by Paul Heiney
‘Where’s the pipework go?’ one asked.
‘Haven’t a clue,’ I replied.
I had a vague notion, but there were only occasional glimpses of white rubber pipes darting in and out of bulkheads and through lockers; however, these were just snapshots of a much wider, but hidden, system.
There were only two possible directions in which things could go. One was directly from lavatory pan to the sea, which was the most commonly used method. Or, everything could be diverted into a tank for later disposal, the method used in harbours or near swimming beaches or anywhere there wasn’t a strong flow of water to whoosh it all away.
The pressure was on to find an answer and we agreed pressure, lots of it, was going to be the solution. We grabbed the dinghy pump from the locker, hoping this would provide us with a little compressed air, and we started to blow down one pipe after another, not quite certain what we were blowing down but convinced that in the end we were bound to hit on the right one. We achieved some gurglings and rumblings, like human indigestion sounds, and eventually managed to establish some kind of feeble flow to the sea. With that, we gave up. It would do until we were in the next harbour and could sort it properly. Big mistake. This was going to come back and haunt me.
When we thankfully left that miserable little harbour, with Al safely on his bus to catch his flight, we had a brief moment to appreciate the beauty of this fjord and to put behind us the previous aggravations. We saw intricate and geometric geological features, weathered cliff faces where wind and wave have played with soft lava, revealing colourful dips and dives in the strata. We applied a little basic geography to try and guess what they were and what had caused them, and were probably wildly wrong. Some mountains were clearly old volcanic plugs, remnants of elderly, eroded volcanoes, which even my schoolboy approach could confirm. A road snaked along both sides of the fjord; isolated cars streamed along, one every half hour, so hardly a rush hour. Then we heard a chorus of birds, the first we had heard in Iceland.
It was 40 miles to Isafjöður, from where James would depart after his all too brief visit. We sailed north past those fingers of high land that jut out from the north-west coast of Iceland, pointing towards Greenland and creating the dark, deep fjords. This is a lonely landscape that shapes the few self-sufficient people who live here in isolation. I sensed that what lay ahead was going to be as far removed from Reykjavík as New York is from Alaska.
As we sailed northwards we saw more snow on the mountaintops, and when the wind swung round and came off the mountains we were aware of it, as the air had a refrigerated scent to set your nose bristling.
After three bleak headlands, a large bay ringed by mountains opened up to our east, and to the north, yet more misty, snowy headlands stretched into the distance. This was where we must make our turn to find the town of Isafjöður. James would leave once the boat was alongside and secure and again I would be on my own. It seemed a good place to press the reset button on the voyage, turn over a new leaf, and approach the north coast of Iceland as a blank page on which to set a new course.
17
A cruel stretch of coastline
This is not a place where casual tourists tread. Only 14 per cent of Iceland’s visitors come to the north-west fjords. Crazy! It’s the best bit as far as I’m concerned. Perhaps they don’t like it because the roads are dirt and cinder tracks, pockmarked, clinging to what seem like vertical cliff walls. This is a wild and exposed northern territory of isolated and often abandoned farmsteads, where harsh lives were lived in a darkly dramatic setting. This was where Laxness set his major novel of Icelandic rural life, calling it Independent People to give you a clue as to how lives were lived here. The tale is ridden with curmudgeonly farmers, reflections of the sagas, and Celtic demons. They used to try witches round here.
A survey found that despite the remoteness of the place, the population here is the happiest in the whole of Iceland. I can’t figure out why. You’d expect the arctic winters, the short summers and the distances from the bright lights of the city to pull people down, not only in their mental approach to life but also their health. Yet they take fewer antidepressants here than anywhere else in Iceland, which, as a country, rates highest in the world for this kind of drug usage, with 120 people in 1,000 popping happy pills every day and the numbers increasing. Perhaps it’s down to climate, for although Iceland comes top of the happy-pill-popping list, it is followed by Denmark at number two, Sweden at number four, Finland at number five – all dark winter places. Strangely, Portugal appears at number three, with no explanation and no obvious excuse.
Icelanders are long-livers, too, having what might be called ‘survivor genes’ handed down from ancestors who developed them, presumably to survive the harshness of early Icelandic life. An examination of DNA from the preserved remains of early settlers shows them to be similar to modern Irish and Nordic folk and hardly at all like modern Icelanders, which suggests that modern Icelandic sturdiness was a result of gene modification over the course of a thousand years, resulting in them being far removed from their softer origins. In the last 30 years, life expectancy here has increased in women by four years, and in men by six years. Seventy-five per cent of Icelandic men work out every day. But figures can be deceptive, and some say that this new longevity might be the result of the decline in smoking, which has been more rapid here than anywhere else in the world. Beer was illegal till 1989 and booze is still ruinously expensive, so you immediately knock out two of the highest risk factors for ensuring an early demise. And you can add to that the protection given by swimming in the naturally heated pools, which unknots muscles and pacifies overheated brains, increases red blood cells and plasma, and generally washes over you with a warm feeling of deep relaxation. In passing, it is worth noting that Iceland averages only one murder a year across the entire country, suggesting the Viking DNA might be drifting into extinction.
***
Sober, happy, not depressed and unmedicated, I turned the wheel and steamed up the fjord to Isafjöður, the only town of any size here. I was not expecting to find any kind of resort, simply 2,500 people sheltering behind volcanic hills from the winter onslaughts of the North Atlantic. The warmest month of the year is July, when the expected temperature might rise as high as a dizzy 12ºC. An optimistic website that offered ‘Five Things To Do in Isafjoður’ first suggested going to an island somewhere else, or go and look at a nearby road tunnel. Actually, you shouldn’t scoff at the tunnel; it is 3.4 miles long and partly single lane, the traffic managed by subterranean passing places all hacked out of volcanic remnants that form the landscape round here.
From a sailor’s point of view, the magic of this harbour lies not in its setting or its history, but in the amazing shelter the fjord provides in one of the most exposed lengths of coastline on the Arctic fringes. From the north all the way round to the south-west, you are protected. Then, as you approach the town and just when you think there can’t be anywhere safer, you round the sandspit on which much of the town stands and you are in a sheltered lagoon where nothing could ever get you. We must thank a retreating glacier for having left this sandy moraine. This is why, in the 18th century, this was a prosperous place packed with tall sailing ships and whalers from Scandinavia, and later, in the 20th century, with our own fishing fleets, before the cod wars of the early 70s.
Without even setting foot ashore, I liked this place already. James leaped ashore with the lines and we made secure alongside floating pontoons in the small boat harbour, feeling beyond snug. James was soon to catch his plane from the town’s airport, which we could see from the harbour; it consisted of one hut with a windsock on the roof, and a runway that had been built out of cinders along the length of the upper part of the fjord so that, on take-off, the wings of the plane came within an ace of scraping their way along the mountainside.
Life afloat reverted to its usual pattern: filling water tanks, seeking diesel, prospecting for decent shops, seeking out a coffee house and w
ondering in which direction to go for a walk.
The town did not feel as remote as its history or geography might suggest. It felt prosperous; the houses were the same as in every other Icelandic town, painted white or cream, clad in sheets of coated steel, the older houses clad in wood. And everything neat, tidy, groomed. I can’t remember setting eyes on anything you might call a dump. It was, of course, the usual drag of a walk from boat to town, but I found cafes, restaurants, hotels, bars and, of course, a large bookshop, all crammed into a short main street that took less than ten minutes to walk. Old wooden buildings in all colours from deep blues to rich reds lived side by side with modern banking offices. It felt like a hub. You are never far from a reminder of the volatility of this part of the world, though. On the next fjord to the east sits the village of Súðavik, where 14 people were killed in an avalanche as recently as 1995. It’s never a landscape in which you can rest easy.
A tour operator caught my eye. Their speedy-looking boat was tied alongside not far from Wild Song, and they were offering ‘Puffin Trips’ to the nearby island of Vigur, fancifully described as ‘The Icelandic Paradise at the End of the World’, and about a 20-mile sail away. Apparently, the description is no exaggeration. The island has the only remaining windmill in Iceland, and a cafe that offers ‘happy cake’, a confection of rhubarb and popcorn, served up by the family who have farmed there since the 1800s. Read about the place, as I did, and apart from the marauding terns, which require you to carry sticks to fend them off, they say you find more puffins than you can, well, shake a stick at. And wasn’t it puffins that I had come to see, and which had proved so elusive that I was beginning to doubt they even existed?
So why didn’t I go, either on their boat or my own? The eternal problem with cruising under sail is that when the weather serves you take advantage of it, or you pay a price. Unlike a conventional holiday where the worst the weather can do is get you wet and cold, on a small boat you can be completely defeated by it. When the weather turns for the worse up here, it can stick in its new wet and windy pattern for a while, and since its tendency was to blow from the north-east, which was the direction in which I wished to go, it made sense to take advantage of a few settled days of clear skies and light winds. But you miss much, I accept. Like the sight of the puffins on the waters off Vigur, as thick as a football crowd, I was told. I’m not certain I believed them.
***
There followed one of my loneliest sails ever, in light and frustrating winds. On this craggy coastline backed by mountains 1,000 metres high, there were huts with no visible means of access, no roads, no tracks. Why were they there? Who used them, and what for? Headland followed headland, Aðalvík, then Fljótavík, each divided by deep and distant bays. One headland, Straumness, had a puny little light on the end, which seemed not much more than a torch on a stick, far removed from the dignity of our towering white lighthouses back home. The pilot book told me the peninsula was now uninhabited, but that didn’t need explaining. This is a chilly place, and I felt it not only in the air but in my spirit. It is not helped by the cold East Greenland current, which runs south from the Arctic and passes not very far to the west of here and puts a clammy damper on things.
Evening was coming on and with it a desire for food and rest, and as the Hornvík headland came into sight, I decided this was where we would rest for the night. They call this headland ‘The Horn’ and when speaking of the more famous one at the southern end of South America, Icelanders say, ‘What’s all the fuss about? We’ve got four Cape Horns!’ Having now seen both theirs and South America’s from the deck of Wild Song, I can tell you they are remarkably similar, if not in geology then certainly in outline: forbidding, fortress-like, with a strong sense of ‘don’t mess with me’. I anchored a mile to the south of it on its western side, lit the heater, and enjoyed a quiet, remote, untroubled night.
The following morning, in sunshine and hardly any breeze, I found that I was not as alone as I thought. I’d been tempted to blow up the dinghy and have a look ashore at a lonely little white farmhouse, clearly unoccupied. I was curious. I was also lazy, and blowing up the dinghy seemed an energy requirement too far. Instead, I decided to get the anchor up and press on. As I was on the foredeck, head down to tend the anchor as it rose from the seabed, a figure emerged from that little house and gave me a friendly wave. I regretted my laziness. What tales I may have heard from the man, who seemed to live in the loneliest spot I’d ever seen. There again, he might have been a tourist in an Airbnb – you never know. And what a waste of dinghy-blowing effort that would have been.
***
So where next? It is almost impossible to tell what any of the harbours in this part of the world might be like. In my dreams, I wouldn’t have minded being somewhere with a bit of a buzz to it, or at least an Icelandic idea of a buzz. I had two tasks in hand; the first was to sort out the lavatory plumbing, which, I soon discovered, had not been rectified despite the efforts of my now departed crew. In fact, it was worse than ever, and pumping had to come to a halt. The other thing I had to do was amuse myself for at least a week till a new crew arrived.
Only Siglufjörður made me a half decent offer, partly because the pilot book said the harbour was good and the shelter complete, but also because it described it as a great place for walking and hiking, and something of a ski resort in the winter. That brought with it, surely, a promise of coffee shops, bars, interesting things to eat that weren’t sheep’s heads or dried cod. The book also said it was another of those places that had known a huge and busy population during the years of the herring boom, which now, of course, had collapsed. I was used to that now. I’d seen enough places the herrings had turned their backs on, such as Lowestoft, Wick and any of those other east-coast fishing towns, so I would feel at home anywhere with faded fishy glory.
I sailed as close as I dared to The Horn until my courage failed and I retreated, scared a bit by how towering it was, how small I was, and how foolishly close I had come to it. As it receded, I could see no land ahead. I noted that in many places the chart soberly warned ‘unsurveyed’. There was no phone signal either, no VHF shore radio – which was a problem, as I was still required to check in with the coastguard every two hours and didn’t want another bollocking from matey, which still smarted. Everything had left me in this lonely spot: contact with the outside world, any sign of life, the breeze, the sun. Even the guillemots (frustratingly not puffins), which had been paddling around in large flocks, vanished too. I could feel a tide against me, slowing our progress, making us feel sluggish, and with a distance of 80 miles to go, which might entail a whole 24 hours’ sail at this rate, the engine went on and didn’t go off for some hours.
There is nothing comforting about the constant rattle of a small boat engine. After a while it drills into your head and starts to make your body tingle with its vibration. There’s no rest to be had, and little pleasure. It became murky dark about ten that evening and the damned wind started to pick up from exactly the direction I was heading. I know I should have sailed and tacked to and fro for God knows how long, played it like a proper sailor. But I didn’t, and bashed and crashed my way through the seas, burning up the diesel, running the engine hard, wanting to get there. I might have been a great sailor if they’d given me a bit more of that stuff called patience.
I was now sailing through one of the world’s greatest cod fishing grounds, certainly on a par with the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, across which I have also sailed. We have been to war twice with the Icelanders over fish, in the cod wars of 1958/61 and again in 1972/73. I was at the newly opened BBC Radio Humberside as the second cod war was in full swing, with the buccaneering Hull trawler skippers pitting their wits and risking their ships against the Icelandic coastguard ships, which were deploying huge cutters to destroy their valuable trawls. It followed a unilateral extension, by Iceland, of their fishing limits to 50 miles, which encompassed the best fishing grounds. Eventually, the Royal Navy was called in to pr
otect the British fishing fleets, and as they did so the UK trawlers played ‘Rule Britannia’ over the radio at maximum volume.
The third cod war happened in 1975, when Iceland extended its fishing limit to a greedy 200 miles. All fishing hell broke loose. Twenty-two British frigates sailed to protect the UK fishing fleet, some equipped with strengthened bows capable of ramming. The Icelanders in turn tried to buy US gunboats, but Henry Kissinger wouldn’t sell them, so they tried to buy from the Russians.
While the skirmishes at sea continued, backstage the Icelanders threatened to close the Keflavík NATO base, which is now Reykjavík international airport. That did the trick. Had they done so, NATO would have lost its ability to keep track of Russian submarines and warships coming out of northern Russian ports, heading for the Atlantic. The British government caved in, the trawlers moved 200 miles offshore and another war was over and generally reckoned to have been won by the Icelanders. The result was the eventual collapse of the British deep-sea fishing industry, the demise of ports like Hull and Grimsby, and thousands of seamen losing their jobs, with the consequent scars on the fishing communities that hurt to this day. In February 2017, they kissed and made up when an exchange of ships’ bells cemented the friendship of the cities of Hull and Reykjavík. If my memory of the people of Hull serves me right, that would have happened through clenched teeth.
There was only one life lost in the whole of the cod wars, in sharp contrast to the cruel months of January and February 1968 when 58 crew members of three Hull trawlers were drowned as their boats were overwhelmed by sea and ice in appalling storms. Two of those trawlers were lost in the waters I was now sailing. The first was the St Romanus, whose disappearance almost went unnoticed after she sank in the North Sea. The Kingston Peridot sailed from Hull for Iceland on the same day with a crew of 20, and only debris from that ship was found. It is thought that heavy icing caused the ships to become top heavy, till all stability was lost. Then all it took was a steep wave to fling them on their sides, from which they couldn’t recover, and they sank in an instant. The shipping forecasts, still broadcast by the BBC on long-wave frequencies that can be heard off the northern coast of Iceland if there is not too much interference, used to warn of winter icing conditions. Icing occurs when the air temperature falls low enough for sea water to freeze, and if this coincides with a stormy period when the air is full of spray then anything that lands on a ship will turn to heavy ice. It was part of a trawlerman’s job to take what tools he could – hammer, axe, length of timber – and hack away at any ice that formed. His life depended on it and men might spend hours on the open decks trying to keep their ships clear, only to find that more often than not the ice would form faster than they could remove it. It is believed that this is what did for the Kingston Peridot.