Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [40]
WE PUT IN TO Iceland, instead of sailing straight past, because it’s not every day you find yourself high up in those latitudes, and we had a yen to visit the place. But also because Tom wanted to consult the experts on the Greenland ice pack, the belt of sea ice that girdles the coast, to see if we could chance an approach, and the ice-monitoring station was in Reykjavík.
There wasn’t a marina for yachts in those days in Reykjavík, so we tied up at the fish dock, which (as you’d expect) smelled nauseatingly of fish, with heavy overtones of diesel. But if the truth be told, we didn’t smell too good ourselves, and we were pleased to have anywhere at all to dock after a couple of weeks at sea on the passage from Bergen. What we all needed was a drink … and a bath.
Now the first of these was harder to find, as although Iceland had won independence from Denmark back in 1944, the draconian drinking laws imposed by the colonial power seemed still to be in operation. The only place you could buy a bottle of even the mildest liquor was the state booze monopoly—I forget the Icelandic term for it—and this unappetizing establishment was only open at times when normal working folk had no possibility of getting to it. On the odd occasion when it was open, there were long, long queues of shamefaced Icelanders, shuffling along in the bone-crunching cold out on the street. When you finally made it to the counter, you had your identification checked by the sort of humorless, boot-faced assistants you’d expect to find running the show in a funeral parlor. The simple joy of just slipping out and buying a special bottle of wine to share with a loved one or some friends just wasn’t an option. No wonder these people were driven to distill their own grog at home.
The laws were relaxed if you were going to have something to eat, so we ended up at a pizzeria, and a very good pizzeria it was, too. The speciality of the house, and the dish that has made the place for me ever memorable, was horse pizza … that is to say, a pizza that, along with the more traditional tomato and mozzarella and oregano, had horse on it. Horse can be a little on the fibrous side, but is much appreciated by the Icelanders, who are the most pragmatic of people.
In terms of personal hygiene, things had come a long way since the days of Ragnar Hairybreeches, for even the most cursory reading of the sagas indicates that fastidiousness in matters of cleanliness did not figure high with Vikings. For us things were bearable so long as we stayed within a certain radius of the fish dock, but as we moved farther afield we became horribly conscious of the unspeakable miasma that followed us. In the horse pizzeria, for example, we had not failed to notice a certain ripple of disdain among the other customers.
The reason for our disgusting state (and I do not include the much more wholesome Ros and Hannah in this) is that it was just too damn cold at sea to wash. The only man among us who was bold enough to strip off and wash in a bucket on deck was Patrick … and that was because Patrick had been in the army for years and was hard as a brick. The rest of us sort of let things slide and, as a consequence, each of us was encrusted in a layer of sweat and dirt, trapped inside damp wool, unwashed socks, and underwear that was best not mentioned.
Fortunately within hours of landing, Ros had managed to find the public baths, and we all trooped along armed with lotions and potions and unguents and sundry instruments