Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [34]
Although I never quite got the hang of sextant maths, Tom did show me how you can get a rough idea of where you are by “dead reckoning.” This is a matter of plotting your course onto the chart. You have to make allowances for tides and currents, magnetic variations, leeway (which is the way that the wind blows you a little sideways off your intended track), and your speed, which you ascertain by streaming a device known as a log—a primitive instrument with a propeller on it that you throw into the sea way behind the wash of the boat. You plot all this information, along with changes of course, wind speed, and direction in the logbook, and on the basis of it you have some idea of where you are … although—unless you’re very slick—not much.
DURING ALL OF THOSE five long days sailing northward to Norway, we saw no sign of land, and, apart from the odd distant ship, there was not much to see on the sea, either, except a few birds.
I bemoaned this to Tom one day, or at least mused aloud about the monotony of the sea compared with the variety of the land with its ever-changing views of rocks, flowers, and trees. But he wouldn’t have any of it. “Birds,” he declared, “are the flowers of the sea. They’re the living element of the seascape; they give it color and personality and endless variety. There’s not an oceangoing sailor who doesn’t care about birds. Even if you didn’t give a fig for birds before you went to sea, you soon come to love them. They’re your constant companions and you get to know everything there is to know about them.”
And sure enough, the longer we were at sea, the more I came to see the truth of this. The presence of birds was enough to dispel our loneliness and fill us with fascination. Tom and Ros, Patrick and John knew all there was to know about them and could recognize different species when they were no more than distant specks far away among the waves. We all had our favorites. Mine was the fulmar, a fat little gray-and-white gull with an amiable disposition and a quizzical look—a companionable sort of bird that you felt might be sticking close to the boat for the company rather than just the search for food. There were plenty of fulmars wheeling around among the waves as we sailed up the North Sea, though as we journeyed north I transferred my allegiance to the gannet, which started to make its appearance in ever greater numbers.
Gannets are bigger than fulmars and more slender and graceful. They dive spectacularly from a great height; they fold up as they hit the water and down as far as two hundred feet they can give a fish a run for its money. To my mind that should class them as amphibians, although this is not generally conceded. But to see a flock of gannets fishing, plummeting from sixty feet up in the air, racing among the schools of fish and then launching themselves from the waves again for another high dive, is one of the unforgettable sights of the sea. And then there’s the strangeness of the gannet’s cry, for it sounds just like a raven, a sound you associate more with the loneliness of heather-clad moorland than with the rolling wastes of the ocean. “Gark … gark,” they cry.
Gannets fly vast distances but go home to their nests most nights for a kip. Fulmars, on the other hand, are a tougher lot. They are pelagic, which means they live almost entirely at sea. They will go for months, even years, without touching land; indeed the only time they do touch land is when they lay their eggs and rear their young. In the case of the fulmar, she doesn’t lay her first eggs until she’s eight years old, so once a chick leaves the nest it spends the next eight years of life at sea. It’s hard to imagine