Biscay

by Horatio Blint

  

It had been an uneventful trip so far.  Apart from an initial bout of seasickness coming through the Channel from our journey’s start in Rotterdam, the most exciting thing had been dodging the amount of shipping that utilises this seemingly yawning seaway.  From the wheelhouse of a 60’ tug, at the age of 17, the English Channel looks huge.  

From the wheelhouse of a gigantic container ship, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of tonnes of similar hulking, lethargic leviathans, all trying to get past each other in the busiest, narrowest strip of sea in the Northern hemisphere, the Channel might as well be a 7’ width limit on a London backstreet.  Add to this ferries, hovercraft and drunken sailors, the last thing they need is a bunch of (very experienced) clowns trying to cross from South to North in a vessel that they’d have trouble seeing, let alone avoiding.

As to why I found myself in this situation, I have to set the story up with a little provenance.  I was 17.  I had left school.  I had one A level (Geology, B of you must know), and having been told by a fusty careers advisor that I’d never get a job doing Geology and should consider joining the Royal Navy, just like Dad, I was a bit lost.  I didn’t fancy war as a career, and those damned Russians were all over us in 1978.  The dole provided beer and enough petrol to put in Dad’s car to get to my mate Nick’s place and play 12 string guitars, and that was it.  Music was where it was at, but quite how that was to happen was currently eluding me.  I needed some income and something interesting to do, especially as Nick was buggering off to Italy or somewhere.

My home was next to the sea, and with that came a raft of salty local characters who seemed to scoop a living of some kind from the ocean.  I was mates with several of them, and was pretty useful around boats of all shapes and sizes.  And so it was that one evening, in the local pub, I got offered a job.  If ever there was any payback for the amount of cash it is possible to hand over a welcoming bar, this was it.  I was in the pub, being offered a job.  Little did I know that this would actually prove to be a fairly regular occurrence throughout my career as it turned out, but that’s another story.

The bloke making this generous gesture was called Gubby.  He has a brother called Trog.  This is the truth.  The brothers were part of a well-respected local family who had been in the village for years and had a deep history of aquatic adventures behind them.  Their Dad and mine were serving RN officers together.  If you imagine a stereotypical West Country mariner, but younger, with scruffy hair, pipe, high alcohol resistance, neckerchief, you won’t be too far off.  Gub had been contracted to deliver two brand new tug boats from their birthplace in Holland to the Port of Algiers, and he needed some crew to go with him.  We got on well, and I knew which way was up, and I needed something to do.  And I was to be paid!  Where do I sign?

Algiers was in North Africa for pity’s sake (and still is I believe, unless the tectonic plates have been busier than I thought).  That was fucking miles away, especially by SEA!  Who would do that?  Little did I realise that I was about to embark on the first of a series of adventures that I would be fortunate enough to undertake throughout what has been a life of exciting travel.

We met our holiday homes in Holland and in short shrift set sail for Dartmouth, where we would load up with stores, before voyaging south.  The little ships were remarkably comfortable and well equipped considering they were tugs, and extremely powerful.  Not particularly fast, but you wouldn’t want that in a tug.  Ours was called Bou’Haroun, and the other was Jijel, both named after Algerian ports.  Gubby, myself and a guy called Dave (there’s always one) formed our plucky complement, and on Jijel were Simon Hunter and Bruce Watson (I think, can’t quite recall) and somebody who I am ashamed to say I have forgotten.

It was an epic prospect.  I had never travelled any further than Falmouth by boat before.  Our route was to take us from Rotterdam to Dartmouth, from Dartmouth on to Belle Île off the southern coast of Brittany, and then a huge stretch across the Bay of Biscay down to Gibraltar.  From Gibraltar we would stop off in Almeria in Southern Spain, where I experienced the hottest temperatures I think I ever have, and finally across the Mediterranean to Algiers.

The voyage in itself is an odyssey, but for me, one leg of it will always remain with me, as I doubt I will ever have a similar experience.

The Bay of Biscay is where the Atlantic Ocean meets Western Europe.  At its northern edge sits the beautiful French island of Belle Île, all windy streets and seafood.  The French coast sweeps on down from St Nazaire through Gascony to the Pyrenees and does a sharp right into Spain, forming Biscay - a bay of truly gargantuan proportions.  If you look at Biscay on Google Earth you will see where the Continental Shelf drops away to the Atlantic abyssal plain, between 80 and 200 km offshore.  The drop-off forms a horseshoe that stretches out into the Atlantic, with Spain forming the southern leg of the ‘U’.  The result of this geological analogue is that the prevailing south-westerlies, which have approximately 4000 miles of open ocean between France and Florida to play with, have plenty of time and space to gather up immense mountains of water and push them into the Bay of Biscay, where they hit the Continental Shelf, only to become more immense and mountainous.  They eventually crash onto the French coast, where places like Les Sables D’Olonne have become magnets for surf nuts.

As we sat sipping cold beers in the sleepy harbour at Belle Île, the others seemed pretty relaxed about our forthcoming trial by ocean.  We were sailing in 60’ tug boats, designed for shunting ships around in harbours.  This was proper Vasco da-Gama  stuff – maybe not Cape Horn or the Southern Ocean, but nonetheless I doubt that this kind of sea-faring was foremost in the minds of the marine architects and shipbuilders that gave our little rafts life.  Was anybody else at all concerned about what we were about to subject ourselves to?

The time came, and we gingerly left the safety of Belle Île, vowing to return such was its sublime sense of peace and ancient beauty – still not been back.  Besides all that, we had to cross Biscay and survive.  In a tug boat.

We very soon lost sight of land as our course and the edge of France diverged and the open ocean revealed itself.  The sea-state was pretty ordinary at first, with a swell coming in from the south-west at around 5-6 feet.  Bou’Haroun and Jijel handled this with ease, and we powered forwards, south by south-west.  

One of the things about sea voyages where you lose sight of land is finding things to occupy yourself.  This can be a fascinating exercise in concentration or crushingly boring, depending on how your mind works.  For me, I like to spend a great deal of time examining the ocean surface in the hope of catching sight of an interesting seabird, or even better some exotic marine beast – a shark, a seal, a shoal of tuna or even a whale*.  The sea can be thoroughly frustrating when playing this game, as it is extremely good at impersonating all of these things.  

One of my favourite seabirds is the gannet.  It’s quite easy to distinguish from a gull as it has a very distinctive wing shape and the wings are bright white with crisp, black tips, but what is most spectacular is how it chooses to feed.  Gannets will fly around in seemingly random patterns at considerable height above the surface.  When there are a few around you know it’s going to get interesting, as when they spot fish just below the surface they fold their wings and become a missile, plummeting to the water and smashing into the unfortunate victim selected as lunch.  How they survive this repeated battering is beyond me.  The speed at which they hit the water, followed by rapid deceleration must exact huge forces on their beaks and skulls, to say nothing of the squishy bits inside.  The fact that they then open their beaks and catch a fish, having spotted it from 100ft up, taking refraction into account and slamming themselves into the sea all at the same time strikes me as an arduous way to eat, but it seems to work for them.

Biscay was not living up to its reputation – I was disappointed.  With only the gannets to hold my attention, and the occasional cup of tea to make for Gub and Dave, time moved slowly.  After a few hours I looked at the charts, to discover that we had made distressingly little ground.  As it was, this was because I was not used to looking things on such a scale.  Biscay is a big place, and it was going to take us at least three days to cross.  Keep watching the water.

The first day passed into night, and the kind of darkness that is rarely encountered these days, certainly when we are land-bound.  On the night watch, the job was keep to the heading and watch the radar.  Yes, I steered the thing at night through Biscay.  To be honest it was quite safe as there was nothing, nothing at all, to warrant a potential collision.  The orange glow of the radar was the only connection with other humans in this sea of emptiness – a distant blip would appear at the edge of the screen, another lonely ship some 50 miles distant ploughing north, quite possibly headed for Rotterdam.  I would try and imagine what it was like on that ship.  What was she doing?  Was she a warship?  Even a Russian warship?  (Wow, let’s hope so!)  What were the crew doing to occupy themselves?  Smoking, playing cards, dreaming of home?  What language were they speaking?  Occasionally we would communicate across the waves, identify ourselves and ask how they were faring.  If English was possible, they would answer with the same sentiments – friendly, invisible strangers.

On day two I awoke in a bed that was most definitely moving a great deal more than it was when I fell into it.  Having done my duties and made breakfast for us all, usually something like opening a can of beans and making tea,  I headed up to the wheelhouse to take a look.  The sight that greeted me was very different to yesterday evening.  We were now well out into the Bay of Biscay, and the ocean was beginning to live up to expectations.  The weather was set fair for the next few days, but the watery equivalent of the South Downs that was bearing down on our black and yellow liferaft would lead one to think otherwise.  The swell that had built up overnight was like nothing I had ever seen before, and this was only the start.

The Bou’Haroun and Jijel were made of strong stuff, and the powerplants that had been driving us relentlessly south were now being asked to demonstrate what they were made of.  When you go sailing around the coast, you may encounter some sizable waves, but the big difference here was not how high they were, but the sheer volume of the things.  The nearest equivalent I can suggest is riding over small hills made from something much less solid than rock.  The distances between the peaks was enough for it to take 30 seconds or more to climb the face of a wave, and somewhat less to cascade down the other side.

Our tugs were equipped with an array of equipment that enabled communication and navigation in all kinds of circumstances, and much of this was mounted on a mast that soared above the wheelhouse to a height of probably 30 feet.  The upper sections of these masts were the only way we could know where Jijel was as the two vessels rode the Atlantic rollercoaster.  We were meeting the swell at an angle of around 45 degrees, and so the climb was longer than if we were head on, and so we danced this bizarre water ballet together, ducking down and rising again like courting birds.

As time passed, we learned that the swell was the legacy of a distant Atlantic storm, and that this particular maelstrom had more up its sleeve for us.  The swells started to grow imperceptibly, both in height and wavelength.  The watery South Downs matured into the watery Lake District.  The size of these immense lumps of water was incredible, and the movement of our little ships became a test of our sense of balance and we found leg muscles we never knew we had.  It was a constant game of seesaw with potentially disastrous consequences.  We would lose sight of each other for minutes at a time, the tips of the masts disappearing below the towering crests as we plunged into parallel troughs.  The power of the whole experience was mesmerizing, and also profoundly tiring at the same time.  Just when we thought we had scaled the highest heights, another wet, green mountain would loom over us and we would begin the climb again, to eventually career down the other side into a valley of deep green blue, below which was an unfathomable amount of dark, drowning sea.

I realised after a while I was no longer scared, but enthralled by the scale of everything.  The size of our ships was totally insignificant in the face of the immensity of the ocean, and yet we were able to ride over it with relative ease, the industrial steel and welds shuddering occasionally as we slammed into a breaker, but we were going to weather this rollercoaster and our eventual reward would be a few days’ rest in Gibraltar.

As we neared the lee of the north-west tip of the coast of Spain the ocean-mountains began to subside and the going became easier.  We were to be gifted with some visitors as the sea became shallower, and I discovered a new way to spend the long hours of nights at sea.  Here, the colour of the water is a rich turquoise, and when the surface is disturbed the plankton within emits a beautiful orange glow.  In the dark, I would climb up on top of the wheelhouse and fire up the substantial searchlight that both vessels were fitted out with.  The ships’ wake would spark off the plankton, their light amplified by the searchlight which illuminated the crystalline green-blue of the water, but this was not nearly as much fun as chasing the dolphins that suddenly appeared almost every night to weave around the bow of the boat.  I would chase them with the lamp, they would follow it, and all the while the blue-green ocean sparked with bright orange.  It was a mutually fun game – the dolphins obviously loved it, and very often would dart between the two tugs to see who was quickest with the lamp.  

I could have happily spent the rest of the trip playing with the dolphins day and night, as there were very few days when they didn’t appear.  It was such a privilege.  There were a few other encounters with turtles, and when we finally reached Algiers we were greeted by swarms of rats that were hiding amongst the mooring ropes on the harbour wall.  Not quite the same, but another first for me.

*It is now not necessary to travel the high seas to see such exotic sealife.  Such are the apparent consequences of warming seas that the coastal waters of Devon and Cornwall are hosts to shoals of Bluefin tuna, Humpback and Sperm whales, giant sunfish and all manner of tropical aquatic exotica.

THE END

Photo of the Gannet (above) courtesy of Benoit Gauzere - unsplash.com