Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [52]
It was a hundred yards away off the port bow, so it didn’t pose any threat to us. “Growler off the port bow, Pat,” I said in a seamanlike way, mainly in order to give the impression that I was alert and doing my job. We watched it as it bobbed away into the mist. That’s what growlers do: they move with the waves, in contrast to an iceberg, which sits foursquare and serene. Growlers are chips off icebergs or broken bits of pack ice that have fled south on the winds and tides. They tend to be somewhere between the size of a small room and a big house, and they get scattered all over the northern oceans. Of course, to a great ship of iron and steel they barely represent a hazard, but to a small wooden boat like ours a collision with a growler would mean the end of the line for us all.
I resumed my watch; there was nothing to see as we butted on through the mist. I stared and stared as hard as I could, and soon there seemed to be wraiths and plumes of swirling cloud in the enfolding whiteness, and then shadows of gray that might be the walls of soaring icebergs just ahead, or more likely just the play of the breeze in the mist. I looked down into the bow wave to reset my vision. I looked up and there was a growler dead ahead.
“GROWLERDEADAHEADPAT!!” I yelled. “HARD A STARBOARD NOW!”
Patrick swung the wheel hard over, and the growler slipped along the port side. It glowed and gleamed in purest white and turquoise and froze the very air around it. Patrick spun the helm back and the sails took up the wind once more.
“Blimey, that was a close one,” I said, as I wiped the mist from my glasses. “I think it’s your turn up on the front now, Pat. I’m about frozen solid.”
“You’ve another fifteen minutes, by my reckoning.”
I grumbled quietly and wrapped myself tightly around the forestay, peering still into the mist. There was something out there, something enormous.
“WHAT IN THE NAME OF HEAVEN IS THAT, PAT?” I shouted.
“What, where?”
“That bloody great thing lying on the water over there, look at it!”
“Holy mother of God, it’s a whale. It’s a bloody great whale!”
Patrick stood up and looked openmouthed at the apparition, then shouted down the companionway: “Whale ahoy!” Then he felt a little self-conscious about what he’d just shouted and said, “There’s a whale up here, lads, come and have a look,” but this time more quietly.
Now, the whale was not like the dolphins; it wasn’t horsing about, it was much quieter, more dignified. Then it blew, a great wet whoomph from its blowhole, and over all the Labrador Sea there spread a great miasma of marine flatulence, a thing with overtones of krill and plankton and seaweed and whole hosts of the fishy animalcules of the northern oceans.
By now everybody was sitting on deck in awed silence. It was as if we had just seen God.
“Pooh,” said Hannah, pinching her nose, then thought better of it and joined in the awe.
The great creature swished its flukes idly and drifted through the water, easily keeping pace with us. It was bigger even than the boat, probably sixty feet or more. It was a finback, one of the most enormous creatures on the planet. There we were drifting in perfect silence alongside one of the few remaining survivors of the great whales, for man has pursued and hunted these peaceful creatures to the very verge of extinction. I had seen film of the appalling things we do to whales, of the pilot whale cull in the Faroe Islands, where