Blue Water

by Lindsay Wright

  Tromsø is the administrative centre for northern Norway and a sought-after post by bureaucrats because of the ‘hardship’ pay they receive for working there. Once again, in spite of the cost of alcohol, the locals seemed to enjoy a high degree of inebriation, but the Tromsønians were generally amiable drunks, and quite fun. In many Norwegian households it is the grandmother’s role to brew the liquor, a practice largely ignored by police and excise officers. The clear, home-brewed spirit I tasted was supped very judiciously and accompanied by coffee — a straight draught was enough to make my tonsils jump out of my sinuses.

  There are no coin-operated laundries in Tromsø. We supposed that in this ultimate social welfare society, every household had its own washing machine — and we soon found out why. The only laundry we could find, at a local hotel, washed a small bag of clothes for us, returned them two days later still soggy, and charged us $80.

  Hvalbiff was available from a van that parked daily at the waterfront, and colourful Lapplanders sold their craft-work and seal-skin clothing in the square. The stolid wooden working boats of the far north, with their brightly varnished topsides, came and went with a rhythmic throbbing of big diesel engines.

  The city was sunny, friendly and safe. Before us we had 450 miles of cold, grey, open Arctic Ocean to sail to Spitsbergen. There were ice chunks, called ‘growlers’, that floated just below the surface and would open Elkouba up like a cutlass through a cardboard box. There were uncharted rocks and reefs and, if we did make it to the shore, it seemed that we were likely to be eaten by polar bears (‘shoot for the body’ — remember?). ‘Let us stay here for a while, then just cruise back down the Norwegian coast,’ Sarah said. The temptation was strong — the trip to Spitsbergen loomed over us like a big black cloud in our consciousness. ‘It would be really nice,’ Sarah continued persuasively. ‘We could stop at Denmark, Holland, France. I don’t really want to go any further north.’

  The explorer heroes of my youth resurfaced in my mind. Would Amundsen turn back? Would Scot? Would Peary? ‘No,’ I said obdurately, ‘we are going to Svalbard.’ In the subsequent heated discussion, Sarah decided to stay with Elkouba and not go home to her mother as I suggested and, before she had a chance to change her mind, we sailed north out of Tromsø.

  V ARCTIC LANDFALL

  Unlike Greenland, Alaska, and most other lands in the far north, Svalbard has never had an indigenous human population. The Viking longships probably stumbled across the islands about 1194, but it was the Dutch navigator, Barents, who in 1596 first recorded a visit there. English explorer Henry Hudson visited Svalbard in 1607, but neither he nor Barents judged the archipelago to be of sufficient commercial value to warrant any further survey or exploration work.

  Until 1707 all the polar land masses were assumed to be part of Greenland, but Norwegian navigator Elling Carlsen, who circumnavigated Spitsbergen in 1862, disproved this theory. The present political alignment of Svalbard originated in the 1920 Treaty of Paris, which gave Norway all the land lying between 74 and 81 degrees north and 10 to 35 degrees east. In 1925 a Norwegian official was sent to claim the islands officially, and after hoisting the Norwegian flag he renamed the archipelago Svalbard.

  Svalbard encompasses the islands of Vestspitsbergen, Nordaustlandet, Barentsøya, Edgeøya, Prins Karls Forland, the isles lying close to them, and the adjacent islands of Bjørnøya, Hopen, Kong Karls Land and Kvitøya. At their northern extremity, the islands lie about 600 miles from the North Pole — 600 miles of broken ragged ice pierced by the large cracks, called ‘leads’, and some open water. This proximity to the Pole is why the islands were chosen as the stepping-off point for various attempts, remarkable for the variety of conveyances employed, at reaching the globe’s northern-most point.

  Parry, and a party hauling specially fitted-out ships’ lifeboats, left from Svalbard in 1827 for an abortive attempt at the Pole. In 1897 Andrée began a fatal attempt to reach the Pole from Danskøya Island, north-west of Spitsbergen, by balloon. Amundsen, in 1925, used two Dornier flying-boats, and in 1928 tried again from a base at Ny Ålesund on Spitsbergen’s north-west coast. Nobile crashed his airship, Italia, trying to reach the Pole, and Amundsen died attempting to find the crashed airship. In 1931 Sir Hubert Wilkins used Spitsbergen as a base from which he attempted to reach the Pole by submarine under the ice. In between these expeditions there were several attempts to reach the North Pole by more conventional methods: on foot and by dog-sled. A Spanish team attempted the icy traverse on motorcycles but, much to the delight of the Norwegian miners who lived at Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s capital, the Spaniards couldn’t coax their machines up the icy incline from the airport to town, and the attempt was cancelled on the spot.

  Since the early 17th century, whalers, mostly Dutch, Danish, Breton and English, have worked from the bays and fjords of Spitsbergen’s ice-free west coast in summer.

  Elkouba picked her way out through the last remaining miles of sheltered water in the leads, and lifted her bows to the first rolling swells of the open sea. A fresh easterly breeze bellied the sails and she began to cover the miles to Spitsbergen.

  I took the watch from Sarah one morning, about a day out, to see a sinister, grey warship lurking in the murk about a mile behind us. As I watched, the signal lamp flashed from his bridge, and trying to decipher the rapid winks and blinks of his message, I managed to make out ‘-. -’, the international signal for ‘I wish to communicate with you.’ I immediately turned the VHF radio on. ‘Warship at 76 degrees north, 9 degrees east,’ I broadcast. ‘This is the yacht Elkouba. Do you read me?’ No reply. I went on deck and still the pinpoint of light winked wildly in my direction, so I returned below and repeated the process. Still no answer.

  When I went back on deck next time I ignored the flashing ship, and closely scanned the horizon. I counted five warships scattered around us, all frantically blinking code at each other. We had sailed into some sort of nasty war game they were playing, and I think they were probably observing radio silence. We had bumbled right into the middle of the fleet and begun broadcasting their position. Not the recommended procedure for winning friends and influencing people.

  We sailed on, expecting at any moment to be blasted from the water, until the sinister armada faded back into the fog. The Barents Sea, between Norway, the USSR and Svalbard, also gives access to Murmansk, the USSR’s only year-round ice-free harbour, and, as such, was used by much of the Soviet military fleet and their North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) opponents to practise war. Twice, en route to Spitsbergen, Sarah and I noticed that we were being observed by the beady glass eyes of submarine periscopes, and Warren Brown had told us of a near-miss between his yacht, War Baby, and a Soviet submarine on patrol.

  Sarah is never sea-sick. We have sailed together in various different boats, and in conditions ranging from mill pond to tempest, and I have never seen her throw up, even while those around her are doing so. The colour green has never decorated her countenance — it is just unheard of. But now, halfway between Norway and Svalbard, in rough but not really drastic conditions, Sarah was sea-sick. ‘I think it must be caused by worry,’ she croaked, and gamely slogged on with her share of the work.

  I had planned on sighting Bjørnøya (Bear Island) about halfway to Spitsbergen, to confirm our navigation; and perhaps, if the weather was propitious, land, browse around and pass on Captain Dahl’s regards to the people at the Norwegian weather station. Somewhere in the sleet and fog, however, we missed it completely, and after about four days at sea we had run our dead-reckoning distance to a spot somewhere south-west of Spitsbergen. The surly grey sky that had shrouded the sun for the whole four days of our passage parted briefly to show said sun, and I scrambled for the sextant to fix our position. As Elkouba lurched around on the steep grey seas, I remembered other dodgy landfalls.

  In 1977, for example, I had been a crew member in the American-owned schooner Sereno, when she struck rocks and sank off Hood Island, in the Galapagos group. One man
was lost, and we four survivors almost died of thirst before we were rescued. This experience made me very wary of landfalls, and nowadays I would much rather heave to a good distance off a strange coastline until I have set a good positive position fix to find my way in on.

  Somewhere south-west of Spitsbergen, Elkouba sat very comfortably, hove-to, while the wind whistled in the rigging and we read, slept and ate for two days. A crowd of seabirds, representing half a dozen different species, gathered in the lee created by the yacht and rode the waves, squabbling and squawking among themselves. An anaemic sun finally glimmered through the clouds just long enough for me to find the angle between it and us, which I quickly worked down to find our position. The sight put us well west of Spitsbergen, so we hoisted sail, apologized to the disgruntled cluster of birds for removing their shelter, and beat into a slowly moderating breeze towards Spitsbergen.

  The delicate balancing act between survival and death, performed by most of the 100 bird species found in the archipelago, is reflected in the Norwegian government’s environmental regulations for Svalbard, where 22 different species breed. It is forbidden to fire a gun, or sound a ship’s horn, near any of the breeding colonies. One careless toot of a horn could scare the parents off the nest, and their young would die of exposure in their absence. An entire generation could be annihilated. Survival is just as arbitrary for the 165 plant species found in the islands; one careless footfall could spell doom. Polar bears, reindeer, Arctic fox, seal and whale populations, though much more robust, also tread the thin line of survival that is life in the Arctic.

  We raised the coast of Spitsbergen, a serrated rim of ragged rock stretching across the horizon, early the next morning. Light air and exceptional visibility baffled us once again, and it took another 36 hours before we were close enough to identify landmarks.

  It is interesting for exponents of celestial navigation to note that, because of the midnight sun, there are two opportunities each day, midday and midnight, for taking a meridian passage. For the midnight sight, instead of subtracting the sun’s altitude from 90 degrees, one adds it, and then subtracts the declination to give latitude. It is quite fun as an academic exercise, but in reality with the land close alongside, an absence of darkness and plenty of easily identifiable landmarks, navigation is not a problem. We used the combination of Norwegian and British admiralty charts, loaned to us by Warren Brown, and found them adequate; the Norsk Polarinstitutt has since completed a survey of Svalbard and surrounding waters and new charts have been produced.

  Our landfall was Stormbukta, a small open bay on the west coast of Sørkapp Land, the southern tip of Spitsbergen. It is a protected anchorage in easterly weather, with good holding on a sandy bottom, in about 3 to 6 metres of water. Stormbukta lays dubious claim to fame as the resting place of the British motor yacht Copious, which, in 1986, was trapped in the bay by drift ice, then struck rocks and sank while trying to escape. The crew and the scientific party she had been picking up were helicoptered to safety.

  On the strength of an article we had read in an English yachting magazine, Sarah and I decided that our first stop would be at Fridtjofhamna, a small, almost land-locked harbour off Bellsund, the next fjord northwards up the coast. According to the article, a lone fox-trapper, Louis Nillson, lived in the bay leading a solitary life in pursuit of the wily Arctic fox. Mr Nillson, the article said, had all his food and provisions for each year shipped from Norway and, if he forgot to order salt or sugar he was out of luck, because the nearest store was 450 miles away in Norway. The article elaborated on Mr Nillson’s lonely lifestyle; a true man of the Arctic, all alone, battling the elements.

  ‘Wonderful,’ we thought. ‘We will turn up with a boat full of relatively fresh fruit and veges, more salt and sugar then he has ever seen, bottles of malt whisky, and all the fruits of civilization.’ We imagined the smile of delight on his grizzled face as we treated him to all this extravagance.

  Sailing into Bellsund we struck one of the fresh, gusty easterly winds which are characteristic of these fjords, so we headed into Van Muydenbukta, a slightly sheltered bay, to anchor and sleep. We dropped anchor in about 6.8 metres of water near a small islet, and slept soundly in preparation for our fête with Louis at Fridtjofhamna the next day.

  When we awoke, hours later, the tide had dropped, and Elkouba was surrounded by long tails of seaweed, swirling in the water around us. A few rocks were visible, but the seaweed indicated many more; barely awash and uncharted, all capable of severely cramping our lifestyle. We carefully picked our way back out to deep water, then headed east to Fridtjofhamna. The wind eased, and we motored up the fjord, imagining the trapper’s rapturous greeting as we sailed in — the first people he would have seen all winter.

  As we approached the narrow entrance to Fridtjofhamna, an aluminium work boat came out and skipped across the water to meet us. The occupant was not dressed as we had imagined he would be, in seal-and fox-skin clothes, but glowed in a bright-orange survival suit and woollen balaclava. ‘Hi, I’m Louis,’ he called. ‘The hut is unlocked, and there is diesel in the drums on the beach. If you want anything just help yourselves. I’m on my way to Longyearbyen to spend the weekend with my girlfriend.’ With a roar from his two outboard motors, he bounced away over the horizon, townward bound. Sarah and I looked at each other, then sat down and howled with laughter. Another Arctic myth had been shattered.

  We got to know Louis later on. A native of Faroe Islands, he had been a tugboat skipper in Greenland before moving to Spitsbergen to work for an American oil company. Part of his legacy from the oil company was 20 200-litre drums of diesel oil, which he was trying desperately to give away before the drums rusted out.

  The hut he had built, on the spit near the harbour mouth, gave him spectacular views across Bellsund in one direction and across Fridtjofhamna, to the glacier at its head, in the other. We felt like trespassers as we eased the hut door open, but it was still snug inside from the dying fire, so we sat at his table and boggled at the view. I sat in Louis’ fur-draped easy chair, put my stockinged feet by the fire, flicked through his books, which were mostly in Danish, and imagined being there in winter with snow 6 to 7 metres deep outside and polar bears prowling in the perpetual dark. I liked the idea.

  Later we showed Louis the magazine article about him, and he looked at it quizzically. ‘Well, I suppose it does take a couple of hours into Longyear by boat in summer,’ he said. ‘But in winter I can just nip across the glacier on my snow scooter.’

  Sled-dogs are almost history in the modern Arctic. In the springtime, when it becomes light enough to see but there is still plenty of snow around, the mountains and valleys echo with the snarl of petrol motors as the modern-day Arctic travellers take to their snow scooters. The scooters travel at up to 100 kph and, dragging sleds full of petrol cans, they range all over the island. In less than eight hours a skilled rider can buzz from Longyearbyen across the glaciers that cover 60 per cent of the island’s interior, to the north-east end of Spitsbergen.

  The anti-scooter lobby cites the injuries caused by accidents on the ice, the incessant whining of the scooters, and the damage they do to the environment, but snow scooters are now as much a part of Arctic living as balaclava hats and boots. In much the same way as their four-wheeled counterparts took over from horses in the cities, snow scooters have displaced dogs in Arctic travel.

  Louis, like most of the fox trappers, used a dog team for his winter trapping. ‘If you get stuck in a snow storm for a few days you can eat a dog, but not a snow scooter,’ he explained. Short, heavily bearded and slightly cross-eyed, he was nick-named Hiawatha by the locals. He did actually spend most of the winter alone with his huskies, but could, in an emergency, radio for helicopter assistance from Longyearbyen, 100 miles away by sea and less by glacier. He had worked on oil exploration, coal mining and fox trapping in Spitsbergen for about four years, and built his hut from the scrap wood that remained from an ice-damaged dock at the coal-mining settlement of S
veagruva. The hut was unpainted and looked coarsely built from the outside, a wart in the midst of majesty, but inside it was beautifully warm, neat and homely. Racks of guns and tools hung in the small lobby, and soldierly ranks of firewood were stacked by the door.

  Taking a hatchet and rifle, we started off along the rocky beach to gather firewood for Elkouba’s stove, stretch our legs and generally admire the view. We marvelled at the house-sized boulders on the beach that looked as though they had been neatly sliced by a cheese-cutter. Later we learned that the rocks split in that fashion when the moisture inside them froze during the winter.

  With our eyes peeled for polar bears, we ambled a couple of miles down the beach, collecting firewood as we went. Flotsam ranged from the huge logs milled in the USSR, and deposited on Spitsbergen shores by the Siberian current, to buoys from fishing boats and even the huge rubber fenders used by offshore fishing fleets.