons, and Alasdair had a fine, logical, problem-solving mind. I set them both to the problem and stepped back to watch. They approached it with great seriousness as they stood there, staring at the useless lavatory, each waiting for the other to come up with a good idea. None came.