Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [51]
You couldn’t help but be foolish and imagine that those tiny eyes of theirs, deep in their protective hoods of blubber, were smiling and laughing at the sheer fun of it. I had seen a similar phenomenon with a flock of crag martins, forty or so of them horsing around in the sunshine and shade of the rocks by the shore in Greece. The only explanation I could possibly think of for this behavior was that it was a manifestation of sheer animal joy. Me, I found myself whooping with pleasure. All the cold and the boredom and the misery and the fear of the journey were amply repaid by such a sight.
The others were a little dewy-eyed about the dolphins, too, for although every long-distance sailor has often seen them, it’s a sight you don’t tire of. And from here on, as we crossed the Greenland Sea, there were dolphins with us almost all the time, and we felt comforted by the presence of such benignity. Until now we had had the birds: fulmars and skuas and cormorants and gannets; creatures that had both moved and fascinated us, and kept us company in times and places of loneliness and fear. For this I’d felt a certain gratitude and respect. But the dolphins … well, the dolphins are mammals; they are “one of us.”
WE HAD BEEN HOPING to make a landfall on the coast of Greenland, but the ice reports had not painted a rosy picture of the seaways up to those ports: there was pack ice and drifting ice, and the westerlies had blown all the ice from the west side of the Sea of Labrador over to the east, where it was blocking access to the coast. This, of course, was back in the 1980s; if you’d a mind to today, you could sail round the Greenland coast in your little Cornish Crabber. There’s almost no sea ice left anymore.
“Trouble is,” said Tom, “that you can be sailing in the evening through waters lightly packed with thin sheets of ice that just tickle the sides of the boat as she passes, and then you wake up in the morning and it’s turned to slabs of pack ice six feet thick. That’s the way it is up in these beastly latitudes. Give me the Torrible Zone any day … and the hills of the Chankly Bore.”
So we didn’t make Greenland—it was just too damn dangerous in a wooden boat—although that evening we passed close enough to the southern tip to be able to make out, in the faintest of pastel blues, Cape Farewell. We watched it wistfully for an hour or two as we passed and warmed our bellies with whisky.
The next day there was mist in the morning, and something new to talk about: John had spotted a growler.
“So tell me about your growler,” I suggested as I emerged on deck.
“You can see for yourself,” said John. “There it is, right behind us.”
I looked back to where he was pointing. There it was, a rather unexciting block of white ice bobbing about on the sea.
“It doesn’t look much to me,” I said, a little disparagingly.
“It may not look much to you, Chris,” said Tom. “But if we’d hit it at the speed we were going, it would have stoved in the front of the boat, and we wouldn’t have been here now, nicely up on the surface of the sea; we’d have been well on our way down below it. From now on, this being growler country—and maybe there’ll even be icebergs, too—we’re having a man on the bow on lookout day and night. So off you go and wipe the breakfast out of your beard and then get shackled on to the forestay; it’s your turn first.”
Keeping watch on the forestay was different from being in the cockpit. There was no shelter for a start; you were right out there on the front of the boat, peering keenly into the mist. You