Move like water, p.13
Move Like Water, page 13
I have met my own Ancient Mariner. Although he did not come with a warning to impart, nor a confession, he did captivate me with his glittering eye, and he did have a lesson to teach me. I met him on my first long sailing passage, when I crossed the North Sea from England to Norway. The wooden boat on which we sailed was the perfect setting for our meeting, with thick canvas sails, flaxen rope, a heavy tiller, and masts that had been tarred and tallowed. I am not sure exactly how old he was, beyond ancient. His face showed a life that had been lived, deep valleys etched into his paper skin by time. Most of his hair was gone, but a few downy strands blew in the wind. With age, he had succumbed to fragility, his body breaking but his mind sharp enough to cut glass. He had been a diver, descending through the zones of the water into the deep, in the early days of the offshore industry. Later, he had sailed in the merchant navy.
I was studying with the Open University, taking an introductory science course to prepare me for when I would start my degree proper later that year. I had an assignment that needed to be submitted the day we were to make port, so, around my duties on the boat, I would find a few hours each day to sit in the saloon at the table with my laptop and books. The Mariner sat with me. He asked me what I was doing, and I told him. He replied that he too was studying with the Open University. He wasn’t working towards any specific degree, but would pick up modules of geology here, literature there, followed by history or whatever took his fancy. As I stumbled my way through hydrocarbons and protein synthesis, I would often end up shaking my head with frustration. I did want this—I had chosen to do the course—but it was hard not to feel jealous of others who had time to sit and chat, read or sleep between their watches and duties. I was also finding the work hard in itself, not helped by the fact that I was on a moving boat and a reduced sleep schedule. The Mariner looked at me, and he spoke with a broad Norfolk accent. His voice was tired, a whisper of wrecked vocal chords that had been decimated by a lifetime of smoking and the cancer that was to follow, and yet it resonated.
“Don’t stop learning, girl. Never stop learning. That is what makes you old. That is what will get you in the end.”
The Mariner never wanted to go ashore. Not in Norway or Denmark, nor Germany or Holland. He had seen them all before, he said, but what I think he really meant was that the ports we called at were not the reason he was on the voyage. He was there because the ship and the sea were more home to him than anywhere he had ever been. He knew that he was dying. He had wanted to come home one last time. At night he would stand on the deck, hunched in an enormous beige parka, leaning against the dinghy, wrapped up even on the warm, short summer nights. The final night of the return voyage, as we pushed west across the North Sea, it was balmy, calm, and dark. The wind had died, the sails were stowed, and we were using the motor to bring us home. The ink of the sea and the sky merged in a midnight abyss, and it was hard to tell whether we were sailing through water or air. As the boat moved, the wake shone with the most beautiful, luminescent turquoise. I have never seen such a colour before or since, streaks of magic lighting up the night. I am glad that I got to share this wonder with him. Maybe it was the sea, giving him one last farewell. What was my first voyage would be his last. His ashes are in the North Sea now.
Of course, the real cause of the fall of the wandering albatross is not the result of violence carried out by one man, but of our collective actions. Wandering albatross are as much scavengers as they are hunters, and their keen sense of smell leads them to follow fishing vessels, just as they followed the mariner’s ship. As longline hooks are set and baited, ready to catch tuna and Patagonian toothfish, a gaggle of birds collects around the boat. There are wanderers, smaller albatross species, petrels, but the wandering albatross find themselves in the most precarious position. The longline hooks are cast, a trail that can stretch out eighty miles into the sea behind the boat, and the wandering albatross fall upon them, to feed on bait or catch, unaware of the danger. In some cases, the birds escape unscathed. In others, the hooks break from the line and are caught in the gullet of the wanderer, or swallowed, to rust in their stomach or to be regurgitated to a chick in lieu of a bellyful of food to sustain growth. Worse still, the bird can get caught in the line, or snagged on the hook itself. The great ocean wanderer, tangled and desecrated as it drowns, is dragged through the sea on a fishing line. A caught albatross has no commercial value; it becomes by-catch, a kill as senseless as that made by the mariner—worse for the fact that it was not even deliberate.
Being caught as by-catch is a threat faced by all wandering albatross. And it is a threat that is growing as both Southern Ocean and subtropical fisheries expand, as we push into this oceanic southern frontier in order to feed an expanding human population. The juvenile wandering albatross feel this adverse effect even more strongly than the mature birds. While heading into warmer waters may have served young albatross in the past, now it seems that these areas have a higher abundance of longline fisheries in operation. While our young albatross is learning to fend for herself, while she is learning to navigate the world alone, her chance of becoming by-catch is higher than that of an adult bird. Coleridge knew nothing of Southern Ocean fisheries, and words like by-catch and anthropogenic climate change did not yet exist, but his poem has echoed over the centuries in a way that is increasingly haunting.
The passage home aboard my new boat started just after breakfast, catching the morning tide out to sea. We headed out through the Carrick Roads, towards Lizard Point. The sea around the Lizard headland forms a tidal race as it stretches out to the south, but I had planned the voyage so we could use that race to our advantage, gaining speed. The weather was fair, the wind light. Checking my watch, I decided to nip a little closer to the land, where the race was running at its strongest, to catch the last of it. It was a good call. No sooner were we past the lighthouse that stands on the point than overfalls began to whip up behind us as the tide changed; anyone still in close to the headland would experience a bumpy ride. Land’s End, the most westerly point of England, was the second and last tidal gate of the voyage. Once we had rounded the point, we would turn north and sail for an uninterrupted 100 miles. I had only rounded the point once before, and that had been heading in the other direction. This made me nervous. The tide there is incredibly strong, the inshore waters around the point are littered with rocks, and if you run too far offshore you risk entering the shipping lane, with tankers bearing down on you at twenty knots. An advantage was that the flow of tide for rounding Land’s End is far more favourable when heading east to west rather than vice versa. I held my pilotage plan in hand and checked off cardinal marks as we passed, reciting their names under my breath: Carn Base, the Runnel Stone—a strange Cornish prayer. As soon as we rounded Longships Lighthouse on Carn Bras, bathed in the evening sun, the hardest part of the voyage was over. The wind had died entirely and we had to motor, but the surface of the water was smooth and gleaming, an unending stretch of quicksilver on which we could glide forever, or so things felt. Maybe we could forget our destination, all our plans, and just continue on, over the Atlantic on a pillowy sea.
Instead, we stayed our course, heading a few degrees shy of due north. As we switched position on deck through the night, the journey remained smooth. Occasionally we saw the lights of a fishing boat in the distance, but, for the most part, we had the world to ourselves, a faint glimmer of shining phosphorescence in our wake. Day broke, and after we shared a coffee in the cockpit I wandered up to the bow alone. Brave was cutting sleekly through the water, there were teasings of fog around, but nothing that would not burn off with the rising sun. As we entered Pembrokeshire waters, we were greeted by puffins, razorbills, and guillemots paddling on the surface, ducking under the water at our approach. The sleek back of a minke whale rolled at the surface before disappearing back into the blue. On our approach, we encountered a basking shark, the first one I had seen since childhood. It had a triangular fin raised above the surface, mouth gaped wide as it filtered the water for food. I pointed it out from the bow, but it was quick to flit out of sight. To finish off the journey we were escorted by bow-riding common dolphins, revelling in our wake as we entered the Cleddau River to head to the marina and dock. It seemed as if the very shores were welcoming us back, as if in acknowledgement of what that journey meant to me.
For all the triumph of that passage home, it didn’t herald a return to the life I’d had before the injury. Despite the fact that things were going well, I often felt like I was waiting for the next disaster. Until my spine was injured, I had no experience of anxiety, but now I carried it with me, and I struggled to articulate what I felt, let alone find a way to deal with it. In my head, I had made sailing synonymous with healing, and although I am sure that in a way it was, it was only a piece of the puzzle rather than the whole picture. In my early dream, when I felt my hand on the tiller, I had felt that this alone would give me direction over my life again. Like the juvenile albatross on her first fledged flight, I had been expecting to spread new wings and ride away on the ocean currents, but there were times when I crashed to the surface and was forced to swim for days at a time rather than fly. I used forward momentum as a coping mechanism, which looked like progress or achievement, a strong bounceback from a bad situation. In reality, movement of any kind was the only thing that was keeping my mind from wandering off a precipice and into chaotic darkness. The sea was never still. It was the place I had to be.
One evening, unable to settle or eat, I slipped my lines, headed through the lock and out for a solo sail. The end of the summer was close, the light drawing low. Instead of feeling sure and steady on the tiller, there was a shake to my hand. I watched the shadowy shapes of the land as I passed buoy after buoy, heading out down the channel to the sea. Where was I going? Why? Who sets sail while dusk is falling, alone, without a destination in mind? No, sailing had not been the cure-all, of course it hadn’t. What I needed was time and stability, which seems obvious in hindsight but was hard to grasp in the moment. Suddenly I noticed a haunting white shape on the water ahead of me, a physical manifestation of what taunted my brain. My pulse quickened and my heart raced, my hand gripping the tiller until my knuckles whitened. This poltergeist started to splash at the water, churning furiously, cawing as it lurched towards me, and I screamed. The scream turned to a shaky laugh. A gannet. It was only a gannet, probably a fledged juvenile whose sleep I had disturbed with my night-time wandering. I pushed the helm over to turn around. It was clearly time to head back to shore.
If our wandering albatross survives, if she grows strong against the storms, if she learns to find food and avoids drowning on a line, if she reaches five years of age, it will finally be time for her to bring her world back to the island. Wandering albatross breed on a circle of islands scattered in the Southern Ocean. Breeding colonies are also found on the Crozet Islands, the Kerguelen Islands and the Prince Edward Islands in the Indian Ocean, and on Macquarie Island in the Pacific. Despite all this scope and scale within her reach, when our young albatross goes to the shore with thoughts of breeding, she will return to her own natal colony on Bird Island in the Atlantic. By some unknown compass she wings her way back there, arriving alongside the rest of the breeding colony. Previously mated pairs gently touch bills and delicately preen the feathers of their mate, reunited after their “off year” from breeding. The surviving juveniles from her cohort will return, as well as the birds born one and two years before her, with the intention of finding mates of their own.
The unmated males gather together, slightly out of the way of the breeding birds, who may be copulating or already incubating eggs. These young males begin a display designed to catch the attention of the young females. They bow their heads and snap their beaks. They shake their heads quickly from side to side. They stretch out the length of their wings, they send their heads jutting forward, long necks rigid, beak outstretched. The male dips his head low towards the earth, and, with a jerk and a low gargle, he quickly flicks his head up, bill stretching up into the sky. While he is conducting this dance, the female circles overhead, flying past as he attempts to secure her attention. It seems to work, because as he points his bill into the air, she swoops low towards him and reaches out her bill to lightly touch his. She comes into land on the grassy ridge a short distance away from this favoured male and begins to walk towards him with a slow, swaying gait.
These displays will continue, the young male and the young female bowing to each other, snapping their bills, dipping their heads, bill-fencing. If she is unsure about the male, she will leave and the process will begin again. In this case, though, it seems the pair like each other. They won’t breed that year, or the year after, or likely the year after that, although they will both continue to return to the breeding colony annually, courting each other and strengthening their pair bond. She intends to mate for life, and will only switch her mate if they consistently fail to produce a viable egg or raise a chick together. On the year when she finally returns to Bird Island ready to copulate and lay her egg, she needs to be sure she has chosen her partner carefully, and that they can support each other through the extended period of incubation and chick-rearing. Once the egg has been laid, she needs to trust that her mate will return so that they can switch places, so that he can take a turn incubating and she can head to sea to nourish herself with food and water. When the chick is hatched and old enough to be left alone, the mated pair need to be in sync to maximise the efficiency of their independent foraging flights. She doesn’t want to have to cut a flight short to return to feed the chick only to find that it has just received a meal from the male. Nor does she want to return to find the chick undernourished.
Three years after her first return to Bird Island, our albatross arrives back on Wanderer Ridge at the beginning of December. She is now eight years old, having lived just under a fifth of her natural lifespan. It is time for her to breed. She greets her mate, her now familiar companion on land. He arrived slightly earlier than her, and has secured a grassy pedestal nest. They rub beaks and gently preen each other’s breast, a low gurgling sound coming from each bird. The time has come. The birds mate, and an egg is fertilised and laid, an egg which she holds close against her brood patch, just as her own mother did, her body heat keeping the egg alive. Inside the shell, the complex dance of cell division begins as, once again, life starts to form. She gently turns her own egg. She sits. She waits, with a stillness she has never before known, as the embryo develops underneath her. A little over a week passes, and she finds that she is beginning to watch the sky, looking for the return of her mate. When he does come back, they carefully swap positions, and she takes to the air. This is the first flight she has ever been on where a strong thread ties her to land, the need to support her mate, to raise her chick. She flies swiftly, purposefully, from South Georgia to Brazil, feeding all the while before banking and heading back to her mate, to her egg.
She sits, she waits, she turns the egg. Days pass, weeks. She sits, she waits, she turns the egg. She is growing hungry, thirsty. She is devoted to the egg, but she keenly scans the skies. Where is her mate? She sits. She waits. She turns the egg. She can feel herself growing weaker, feels that she is losing condition, and still her mate has not returned. A day passes, and another. She is growing frantic. Her basic instinct is to incubate her egg, to raise a chick who will fledge as the next generation of wandering albatross. But there is a more powerful instinct within her. It is the instinct that kept her alive as a chick through the harsh winter conditions. It is the instinct that helped her learn to forage, to perfect her flight so she could travel further, faster. Her instinct to survive.
Some 1,500 miles away, a fishing boat is hauling in its lines. Snagged and tangled, broken wings wrapped in line, her mate is hauled on to the deck. He is drowned. He will become a statistic, if he is reported at all, drowned as by-catch. Accidental. Of no commercial value. What harm can the destruction of one bird do? Back on Bird Island, she stays on her nest as long as she can physically stand. Her chick will hatch in a matter of days—fluffy heads are already bursting out of the nests around her—but she has to go. She cannot wait any longer. Her body, despite the lack of food, has never felt heavier. Her wings know what to do. The wind snatches her into the sky, carrying her away on a mournful journey of lament over the Southern Ocean.
The egg, an entire world encased within a shell, inside a nest, on an island, is left behind, cold and abandoned.
Our albatross will never know what happened to her mate, why he failed to return to her after all those years of careful courtship. It is possible that she will seek a new mate. Researchers on Bird Island say that sometimes they see a bereaved bird find a mate again within a year. For others, it takes several years to go through the grieving period. And there are some bereaved wanderers that will never mate again. Our albatross will not have been the only bird that season to lose her mate and be forced to abandon an egg or a chick. The breeding population of wandering albatross in South Georgia has been monitored for over thirty years. Between 1999 and 2018, the number of breeding pairs recorded on the archipelago has declined from 1,182 pairs to 661. On Bird Island, the decline is 3.01 percent a year. Although breeding colonies of wandering albatross in the south-west Indian Ocean have seen some recovery since the 1980s due to changes in fishing practices that reduce albatross by-catch, the population on South Georgia shows continued decline. In just nineteen years, 521 breeding pairs were lost. If this rate of decline continues, in little over nineteen years’ time there will be no wandering albatross left on South Georgia at all. The decline in breeding pairs is the consequence of both mature and juvenile mortality. Sometimes one or both members of an established pair are lost. Sometimes juveniles never live long enough to return to their natal colonies and find a mate.
