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By Root 389 0

through the waves; the choppy sea had calmed with the onset of night, making her motion far less unpleasant. Recovered by now from my bout of seasickness, I was enjoying the pull of the wooden wheel and peering into the twilight and thinking how lovely the land would be when we reached it. Reykjavík … I knew nothing about the town and had never expected to visit it. In fact, Iceland itself had a magical ring to it. But eclipsing this by a long way was the thought of sailing to the New World. Can anything ever beat that for romance? I had never been to Newfoundland or Canada or even America before and had never felt particularly drawn to those lands on the other side of the pond. Though in a way that hardly mattered: it was the journey that was the thing … to buy a ticket and get on a plane was all very well, but to navigate your way across the perilous ocean, driven by the winds in the centuries-old manner. Well, it was one hell of a way to get to a place.

“Hey, Patrick,” I called, lonely at the helm and eager for a little improving conversation. “What are you doing up there on the deck?” Patrick was lashed by his safety harness to the mast, and slithering about with the bucking and rolling of the boat, making the most minute adjustments to the unfathomable array of ropes that constituted Hirta’s running gear.

“I’ll be with you in a minute,” he gasped as he panted and puffed at the hauling of some particularly weighty lift. “Bring her up on the wind a touch, will you? … While I get this throat purchase tightened up.”

Obediently I heaved a little on the wheel, and Hirta lost her speed, her sails flapping uselessly as she lay head to wind.

“Right, that’ll do. Pay off again and we’ll see how she goes …”

I spun the wheel back, the boat heeled as she caught the wind again and surged forward just the tiniest bit more swiftly than before. Patrick lurched back into the cockpit, wiped the spray from his face with his hand, and wedged himself in beside me.

“Is it really worth it, Pat … all that buggering about you do up there?”

He looked at me kindly and grinned.

“Well, it keeps me out of trouble … and it sort of makes me happy.” He looked up squinting at the billowing red sails, black against the gray of the arctic night.

“Wait a minute … no, look at the staysail. See where the front of it is slack? Well, that’s because the jib is curling the wind round and spilling it onto that bit, so the staysail is having less effect in driving us on. Now, if I slacken off this rope here just the littlest bit … like this …” He grunted as he slipped a loop from the catch, or cleat, beside the cockpit, let it run a couple of inches, and then cleated it up again. “Now the staysail’s full of wind and tight; the ship’s working just that little bit more efficiently.”

“OK,” I said. “I see.”

“And the thing is,” continued Patrick, rather pleased to be able to impart this nugget of arcane nautical information, “when you’re sailing twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week, the tiniest bit more efficiency can make a big difference to your journey time. At full speed we’re doing about seven knots,* so if you can up that by just a quarter of a knot, you’re really getting somewhere. Also it’s a matter of pride: you want your boat to be sailing as good as she can. And what’s more important, you want everyone else to see you’re doing the thing right.”

I peered into the pale cold light, where not the slightest speck or flicker of movement denoting any other vessel could be seen.

“Not out here, of course not,” he continued, “though when Tom comes up, the first thing he’ll look at is the sails, and if they’re not pulling as they should, he’ll think we’re a bunch of farmers … if you’ll excuse the expression.” Patrick grinned at this and slapped me playfully on the back.

“Here, give me the wheel for a spell and I’ll see if I can’t make something approximating a straight course.”

I slipped down the companionway into the warmth of the galley and boiled a kettle for some tea and smeared some marmalade onto a handful of digestives. It’s scarcely documented