‘Welcome, welcome! I am Tem.’
He leads me aboard. Otso is slipper-shaped, a low stern rising and flaring to a wide bow. In the centre the raked white pyramid of her superstructure, smartly striped with Finnish blue, rises ten storeys above the waterline. Stickled with ladders, gantries and pipes, she feels tough and competent, smelling of steel, refuse and diesel. Entry is via a small hatchway with a high sill. The corridors are narrow and warm, scented with coffee and cooking – spicy chicken? She seems well worn rather than hard-driven, scrubbed and brushed; like all of the Finland I have seen, she is impeccably clean.
‘We have this present for you.’ Tem hands over a splendid white hard hat with HORATIO IB OTSO ARCTIA ICEBREAKING labelled across the peak. ‘Ice and things can fall off from above, so please wear this when you are outside.’
The solicitous concern and Tem’s soft manner are disarming. A collection of men, engineers, are sprawled in the engine control room. We all say ‘Hei!’ This is a refreshingly simple communication, the only such example in Finnish.
Greeting the men and being looked over by them is like entering a working men’s club. Icebreaker crews become closely associated with one or two ships, returning to their main vessel and each other repeatedly. The febrile atmosphere you detect on some ships when new crew join is absent here. I feel like a new boy starting school in the middle of term.
‘Now we will see if we get stuck!’ Tem says almost hopefully, opening a small lift. We go four decks up and climb a stair to the bridge. In the middle in front of the windows is a control position, complete with a Morse code key, a small steering wheel and throttles. On the port wing is a second set of engine controls, and on the starboard side is an amazing chair mounted on rails in the deck, in front of the third steering position, the one they generally use. The wing positions are housed in octagonal turrets, thickly glassed in, which stick out from either side of the bridge. Steering from here, the helmsman can see behind and beside Otso as clearly as he can ahead. Being able to judge what is happening all around an icebreaker is crucial, I will learn. They work in dangerous proximity to other ships.
The bridge is a full orchestra of technology. Here are radar screens, computers, throttles, rudder controls, bow thruster and the controls for the ‘bubbler’, which pumps air out of the sides of the ship below the waterline, reducing friction with the ice. At the rear of the bridge a chart table is surrounded by screens, radar displays, at least six radios, three satellite links, displays showing weather, ice, other ships and the heeling tank, echo sounder, searchlight controls, schematics for engines and ballast, dials showing power outputs, switchboards, telex printers, Inmarsat printer … There must be thirty screens.
‘Vill-ay, first officer,’ says a large young man as I bungle the simultaneous handshake and introduction protocol. Ville’s face is a collection of curves, like a baby ogre. His hair is clipped short, and he trims his beard into a chinstrap. He is wearing a grey tracksuit and sandals. Everyone is dressed for slouching in front of the TV. Ville has the air of a shy man with much to do.
‘Sampo,’ says a smiling man with a suave air, clothed in charcoal colours, smarter than Ville’s rig. Sampo is the second officer – younger than Ville, I think, but it is hard to tell. He is an ageless, unlined man, his greying hair an immaculate swoop and his manner not at all shy. ‘If you come with me …’ He has a rapid and rapidly assessing quality about him and his English is perfect. Down we go to the main deck, and over to the seaward side.
‘This is your lifeboat, starboard. If you hear the alarm you come here.’
We agree that lifeboats are horrible, dangerous things, and I compliment him on his ship.
‘Only a bit of rust,’ he says, looking at a spatter of flaked patches on the steel. ‘The Bay of Bothnia is hardly salty at all, about 0.2 per cent.’
We go up and down stairs rapidly, along corridors, up again, down again.
‘In here … we eat – breakfast five thirty, lunch at eleven thirty, dinner at five thirty. Down here is the gym. Here is the sauna. Two saunas, one for officers, one for crew. The laundry is in here. We have a conference room but we don’t use it. Lounge …’
My cabin is spacious, with a couch and desk, a bunk and a shower. The windows are double-glazed, thick plastic on the inside, glass on the outside. There are drawers with things in them, and trays and shelves and all manner of small treasures and documents others have left.
Forward lines let go, stern lines let go, spring lines let go. No pilot, for all the navigating officers hold pilotage licences, and no tug. Otso is under Tem’s fingertips as he makes tiny adjustments on throttles and bow thruster, turns the dial controlling the two rudders and moves us slowly, slowly away from the berth. He will not handle the ship again until we return to port.
‘Why does the captain do this bit?’
‘Kind of … tradition. Yes. This is when you can hit things with everyone watching!’
Our only audience, dock workers in bright green jackets, hurry away as soon as the lines are cast off. Diggers and trucks are working a wasteland of dirty snow, while a refinery adds steam to a steam-coloured sky. In sheened black water ice floats in shattered fragments. The only motion outside is three hooded crows, heading in a straggle for an island through huge stillness. You can see silence here. The atmosphere on the bridge is hushed, almost reverent, as we depart at a stately pace towards the frozen sea.
From the bridge we stare at a sea without tides, without waves, almost without salt and now, to the eye, without water. We run into a skin of ridged ice, black-lined by the wind where the snow has blown away. Channel buoys stand rigid, frozen in place. A dark nodule off the port bow is a seal like a fat semi-colon; flapping away to the south, neck thrust forward between enormous wings, is a sea eagle, intent as an assassin. There is excitement on the bridge at the sight of the creatures, a chatter of Finnish and a grabbing of binoculars. ‘Icebreakers used to hunt seals!’ Ville says.
The ice stretches to opaque horizons. As the lines of the forests fall away behind us, all bearings seem lost. Our black track rocking with shards is the only distinction, as if we are the tip of a pencil trailing a line into empty space.
Now Tem is on the phone he carries in a thigh pocket, coordinating the other icebreakers. He has half a dozen to assign, scattered up and down the gulf.
‘One is being repaired, so they thought it was a good idea to hire another from Sweden. He’s asking for work,’ Sampo says.
On a whiteboard there are ships’ names, port names and times, indicating whether the vessels are leaving or arriving, and noting where we will find them. This is our to-do list, Sampo explains.
‘The ice is thickest at the edges of the bay, so we lead them in or out, but it depends where the ice is and where they get stuck. The rule of thumb in icebreaking is everything changes all the time.’
My assumptions about icebreaking were wrong. I had imagined we would be trundling up and down the Bay of Bothnia, cracking open the shipping channels – known as fairways – keeping them ice-free so that the trade upon which Finland relies might continue to flow through the winter. In fact, a newly broken fairway might remain passable for hours, but it is just as likely the ice will close up again in minutes, even seconds. Every ship hoping to cross the Bay of Bothnia will need an icebreaker, certainly near the ports and possibly out at sea as well. I had supposed container ships carrying food and goods would be our main customers, but the list shows that few are transporting containers; bulk carriers, ore carriers, colliers and chemical tankers will be our business. Working southwards from the bay’s most northerly point there are six main ports –Tornio, Kemi, Oulu, Raahe, Rajha and Kokkola, all frozen in – but Tem cannot just assign one icebreaker to each port, because out in the gulf is the drift ice, trapping ships on their way to or from Sweden and the Baltic.
‘For some reason no one else wants to do this coordinating-captain job,’ Tem says slowly, grinning, ‘I always do it. And when it all goes
wrong, we fix it.’
‘How much does an icebreaker cost?’ I ask Sampo.
‘About twenty thousand euros per day, if you want to hire us.’
‘Do you charge the ships for help?’
‘They pay a fairway tax – that includes us.’
Beyond the bridge screens we can see the fairway, a channel marked with buoys, safe for navigation in this shallow sea. Further from shore where the buoys give out, the safe channel is marked on electronic and paper charts. We can see what appears to be the fairway in the broken and rubbled track left by previous ships, but this is misleading, Tem says.
‘The ice is always moving. If you only follow the track it can take you away, and the bay is very shallow. Every year this happens.’
‘Where are we going, Captain?’
‘We are going to Raahe. We have some ships there.’ Tem loves the sounds of Finnish words. ‘Raahe’ is spoken with a roll on the ‘r’ and a skip in the middle: ‘Rror-hey’.
‘How far is it?’
‘Ah I don’t think in distance! Only in time. We will be there in four hours.’
I will learn that there are no distances in the Bay of Bothnia. There are speeds of wind and speeds of ice drift. There are hours of dark, hours of light and hours of twilight. There are ships’ waiting times and our expected times of arrival. But distance is nothing here. Distance is only the time it takes for us to cross a floe, to forge through a lead, to break into the next white field. Sometimes cracks shoot ahead of us across the pack, black lines in long curly breaks, as though the ice fractures along preordained faults. Sometimes it seems all our transits are fated, as the helmsman stares ahead and the engines beat and the mist gathers or falls back, and the light brightens or dims and the ice thins and thickens. We will arrive, we will break and turn and break again.
Outside I go, diligently suited and helmeted, eyes streaming at the cold. Expose a hand for thirty seconds and you can feel the blood being squeezed out of your fingers. There is no sensation of water motion at all, only the grating, barrelling cacophony of the hull crashing through the ice. Our rolling collision sounds like a giant steel wheelbarrow being dragged upside down over a stony yard. The deck rumbles and bobbles underfoot. An icebreaker works by thrusting the curving weight of its bow up onto the pack, the drive of the engines and the weight of the ship pushing it forward and down. Over ice like this, twenty centimetres thick, you feel no lateral or vertical movement. Instead there is a constant shuddering, as though the ship is tearing herself over a reef.
To the south-west is a stain of sunset between the ice and sky, a cold pink blush. The ice is slightly brighter than the air; together they seem to collect light and focus it on the ship, so that her surfaces, her rusts and paintwork, her rails and sills, her winches and ropes glow slightly, every detail in definition.
‘Sheeiw, but it’s cold!’ I gasp, back on the bridge.
Sampo laughs. ‘Minus ten. In minus twenty you can actually see the water freeze, really fast, just – skoosh!’ He throws a gesture across the bay, casting a spell. ‘And you know it’s minus twenty when your nose squeezes up. It kind of contracts.’
I lean against the windows, which go floor to ceiling, armoured glass three centimetres thick. Below us the solidified sea is hypnotic, the cracking white breaking with black lines, leaving peat-coloured water in our wake.
‘What kind of ice is this?’
‘This is compacted ice. It’s been broken and frozen together. When we get to consolidated ice, the heavy stuff? That can double or triple fuel consumption. We’ll get through a hundred tonnes of fuel in twenty-four hours. When you think an average family house in Finland might need one and half tonnes for a whole year … You can just leave your car running if you’re icebreaking!’
It emerges that Sampo has strong feelings about cars.
‘I got a Silverado. I’ve been doing some building work on the house, and it’s good for carrying stuff,’ he says. If he could look sheepish he would, but Sampo was not made for embarrassment.
A Chevrolet Silverado is an absurd machine, over four tonnes of steel, bull-headed intimidation and giant wheels, achieving a laughable nineteen miles to the gallon. Most four-by-four drivers could curse Sampo as an environmental war criminal without feeling a twinge of hypocrisy. Thankfully we have Otso, her sisters and her charges, absolving the SUV drivers of Finland. And beyond Bothnia we have all the ships at sea today, expelling so much carbon dioxide that measured as a nation they constitute the seventh most polluting country on earth.
It takes me a while to stop calling Tem ‘Captain’. Informality is a Finnish trait. When the USSR attacked the country in 1939 Soviet brigades were coldly hierarchical, controlled by officers and policed by commissars. The opposing Finnish units were often made up of men from the same region. They referred to their officers by name or nickname, authority a personal quality more than an institutional imposition. Dash, flexibility, improvisation and sisu underlay the fighting quality of the defenders. Finns do not boast about it, but holding off overwhelming Soviet forces and later defeating German units in Lapland gave the young country a foundation of tremendous pride and self-belief.
Sisu is the key. It has no single equivalent in English, but denotes a gritty, courageous and robust refusal to be beaten. Finnish soldiers invented the Molotov cocktail to attack Soviet tanks, aiming to souse the machines’ air ducts with blazing petrol. (Eighty-seven women and five men produced over half a million of these weapons until their factory was destroyed. Finnish manufacturing pride led early bottles to be sealed with tops giving the factory’s address.) They levered off Russian tank tracks with stakes and bars. They shot at the gunners’ eye slits with pistols, the very definition of sisu.
‘So this word sisu, Tem, does it mean a lot to you?’
‘Yes. I suppose so. Well for me I think, Chin on chest and head on to the next disappointment!’
He laughs with the gaiety of a man whose head would never be allowed to slump and who must have known disappointments but not many.
The Swedish icebreaker Frej passes in the long twilight. Even in February the dimming time lasts and lingers, a heavy pewter, as if the sky weighs more than the frozen sea. We pass Frej in brash ice, a slushy mosaic which has formed, broken and been repacked by the wind. Her charge, an orange gas carrier, follows a hundred metres behind.
‘The rule of thumb,’ Sampo says – Sampo is very fond of rules of thumb – ‘is that if the distance between the ships is such that the vessel you are leading is not in danger of crashing into you, she will get stuck. It’s not so bad in a big fairway, but in the open sea you can find compacted ice like cement. You hit it, wham! You stop, and the ship behind you goes into you. All we can do is tell them to turn hard to starboard, but the gap is so narrow. Actually we have a big crack in the stern …’
Supper is pork, rice and salad, prepared by Ulla and Pentti. Ulla is a woman with a shy, sweet aspect and no English. I will seek her out after every meal and thank her, and each time she will duck and smile. Pentti is a hulking man in chef’s trousers, his face grizzled, who smokes noisome cigars. He has labelled each dish with a note in English. SOUP, FISH. SOUP, VEGETABLE. PORK, MEAT. POTATOES. Tomorrow will be SALMON, FISH.
‘The best is Jansson’s Temptation,’ says Tem. ‘Fish and onions and potatoes.’
Pentti’s painstaking labelling is not only for me. We have a second passenger aboard, Reidun, a Norwegian geophysicist. Reidun is a hero to the crew. Two years ago her company chartered Otso for a voyage to Greenland to make seismic surveys for the oil industry.
‘We thought if you came back you could get us another voyage,’ Sampo tells her.
‘I wish I could,’ Reidun says.
‘You’re not working now?’
‘No. No, this is my holiday,’ Reidun says. Her daughter is at university in Britain. Reidun works, climbs and yearns for travel. She and Sampo have a delightful friendship, as though he has adopted her as a kind of super-aunt. She i
s the only one on the ship who can still teach him tricks in the ship’s databases. Her eyes are an astonishing blue, and she has a slightly unnerving way of holding your gaze in silence, as though you are a study subject. This trick provokes Tem to heavily comical sallies in which he claims he cannot do anything, does not know anything, does not really work and survives by lowering his chin to his chest and heading for the next disappointment. There is much reminiscence about their previous voyage.
‘The North Atlantic was the stuff of dreams,’ Sampo says. ‘We came back through storms. When the waves were the height of the bridge I turned the searchlights off. Enough! I’d rather not see them!’
He has also been along the Northern Sea Route, which runs along the top of Russia, emerging in the Bering Strait.
‘With two Russian icebreakers, nuclear-powered.’
‘God, what a voyage! What was it like?’
‘Pitch black for two weeks. You get into this black tube and after two weeks you pop out on the other side of the world. So far north there are a lot of time zones. You adjust your clock twice a day.’
CHAPTER 5
Silence
AFTER DINNER I join Pentti in the smoking room. The smoking room is a steel box accessed from the main deck, a stinking coffin decorated with Playboy calendars dating back to 2010, each displaying a winter month with all the days neatly crossed out.
‘So this is the art gallery?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you been a cook on ships for a long time?’
‘All my life.’
‘Would you ever cook on land?’
‘No!’
‘Why?’
Icebreaker Page 3