Month: June 2023

We have seen our first iceberg! Several miles away to the southwest of us, but unmistakeable. Kittiwakes true to their name roam our wake.

Current position 58º 48’ N 44º W.

Memories of France, Saturday, 17th June 2023

During May in the boat yard, we worked on a thousand and one projects on the Atlas; routine maintenance, repairs, improvements, installation of new equipment. During that time we didn’t live onboard high and dry, but in a picturesque little gîte in the neighbouring village.

Owned by sailing friends of Arnaud’s, it is a little gem of an old house they found and refurbished in a picture of a Breton village. Three rooms on three floors, it’s a narrow home at the corner of a cul de sac. We can see the water from the bedroom in the attic.

Beautiful stone houses with flowering gardens, stone-walled roads so narrow that the car’s side mirrors just about fit, a boat ramp down by the water, and sailing and fishing boats on moorings in the bay. Every morning, a rooster welcomes the daylight, and a donkey brays here and there. The bumblebees are humming busily.

We met up with the hosts in their own house next door to watch Arnaud and Richard’s just-released documentary ‘Latitudes of Change’. Narrated by filmmaker and photographer Richard Mardens, it captures their voyage to Greenland two years ago in moving cinematography and words.

A crew of four, they sailed to Greenlandic waters to study marine mammals with their project ‘Glacialis’. Alex and I met photographer and speleologist Arnaud Conne and Virginie, a marine mammal observer, when they developed the expedition together while on Santa Maria in Greenland. During their voyage, I supported them with weather and ice information and with data analysis afterwards.

After this ‘French premiere’ of the documentary, our hosts invite us to a generous and delicious apéro riche, where I taste pan-fried buttery scallops, or Noix de St Jacques, for the first time. A revelation! Stephan, our host, freedives for them each week in the river just outside the village. Upon hearing that we too dive, he spontaneously invites us to join a couple of days later. What an opportunity! We jump at it. Yes, absolutely! We want to come along! How often does one get offered to be taken to dive for scallops, especially when not living near their habitat?

Clad in our wetsuits, fins, masks and snorkels in hand, we make our way down to the slipway overgrown with algae to meet the group going out at low tide. Six of us pile into a little fishing boat together with Stephan’s young border collie. We motor out to the shallows near an island in the river. The team briefs us about the diving conditions and tells us what to look out for to find the St Jacques. We’re in the last days of the scallop season, the final time they all head out to harvest the beautiful shellfish before the summer comes.

We arrive at low tide, nearly slack water, with just a little trickle still flowing up the river. The best time to capture scallops. The team warns us to pay heed to the turn of the tide and of bands of current that will soon pick up. Be constantly aware of your position relative to the boat and make sure you can get back and your rate of drift, pay close attention to read the signs of eddies and currents both underwater and on the surface.

Little turbulences on the water surface, stream patterns around rocks, buoys, and islands, the orientation of boats, mooring lines, the way the water ripples, different surface textures where wind is part of the game, either aligned with the flow, across, or against the stream, air bubbles and loose material floating past, the changing resistance on the fins and the body, the behaviour of the birds, … a host of telltales. Underwater, likewise, there are a myriad of signs that tell of flows: the orientation, angle, undulation of algae, sea gras, and other plant growth, particles suspended, topography, one’s own motion relative to the riverbed, the resistance of the water as one changes direction or moves into a different area, …

Anchored in a depth of about 6 m, one of the team gets into the water while we all don our remaining gear: socks, fins, masks, snorkels, gloves. He comes up with 6 scallops on his first dive, and a spider crab on the second! The others grab their collection nets and dive buoy and off they go. We follow and take our bearings.

Diving in a tidal river is unlike any diving we’ve done before.

The water is of a greenish opaqueness, with little bits of plants, algae, suspended sand and mud particles. The bottom is nowhere to be seen, despite being in so shallow an area. We first stay near the boat, observe our environment and the other divers filing their nets.

Then it’s time to go. I lie on the surface for a moment or two, relax my mind and body, take a deep breath and dip under. With just a couple of fin strokes, I reach the river bed, revealing itself through the green underwater mist as I draw nearer. I enter the habitat of St Jacques, I feel like entering a world on its own, hidden from the the surface.

Although I didn’t have much of an expectation, the riverbed landscape surprised me. Rocks, sand, pebbles and gravel between hummocks of submarine growth; startling varieties of algae and grasses with different hues of blueish-green and ranging to yellow, purple and red against pale sand and rocks of many shades. The surface of little hillocks is not unlike dunes along the coast overgrown with long grass and succulents, but in miniature format. Enchanting landscapes found in unexpected places.

The turbid water, brine mixed of salty sea and the river’s freshwater, at first made me a little uneasy. Used to diving the glass-clear waters of the Atlantic near the rocky shores of the Azores and the Canaries, where the visibility can seem without bounds, and on a ‘bad’ day might still be 20 m, it took a little getting used to. I couldn’t see farther than perhaps 2.5 or 3 m, regardless how much I strained my eyes. Alex, buddying with me, lost sight of me nearly immediately when I dived — not half a chance to spot me once I was cruising along the bottom. More often than not, I surfaced in a completely different spot than he expected me to.

Stephan and friends told us to look out for wavy arcs, just visible, buried in the soft sand between the little hillocks: the scallop shells’ outer rims. At first, it seems impossible to see any. Once the first one is spotted and pulled out of its sandy cove, the eye gets trained on what to look out for. It discerns the intricate subtleties of their patterns. Then others suddenly appear, emerging from their surroundings. Found you!

The inner hunter-gatherer awakes, looking for more. Towards the end of our dive, I come to an abundant area. I spot one, and as I pick it up, the eye gets hooked onto the next. I grab them one after the other, as I follow what seems a trail of scallops.

What appears to be a giant, ‘oh just that one over there, before I come back up, it’s soooo big,’ shrinks once in held in my hand. The diffraction of the light from the water through the boundary of my dive goggles and into its airspace magnifies dramatically. I drop those that seem smaller than the required size right away, and take only those that have a fair chance of being big enough.

Stuffing them behind the weight belt below my belly and around the bum, holding them in the pit of my elbow pressed against my body, I gather up more until any additional one picked up would result in the loss of one found earlier. Time to return to the boat.

The stern container is abundant with St Jacques when I offload my catch, and the divers gather to call it a day. The current has picked up, eddies around the island have become more pronounced, the boat has swung around and now tugs at its anchor. The flood has set in at an increasing rate. We have been in the water for longer than it feels.

One last dive, one last catch. I take a deep breath, duck dive and say goodbye to the riverbed world.

When I climb back into the boat, Stephan and his companions are already hard at work measuring each individual scallop for its size, rejecting those that are smaller than required by the regulations. Counting them into buckets, they divide the catch. Ours is meagre compared to those of the experienced team that goes every week. Nonetheless, they give us an equal share! Stephan gives us his, with the dry remark that his freezer is anyway packed with previous catches. We are touched by his abundant generosity.

Back at the gîte, Stephan teaches us how to open the scallop, peel the animal out of its shell, until the only thing that remains is the aptly named noix de St Jacques: a white muscle the size of a walnut that allows the scallop to open and close its shell.

Scallops have about a hundred eyes arranged all along the outer rim of the animal. Little blue globules. They can peer out of their housings with a near-180-degree panorama.

While we prepare our bucket full of scallops, I imagine how the poor thing looks at me while I pull it out of its shell. I must be a monster to it, tearing it apart alive. I need to get my mind off the thought, and keep on going to the bottom of the bucket. Otherwise I’d run back to the sea, bucket in hand, sobbing, releasing the lot.

The closer we get to the bottom of the bucket, the livelier they are. Some put up a fight as we insert the knife to cut loose the closing muscle. Snapping closed, clutching the knife in an attempt to keep us out and protect themselves. It’s difficult. We are killing and going to eat another being. The reality of doing it oneself forms a bond between predator and prey, gives it more weight. Not something bought in the supermarket, chopped up, cleaned and prepared by someone else and neatly packaged and ready to eat — disembodied and removed from the living being it was. It’s the real thing.

Delicately fried in butter, they are delicious, sweet, and tender. I’m feeling grateful and thank them in my mind.

Angie

Passage notes, Friday, 16th June 2023

On our passage, we have been encased in low lying stratus, fog, and mist for days on end. The boundaries blur, of the clouds as well as our world. In an ever changing gradient, it dissolves into a white or bright grey of sorts, our horizon pumping and flowing closer and further with the amount of water suspended in the air.

Uniform grey, one could say. But no. The more we look, the more we see. The more we listen, the more we hear. As so often, taking the time to observe with all the senses, to notice sometimes minute details, sometimes the overall permeating quality, the senses sharpen, and an infinite variety of fog-scapes and qualities of light open up. We learn to read the subtle differences, the variations, and we attune to our surroundings.

The density of the fog patches, the strength and location – I don’t dare say, direction – of the sun, time of day, thickness and evenness of the cloud layer above, and lastly, the swell travelling across the ocean from weather systems in far-flung places, the wind and its influence on both the water surface and the birds. They all are instruments in an orchestra piece that plays in continuously new variations.

Yesterday, a sharp metallic clearness was the overall impression; today, the seas are even flatter, and conjure images of silk and cotton balls; a thoroughly matted environment that swallows sounds and evens out the light. Our horizon has shrunk too; when I stepped outside this morning, I could hardly see further than 20 m, before the boundary between sea and sky blurred. The ocean appears empty today, yesterday’s birds are nowhere to be seen. It’s but a ‘personal’ impression, with our radius so reduced.

We carry with us our little dome of visibility, our world, as if walking with a flashlight through a cave. Before us, the seascape slowly opens up, gains clarity, comes into focus, shapes emerge, contrasts increase, a faint tint of green becomes visible here and there in the water. It travels by, and to our left and right, we can see just as far. The flat swell rises and sinks, until it disappears astern into the fog, in reverse to how it appeared. There is a subtle difference today to the direction, once can guess where the sun must be hiding.

In the night, our red and green navigation lights mounted to port and starboard, as well as the white stern and steaming lights, refract in the fog, illuminating our surroundings, the deck, the inside of the boat, and the mental image of carrying a torch through a cave becomes even more pronounced. We grope forward nearly blindly, but for the aids of navigation that extend our eyes, such as the radio-based AIS that transmits the location, direction of travel, speed and other information of each ship that has one installed, or the radar, which penetrates the fog and reflects from objects near and far.

The railing and a few washing lines in the rigging are adorned by our laundry. With a flat high pressure area squatting on top of us, the utter calm last night, and no wind on the forecast, we left our clothes hanging overnight. Dew droplets settled on the fine fibres of the merino underwear and shirts. Will they ever dry? Or do they just collect the mist that descends on us in regular intervals? If nothing else, they get a good airing. Domestic trivialities on the high seas.

Angie