Farewell Mr Puffin

by Paul Heiney

  The breeze remained fresh and gusty as we turned in for the night. Nothing too bad, but by dawn the wind was bellowing and sheets of rain were cascading as I’ve only ever seen them in the movies. Sheets and sheets of it, blown on the wind. It drove through every gap in the boat, and certainly through the main hatch, which was pointing into the wind. The cabin floor was awash and the only solution was to insert the wooden washboards, the canvas screen not being sufficient to keep the rain out. But the washboards were in the cockpit locker – not much more than a few feet away, yet this meant putting on a full set of oilskin clothing, otherwise such a short dash would have resulted in a severe drenching.

  Once outside, I didn’t like the look of the lines that were holding us to the shore. They seemed stretched tighter than I had ever seen them before, truly bar taut and at the end of their tether. I grabbed more lines from the locker and doubled up everything, knowing that the wind was still expected to increase, although it was already at gale force.

  Time to consider how to pass the time. Relaxation was out of the question. Certainly it was too risky for us both to leave the boat, so we agreed Crispin would go off in the morning and I would have an afternoon excursion. There was only really one place to go and that was back to the village where we’d first tied up, which was only a couple of miles, but trying to walk it in this weather, against the force of the rain and the wind, would make it feel like five. I bid Crispin farewell as he trudged off in the plucky manner of Captain Oates and moved myself closer to the stove. Thank God for a decent mobile signal. The latest forecast showed no let-up of either wind or rain for at least another 36 hours.

  Crispin arrived back at lunchtime looking like an old tom cat that had taken a drenching in a canal. It was my turn next to brave the storm. Clad for the ultimate meteorological experience, I ventured out of the cabin. The first thing to hit me was a pummelling blast of cold Arctic air. I know I have been misty-eyed about all things that blow down from the north, but this was something else. The rain actually hurt, every drop as sharp as a bullet, and it was impossible to look directly into it. I had one weapon in my protective armoury. Some years back, I had bought a Newfoundland sou’wester in a museum in Nova Scotia. It was supposed to be a replica of the Grand Banks fisherman’s choice of headgear and looked, at the time, ridiculously large. However, it works. It is made of canvas and stiffened probably with plastic rather than animal fat or grease from sheep’s wool, which would have been used in the original. It has a wide brim that extends far behind you, and once this is turned up it channels the rainwater down your back instead of where you didn’t want it, which was down your neck. It is a thousand times more efficient than any piece of modern, high-tech sailing wear that I have owned. If there is a drawback, it is that it adds to your windage, and there were moments when I was driven to a standstill by the sheer force of the wind. The two miles took me over an hour and a half to achieve.

  I eventually came upon the town and fell with deep gratitude into a shop selling coffee and cake. I apologised repeatedly for the wetness of my clothes, the outer ones of which I removed only to discover that the inner ones were just as wet. I don’t think they understood why I kept saying I was sorry. Bedraggled figures are probably more common than dry and snug ones.

  When there was a lull in the rain and I was able to peer through the steamed-up glass window of the coffee shop, I saw a town that was even more neat and tidy than any other so far. There was not a speck of rust or dereliction to be seen anywhere. The grass was groomed, the school was perfectly painted and maintained, the cars were all washed. If you have seen The Truman Show you will know what I mean by a town that is so perfect in every way that it simply can’t be real. This was a Perfect Place in every respect. Had we died? And was this heaven?

  A pickup truck pulled up outside the coffee shop, stuffed with pot plants. Out of the cab jumped a lady clad only in a black sports bra and a pair of yellow oilskin trousers, with no hint about her that exposure was about to overtake her. Nobody gave her a second glance.

  I made the coffee last as long as I possibly could, then called at a well-stocked and pristine supermarket, but I noticed that halfway along the road, made of cinders like all the out-of-town tracks, a torrent of water was rushing down the mountainside and rapidly washing the road away. There were already deep potholes, large enough to swallow an entire car. I saw a car approaching at speed and I flagged him down. The driver spoke a little English and I explained that there was danger ahead. He shrugged, thanked me, and drove off once again at high speed. I suppose they get as used to their roads being washed away as we are to the gas people digging ours up.

  Over mugs of tea, Crispin and I swapped notes on the wettest walk on Earth. Then came a knock on the cabin roof. ‘Harbourmaster!’ came the cry. This was possibly the last thing we needed. I feared he was here to ask me to move the boat, which harbourmasters have a habit of doing.

  I slammed open the hatch with my excuses ready but found a young, fresh-faced fellow looking down at me. I started my apology. ‘I’m very sorry. I am happy to pay but I could not find your office.’ Which was true.

  ‘I don’t want money,’ he replied, and chuckled. ‘I came to see if you were OK. Did you find electricity and water?’

  I was slightly taken aback, having readied myself for a bit of a battle.

  ‘Come in my truck, if you like, and I will show you the town. You have been stuck here two days and you must be bored.’

  I soon found myself being driven at high speed up the mountainside in his powerful 4x4. He showed me the defensive earthworks that were designed to protect the town from avalanches in the winter, one avalanche in 1974 having killed 20 people. Then talk turned to the fishing fleet, and in particular one giant of a hungry trawler, which had the look of something that was fresh from the factory and in showroom condition. ‘You should go in there!’ he said, pointing towards the bridge. ‘The crew sleep in mahogany-lined cabins. It’s not like the old days. And the captain? His quarters are like something out of Trump Tower!’

  I asked him about the town, its 2,000 people and its prosperity, and how did anyone possibly earn such a rich living in a remote spot like this? It is worth remembering that it is only since 1949 that people were able to get here by road and even that required driving over a mountain or two. It wasn’t until 1977 that they dug a tunnel and before that only the sea gave the easiest access. He told me that over the mountain, out of sight, was one of Iceland’s largest aluminium smelting plants. The production of aluminium is an electric-intensive process, so where better in the world to do this than the place where electricity is cheaper than almost anywhere? Apparently, the smelting plant pays good wages, which pays for cars to be washed and gardens to be kept tidy. He told me another story, of the small fish factory on the north side of the fjord, which I had stumbled past on my wet walk to the town. It was once owned by a man who loved this community so much he left his small factory to his neighbours in his will by making everyone in the town a shareholder. When the industrialisation of fishing became unstoppable, and given this town was well placed for quick and safe access to the rich fishing grounds, that small factory turned into a huge one, becoming one of the largest fish processors in Europe. The benefits of that went straight into the pockets of the locals. That’s why the swimming pool has the look of something a top-class hotel would provide, and why not so much as a blade of grass looks out of place here.

  The great thing about volatile weather is that although you get storms, you don’t have to wait long for the sun to shine again. The rain and wind did not moderate much for a further 48 hours and as we went to our bunks on the third night I could not bring myself to believe what the weather forecast was telling me. It said the next day would be sunny and calm. Some chance!

  But it was. The lines that tied us to the shore were undone and I imagined they breathed a sigh of relief now their torment was over. We were free, with the sun on our backs and a gentle breeze. We were on our
way home.

  22

  Farewell to the land of the puffins

  We rocked and rolled in the swell, stirring our stomachs and darkening our souls. Swell lingers long after the wind that created it has blown itself away, a bit like the last headache after a wild night out. But soon the sea flattened, the clouds broke and golden afternoon sunlight illuminated the distant Faroe Islands. What a sight! We had come full circle, and although I remembered how stunning they were, the vision that greeted us was of a different order completely; it was as if a theatrical show had just turned up the lights.

  As we rounded, or tried to round, the westernmost headland, we felt the full force of those tides so accurately depicted in that pilot book over which I had sweated when heading north – the one with drawings showing streams of dragon’s breath swooshing between the islands, marking the fiercest tides. To prove how powerful they can be, the compass said we were going one way but my eyes told me differently, and the electronic plotter that shows our course over the ground said we were both wrong and we were heading off somewhere into the mid Atlantic. This place would be a nightmare in one of their frequent fogs.

  The tide slackened, as it always does, and we eventually crept towards land with the low sun throwing the ragged geology of the overwhelming cliffs into sharp relief. Crispin was energised by the drama of the changing scenes and dived for my definitive guidebook to all things Faroese. He started to read aloud chapters on geology – about which neither of us understood the slightest thing, but we came away from Crispin’s impromptu lecture like experts.

  One thing was certain – this is not Iceland. The landscape was markedly lush and pastoral in places. We both remarked how much we loved the sight of grass once again, and hadn’t been aware of how much we’d missed it in Iceland. We were into August now, when things can start to cool down at these latitudes, but it never felt cold enough to think of lighting the stove; the grass somehow maintained a summery feel.

  We paused on the island of Nólsoy, only a 20-minute ferry ride from Tórshavn, where most of its population go to work. This island was the nearest that town has to a suburb, I suppose. If this voyage had given us anything, it had certainly inspired Crispin. I doubt there was a moment when he wasn’t supping up the landscape, or the maritime environment, or simply watching and learning how to sail a boat; for me, he was an almost perfect crew. We found an unusual bar, as sailors always do, which was accessed by the somewhat secretive side door of an ordinary-looking house. Once inside, the room opened out to include a stage with lighting and disco equipment. It was the world’s smallest night club. Pints were being drunk at the end of a long day and so we raised a glass to the time we had enjoyed together.

  We sailed the following morning and later, as darkness started to fall for pretty much the first time for us in these high latitudes, the masthead light was needed. The sun was on its way south, leaving these subarctic islands behind to endure another winter.

  We approached Orkney from the north, and more by good fortune than planning avoided one of those turbulent ‘roosts’ that hang around here. We headed for Pierowall on Westray, passing through the Papa Sound between Westray and Papa Westray, famously home to the shortest commercial airline route in the world, which runs between the two islands – a distance of 1.7 miles and a flying time of around 57 seconds. From here it would be but a short sail down to Kirkwall where, as with all arrivals, a host of jobs were awaiting attention, not least the lavatory plumbing, which way back I had ‘jury-rigged’ – a euphemism for bodged – and needed to make a proper job of. My dear old friend, the Pamona Cafe, would be waiting for me, the scones hard as usual, the tea a little stewed, but welcome nevertheless.

  Crispin flew home; I stocked up for the voyage south, and waited for the weather to blow me once again down the North Sea, and to home. I kept the faith and maintained a good lookout for puffins as I sailed. I passed once again the Farne Islands, and the towering cliffs of Bempton, this time in the clearest of visibility, yet not a single, solitary puffin did I see. Total puffin sightings of the entire voyage – just one. I thought of him, alone, bobbing around in those chill waters off that bleak coast.

  Does this depress me? Is this a sign that our oceans and coastlines are going through a period of such turbulent change that even the puffins can’t stand it any longer? Not really. I may have been unlucky, and it would be wrong to extrapolate my bad luck and preach of the doom that is about to engulf all seabirds and everything natural about the high seas. It may be because I can only live in the moment that I find it pointless to fret about what might happen a couple of centuries down the line. That is not to say I dismiss the fears of others, but to be honest with myself I can only throw my hands in the air and ask, honestly, what the hell can I do about it?

  In times past, long forgotten, many tides ago, there may well have been seabirds as beguiling and entertaining as the puffin, but which are now extinct. We have no knowledge of them whatsoever and so we shed no tears. If the puffin goes then I would feel sorry for the generations to come who are deprived of the joy it can bring, but who is to say that something won’t replace the puffin in their hearts and bring as much delight? I am not of the ‘nothing must change’ school that seems to drive so much conservation. In our short lives, the most we are ever allowed is a snapshot of a brief moment in time. Darwin taught us that everything must evolve. Change happens; we can only get on board and enjoy the ride. To think that we can halt the evolutionary processes is a measure of modern arrogance.

  I fear that the more science we are made aware of, the less we are able to enjoy life, and the more we are persuaded to fret. As I write, we are being whipped up into a frenzy of fear over so many environmental fronts. Ocean acidification, unheard of a generation ago, is now moving up the agenda, which is bad news for everything from cod to sea urchins. And there are many other issues. I wish science was less revealing of an ever expanding queue of armageddons, and would instead try coming up with some solutions. It’s possible, of course, that there aren’t any. If that proves to be the case, ask the dinosaurs what happens next?

  Let me temper my complacency with a bit of encouragement to those who fear change. Researchers at Columbia University have been studying the Lofoten Islands off the coast of Norway, further north than Iceland and inside the Arctic Circle but rendered habitable by the passage of the last drains of the comparatively warm Gulf Stream. This, remember, was Viking land and it was the Vikings that shaped almost all of the societies, cultures and the habitable landscape of the places I had passed by on this voyage.

  Given their position, the Lofoten Islands have always been a marginal place to live and work. It is just about possible to farm there, but equally a small climate shift in either direction changes its sustainability dramatically. It’s like a place that lives or dies by the click of a thermostat and over centuries that thermostat has by turns transformed it from a barren freezer into a moderate kind of place in which to live and develop. It is now thought that during one of those periods of climate change, when the Lofoten Islands warmed, living became easier, farming could advance and the indigenous people, who we might call Vikings, finally caught up with the use of iron several millennia after other parts of Europe. In other words, the Vikings had good reason to be grateful to climate change. Or course, the reverse could have been true; changes in climate may have propelled them to try and expand their empire as survival there became less certain. Either way, there is a growing belief that climate change and the Viking era are somehow linked. Climate will surely have changed the course of human history before, and seems about to do so again.

  But is climate change affecting puffins? Does my casual observation of them, or lack of it, prove anything? Of course not. I accept I might have been unlucky, and also that I was not employing the acute observation of an ornithologist. Even so, the figures are as stark as the headlines could be lurid, given that Iceland’s puffin population has dropped from roughly seven million to nearer five. D
oes this mean the puffin is doomed and that perhaps nature, sensing the changes to come, has decided those huge flocks are unsustainable and is guiding us into a period of readjustment? This may have happened many times before, we just happened not to be there to witness it.

  Here’s a bit of optimistic science so we don’t end on too glum a note. Have you heard of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation? No, neither had I, but it is hugely important and nothing to do with climate change. It is a regular warming and cooling of the Atlantic Ocean that takes place over a period of roughly 60 or 70 years. It is currently just past its peak and in the cooling phase once again; it was at its coldest back in the early 70s. This has been going on, we assume, since long before science was ever able to measure it and was only recognised as recently as the 1980s. The variations in sea surface temperature that are created by it can be quite small, but to sand eels and other prey on which puffins might feed, these subtle changes are not good news. Sand eels like their water chilly and if they sense it warming they will migrate north to cooler climes. In order to fill their dazzling beaks with nutritious little eels to feed their young, the puffins have to fly further, with inevitable losses. The warming phases, a decade ago, might only now be showing up in puffin populations. So that’s good news for the puffins if you believe that science of the Oscillation, for the Atlantic will soon start to cool and the sand eels will once again be ready for doorstep delivery to the puffin colonies.