Log from the Voyage of El Vigo

THE ARTS JOURNAL is delighted to be working with Lewis poet and visual artist IAN STEPHEN on an exciting project to host a daily Log from his latest artistic voyage on his yacht, the El Vigo.

Ian Stephen, Stornoway's seafaring poet © Peter Urpeth

IAN STEPHEN has completed a number of projects in which his dual passions for sailing and art have been inextricably combined. Next week, he and a crew of three will launch on the latest such venture, a project which is part of the Stanza Poetry Festival in St Andrews.

Ian will sail from Lewis to St Andrews, stopping off en route as they navigate around the top of Scotland and down the east coast to a rendezvous at the Scottish Fisheries Museum in Anstruther, and on to St Andrews for the festival itself.

Ian will be sending material to the Arts Journal on a daily basis throughout the voyage. These ‘Logs’ will take the form of text (including new work created on the boat), visual images and audio files from the boat. As with all marine voyages, many factors will come into play in determining the exact nature of both the voyage and the material.

This is a tremendously exciting project for the Arts Journal, and we are delighted that Ian has chosen to involve us in it. We wish the mariners the heartiest bon voyage as they prepare to set sail early next week (Monday 9 March or Tuesday 10 March seems the likely starting point at this stage). Visit this page regularly to monitor progress and link to the daily Logs.

LOG ENTRIES:

Pre-departure (Posted 4/3/04)

It’s only a week till the crew arrive. You can plan for tides but not for winds. The charts are now in folios. I’ve been up top for a look around – replaced frayed rope and tightened a wire here or there. There’s still plenty items on the list without a tick. But we can talk to HI~Arts web site.

And there are 2 crisp new notebooks – one for Nicola Gear who’ll manage the log, in writing and sound. And one for the skipper who’ll be listening for resonant phrases.

Norman Chalmers will be officer-in-charge communications and concertina. Adrian Farrow is our sawbones and since he really is a surgeon we won’t bother with a pre-emptive strike at the appendixes.

El Vigo is a 33ft single-masted sailing yacht, narrow and deep. She was built in pitch-pine and mahogany in Vigo, Spain, to a design by Robert Clark. I’ve crossed the North Sea in her before, been through the Merry Men of Mey in the Pentland Firth and also out to St Kilda. So I know she’ll look after us if treated with care.

The game-plan is to go for Stromness then Wick. A homage to George Mackay Brown in the Orcadian city of Hamnavoe. And to the contemporary Orcadian artist, Colin Kirkpatrick aka Puck, the cowboy. We might put in to Fraserburgh, Peterhead or Aberdeen, if the weather permits. But if the wind is fresh from the east we’ll give them a miss and sail on down. El Vigo will aim to rendezvous with the Reaper at the Scottish Fisheries Museum, Anstruther and back up to StAnza Poetry Festival, St Andrews. But any sea-plans are only provisional.

Priorities: new cowl for the heater – snow lingering on the decks, and the checks up-top.

The difficulty is drawing a final line. That applies equally to making poems or to preparing a boat for sea. El Vigo now has the charts and a new radar reflector and a serviced liferaft. But her bottom could do with a scrub, her topsides a lick of white. And, as I’ll be living aboard her for the best part of a month, some work to the interior woodwork.

There are good tides for beaching her over the weekend so, weather-permitting we’ll give it a try if all else is done. Tough on the crew – off the plane and straight down to the shore, roller in hand.

Ian Stephen's gansey

I’ve a new gansey, smelling of Shetland, knitted for me by Di Gilpin. She handed it to me the other night and explained how the cables and turns do not follow straight lines. They swither like conversations. Di told me a story about meeting with minke whales, under Neist Point, Skye. That’s now worked into a video we made together, as she cast-on this gansey. It will be shown at The Byre Theatre during the Stanza festival. But she also told me about the Skye waterfalls which sometimes don’t fall.

I was walking in the Neist Point area, tail-end of last year. Blast of breeze blowing a waterfall back and up into the air, from the cliff. Here it is and it’s also in the sound-log. And in the gansey, of course.

Neist Point by Ian Stephen

The nearest you’ll see to
water flowing backwards
against the run of slope,
gravity losing support

as the anabatic blast
drives the cliff’s burn back
and up cloudward

in a rhythm you can’t clock
and is irrational
as any sort of love

but rainwater
has a chance
of reaching sea
even if today
you don’t see it fall.

Day One – Ready to Sail (Posted 8/3/04)

No matter how many hours, how many days, we’d still be finishing with the tide around our ankles.

We caught a good tide to dry her and scrub and paint. We’re sailing today Monday 8th.

The squad turned out in style, people who’ve sailed on El Vigo or who just like to give a hand.

There’s sun but not much breeze.

Day Two – To Orkney (Posted 9/3/04)

Clearing Cape Wrath

Stainless, still at the end of the boom.
Up there, squadrons of stars shift.
Maybe not endless but
a fearsome number
propelling into
the lit city of Durness

Ian’s thoughts as we night sailed on watches…a long cold moonlit Minch…round the Cape and the sea and wind building up towards Orkney..

Leaving Stornoway 1pm Monday, Ian lost the hat on the foredeck in big seas coming towards Hoy, still has the gansey though.

Day Three – Stromness (Posted 10/3/04)

El Vigo departed Stornoway 1300, 8th March, arrived Stromness 1200 9th.

You’ve to catch a tide to get through Hoy Sound, to Stromness unless you can swim or sail or power-up faster than it. El Vigo couldn’t so that’s what we call a tidal gate. The navigation is easy – you just have to find speed to reach the gate while it’s still open.

We made it, diesel-assisted through parts of the night when the wind fell light. But the forecast Southeasterly came good and worked with a the forecast southeasterly came good and worked with a fair tide to get us through in time.

Cold and beautiful noon in Stromness. Thinking of the quiet and timeless art of George Mackay Brown, that poem of his when the yole is sailing under and the old guy just sucks at his pipe between his teeth. And all I’ve got to worry about is continuing problems with contamination in fuel and fresh-water tanks and lines.

Thinking also of the precedence of other voyagers. Ricky Demarco hiring a ship and bringing a pile of the appropriate people aboard. Just going visiting – and it’s not only landscape, seascape, it’s people. So we’re getting R and R at Puck’s flat in the former lighthouse-keepers’ cottages. And it looks like a session tonight, brace of concertinas, flute, fiddles, a trained singer (who’s also a diver, potentially the handiest person a sailor can meet) and maybe some untrained stories.

The wind is still fresh from the southeast and we’ll need a shift or an easing to let us through the Firth to the sea-route south. So it’s repair day. Here’s a bit of yesterday’s log. A log is a line trolled behind a vessel, marking pace through the water and a poem isn’t that different.

Hoy Sound

Another old man wincing at sun.
He’s out of the fast
air with east in it,
the stream that’s driving us
against the piling water’s run.

Our lead sail’s assumed power
letting us lean to get the sharp
and pertinent shoulder cutting
the deeper, easier middle,

secure to take in the Palomino
manes, ranging but never alone
and the platinum Munro bob
break-dancing, Stromness-style.

Day Four – Stromness (Posted 11/3/04)

“You’re the first birds this year” said Ian Richardson the boatbuilder. It’s not the season, not yet, and now we’re stormbound here, snow on Hoy, sleety squalls tunelling down the thin Stromness streets.

Can’t think of heading out into Scapa Flow till the easterly gales back off. Then there’s the Pentland Skerries and the massive tidal gates of the Firth….but we have a plan.

Music session at The Ferry Inn

Meanwhile, repairs to our water supply and heating system, and tonight a big music session. The only concertina maker in Scotland – and one of the few in the world – just happens to live here, he’s a sailor and a singer too, and knows all the music makers, so the word’s gone round and The Ferry, right by the harbour, is the place to be tonight. We won’t be able to stop Ian from trying a Stornoway strip the willow, but he’ll be in trouble here, boy, where they make two long lines and nothing stops them, not even the furniture.

Day Five – Stromness (Posted 12/3/04)

We haven’t shifted. Even the wide deep Orkney creel-boats with their tall bows are still tied-up today. The Southeasterly has moderated now but the forecast is still not great. We took the chance to speak to the men who know.

William Bremner is the last man to be born on Stroma, the island which divides the outer from the inner passages through Pentland Firth.

Gordon Morrison is a Wick man, doing his ticket here at the Stromness Maritime College. “Mountains,” he said. “You’ve to look at the whole picture. It’s what’s happening further out there in the North Sea. Days of gales building water and it’s all piling in to the shallow edges.”

So the advice of the guys who run ferries, or haul creels, catching eddies, doing every trick to use rather than fight the tides here, is pretty clear. Stay put.

Southeasterly: Stromness

There’s a fair bit of east in it still,
the laziest wind, as they say,
“Doesn’t bother to go round you,
just straight, all the way through.”

And the gentle men at the harbour
warped our own white horse,
pretty wild on the rope,
round and out of the teeth of it.

A day to open the Rayburn oven,
“Wellies away, stick your feet in.”
Remembering, like steam from a browning scone
done on the oiled plate on the top.

If it’s about anything, it’s this,
the taste of the relations, out of town,
the watch-mates met again
in the Ferry Inn, on the bridge of the Hebrides.

The way one phrase talks to another.
The history of your way through weather.
The touch of your people.

Puck Kirkpatrick’s Orkney roadshow took us to the burial mound of Maes Howe. The three stones that make up the long, low entrance corridor can’t be imagined. This feat of quarrying and transportation was achieved before the pyramids. The Norse runes look delicate but the translated texts are pretty wild chunks of language. Another form of log-keeping.

Next stop, Skara Brae.

SKARA BRAE. Low Water, equinoctial springs

Anne’s office, perched at the site.
The filing cabinets face the door that
opens to winds that used to prevail.
That reef, the building bar of stones,
is extending out, she says,
like the bay is looking after itself.

Day Six – To Hoy and beyond… (Posted 13/3/04)

So El Vigo is snug at Burray. She’ll be listening to the roar of the fetch from the Skaggerak. Long-distance water breaking on the other side of a man-made causeway which closes the sea-gate east. Churchill ordered a series of these defences to fight the U-boats which could sneak into Scapa Flow.

We’ve jumped ship with our log of words, recorded sound and digital images.We’ll be installing them aboard the “Reaper”. Her skipper is planning a hop up to St Andrews and through the new lock-gates to the inner harbour. There for the duration of the Stanza poetry festival. She used to fish herring, powered by two high, tan lug-sails. A lot of her catch would have been sold as part of the Baltic herring trade. That’s right over there, just across the North Sea. I’ve sailed that route twice, once in El Vigo, but right now it looks like impossible distance. We’ve had a good look at Margaret’s Hope, the settlement next door to Burray, as we beat against the wind to get an angle into our borrowed mooring. It looks like a Danish village. It’s good to see some landscape again after sleet, hail, lingering mist and high spray. William Bremner meets us.The word is that Wick and the other harbours open to the east are closed.

We’ve something to share. Norman Chalmers has had the camera and keyboard out as often as the box and whistle. These photos you’ve been seeing were quietly shot, edited and sent by him. Niki has been recording sound throughout and planning a form the samples will take. Adrian, the surgeon, has been dissecting the Danish heater or organising hosepipe to bypass our ruptured water-tank.

So how is morale as we’re leaving Orkney, with someone else doing the driving? It’s good. There’s a lull today but new gale warnings with another system approaching.We’ve had some great late-winter sailing but haven’t taken any serious risks.

As a coastguard, I used to organise maritime rescue. A lot of our statistics were guys who were hell-bent on getting to a certain place for a fixed time.

SESSION (at Ian and Kitty’s)

The fiddle’s chattering to the cauld wind
pipes and John’s bass kicks.
Kitty and Norman’s boxes
squeeze and shunt the
vectors of the session
Cooking on gasoline.
It’s all bending fine.

The boat’s moored in
whatever breeze.
Lines of only maybe arrivals
smudge in the backspray of
the jabble that shines out and up
from visibility, moderate to poor.

The sight of height is
only an idea of Hoy.

Shortly after these photographs were taken, the El Vigo crew were forced to abandon their brave voyage. The crew are safe and well, and continuing their journey to the StAnza Poetry Festival on dry land…

Journey’s End (Posted 17/3/04)

For every decision there is a timescale. When a helicopter crew moves from 15 to 45 minutes standby, during night hours, you don’t want to delay. …call the guys in to immediate readiness. You’ve lost no time. When they’re driving in to the base you can make some calls.

Maybe you find that the doctor who recommended urgent evacuation didn’t realise that 4 additional lives would be at serious risk, airlifitng a patient from a heaving boat well out into the Atlantic. When you speak to him directly he says tomorrow will be OK. No-one is going to die so the four airmen can go back to their respective pits.

Compared to these issues, this one was a small decision to make. By making it in good time, the crew have been able to hold together for some more days.

On the bus south. Working to document our experience in the hope that it’s well worth sharing.

Adrian is now back to ‘life and death’ operations. Niki spent a full day editing some of her recordings. Norman met me at Waverley Station to catch light. He had me place the charts taken from El Vigo on the bonnet of his car, stretched flat. He worked his digital magic again. This feeling of the team remaining intact is worth everything.

Tom Gardner and Ian Stephen

I’m seeing Norman again tomorrow – that’s Thursday I think. Tom Gardner (and that’s a grand name for a Scottish skipper) is taking us out aboard the ‘Reaper’. The plan is to leave the Scottish Fisheries Museum berth at Anstruther and go on up to St Andrews. It’s a pretty poor forecast for the weekend but we hope to be tucked up inside the new lock gates at St Andrews’ harbour.

The few day’s grace has given time to work on the exhibitions. One will be sharing space in The Byre Theatre. The other will be on board the ‘Reaper’. As usual, some of the pre-made works have been jettisoned. These provide security for the time it takes to make something new. But I’ve been splicing Niki’s recording of paced Orcadian and Wick voices to slowed footage of our last few days. The mission is simply to share the poetry of meeting – we met a little water but we met a lot of people.

Anstruther to St Andrew’s Bay

Get that bonnet in your pocket,
you’re on the east coast noo.
Green’s nae a colour for luck.

A long black ship turns tight stone corners,
a postie’s jig on sympathetic warps
and the full keel’s clear, we’re up the road.

Stornoway, aye, in for bait, on to Faroes.
A spoke or 2 roond 215’ll dae’s noo.
See that marker, if you’re doon this way,
3 tides meetin, keep a clearance.

I’m seeing a shading in the tones of water,
The bounce of light from incidental land,
Double Suilven, Baltic Orkney and

the brim of a soft and stubborn haar,
the slide of the whole tune, easy as Tom
as he whistles her through St Andrew’s lock,

a ba’ hair margin
on one side only,
alternating
– like our breathing.

Homecoming Part 1 (Posted 6/4/04)

Sailing plans are always flexible. Game plan 1 went thus:

Catch the moderate westerly, (where the wind is coming from) so no going westabout in the firth but let it and the tide take you out and then up to Kirkwall. Next day’s southerly across the tide (but not a huge one) giving you a good sailing angle to clear Einhallow Sound and open water home.

Game plan 2:

Things happened at home so we couldn’t get away till Monday 30th, couldn’t sail till Tuesday: So use the lighter southeasterly to ride the Firth west, with tides not too crazy and maybe make Loch Eriboll. That would allow a day for the bigger water to settle and let us clear Cape Wrath and go for it all the way home.

Game plan 3:

Have a grand night at William Bremner’s in Burray. Then sail in company with Hamish’s 36 ft Rustler “Kora”, to go round Flotta and into Longhope, on to Stromness, a different route than before, ready for the gateway home.

So the pictures show what we did. It’s a family team now, with Barbara and our 19 year old son, Sean. Both of them have a bit of water behind them, a lot of it on El Vigo. Barbara just invested in a small digital camera so we could keep the log going in the absence of Norman. Niki and Adrian couldn’t swing this one, either.

We did some in-flight transfers under sail, in grand conditions, so William also had a go at the helm of El Vigo. He was amazed at how light a boat with such obvious power could feel.

The two vessels anchored at Longhope,another Baltic-looking settlement. I can’t hear that name without thinking of the lost lifeboat. It’s a reminder. Of course I admire the Grand Prix racers of the sea, sailing high latitudes on tuned 60 foot sailing machines but the real heroes are the volunteers who are ready to drop everything in any conditions.

They take small lifeboats out to wild water for pleasure-sailers or merchant ship or fishing vessel alike. What they call prudent seamanship isn’t a lack of nerve, it’s respect for the elements and people who might have to bail you out.

Here’s a poem, made during a workshop at StAnza poetry festival. We were working on the idea of “A log as a line to take.” – but in the sense of the people behind you, where you’re coming from.

At Longhope

It’s your track record,
how she leans to the cloth she carries,
how her forward sections dip
and the bounce of recovery.
The swither of that, if any,
in small turbulence astern.
It’s the hiss of the line of bubbles,
the ones you’re not often going to see
in the clutter of several waters
but you have to get the sniff of them.

Homecoming Part 2 (Posted 7/4/04)

The forecast wind is still southeast. The same section that was no-go against tide to clear Pentland Firth for the North Sea is a good breeze for home. We’d just need to go with tide, clear of Hoy and get the right angle to hover between Cape Wrath and Tiumpan Head. Bit it’s due to start whistling from midnight. We’re offered a more sheltered berth at Stromness and the comforts of “da peedie coffee house” – Hamish and Frieda’s flat and dinner to boot. Part of me wants to sail now on the evening tide, get clear before the wind gets up. Then reef down and ride them with a scrap of sail. The other side knows we’re going to have a hard sail whichever way we do it. Best to start with a rested team. The wind-direction is viable.

So we had another night of Stromness hospitality, but with the quieter tone that comes from knowing you’re sailing early.

We cleared before the ferry. Looking back to Hoy Sound and Bring Deep, benign now that you’re not fighting to clear. The same sea-route is never the same road. The landscape when you see it changes by the second in light and cloud. So does the water. El Vigo was soon sailing as fast as she’s gone, in our custody. We had the smallest main we could show and a smallish jib with a high cut so it’s not inclined to catch waves. The exhilaration is awesome.

It also fools you into thinking you can safely carry the cloth you’ve set. When the same boom that looked high above you is trailing the water, it’s time to do something about it. But then you’ve to turn back uphill for as long as it takes to stow some sail. So the cabin windows get a wash as you turn. Then you gain relief as the front sail backs – diluting the power of the wind that’s now gusting to gale force but still in weak sunlight.

West Orkney to North Minch

When I was preparing the boat, I knew that the smallest mainsail we could hoist – 3 reefs in – was still too much cloth for gale force winds.

Well, fine if there’s not a build-up of sea but we were now out in open water, stuff that was sweeping up all the way from the Pentland Firth. But I’d left it too late to have the sail altered so the only option now was to do away with it or with the foresail. The jib took us all the way home. Except that we were daft enough to hoist the main again in a lull when the boatspeed dropped. So we had to have another short bash uphill till we got it down again.

You can’t be complacent near home, at night, in strong breeze. So we ticked off the marks. Glad to hear the roar of surf at Chicken Rock and the Beasts of Holm, a decent gap off. It’s when you don’t see them, you get worried. So the port of arrival is the port of departure. What have you gained? The company along the way will do for me. I learned from a grand group of writers at a workshop at StAnza Poetry Festival, that the log of your own way through water is the people who’ve gone before you. Entering harbour, their voices are cheery.

Growlers, (top end of the North Minch)

They say you want to look a beast in the eye
but see the growlers, come a long way,
I’m not so sure it helps to look behind
and they’re usually just playful
scratching their backs on your keel
a hiss of steam and on where they’re bound.

Then there’s the sloppy ones,
always in 3, the Mull guys tell me,
when the pressure’s been high and
the strong dry breeze stays Southeast.
They don’t mean to make a menace
more curious like as one of them breaks,
a slap on the shoulder and into the cockpit,
maybe another, a rough greeting
just to catch the craic of your ship.

Chicken Rock (Approaches to Stornoway)

Jock Stewart’s red face shone in fog.
A hillwalking compass got us to the mark.
The lythe surrendered, 30 years back.

We’re rolling close and the leeway’s heavy.
I’m scanning for a quick 6, one long.
There’s a cardinal mark, these days
except that it’s not bloody on.
And it’s a combo as always,
the feel of the helm gives the figure
and the satellites send a wee beam down
to give you a handhold.

© Ian Stephen, 2005