A glorious day is in the offing. I pass the harbour master’s tower early, a last greeting and I set sail into the open sea.
Soon I pass seemingly endless wind farms; far out, dozens if not hundreds of wind turbines tower into the sky, huge and only visible in their true size from close up. But as seen so many times before, in the Baltic Sea as well as along the east coast of England, these farms are not in operation. Why do taxpayers make such investments, why do they bear the enormous maintenance costs, just to see these things standing in the water? – Or am I making a mistake in thinking? Is it about the good intention, not the result?
Anyway, the sun is shining. Not a breath of wind. Wonderful. I switch off the engine, take a sunbath, let myself drift. – All around me is wet, no breeze, no waves, where am I?
I start again and decide to go straight to Stromness, a little town on the Orkney Islands. It doesn’t even occur to me to take a closer look and think much about it – the weather is fantastic, so I drive through the strait ahead without a pit stop. Just a few more kilometres… I remember that we were once on the road here with our bikes, with all our children, and that the ferry boat from Scotland to the Orkney Islands didn’t sail for some unknown reason, despite – even then – beautiful weather…
Suddenly, I’m turning west at the north-eastern tip of Scotland and driving exactly between the Scottish island of Stroma and the Orkney island of South Ronaldsay, the steering wheel is yanked out of my hand – no, not really, I’m bravely holding on to it. But I have nothing more to order. The boat does what it wants, or rather the water does what it wants with my boat. I dance as if on huge whirlpools of water, no: I am danced! To my left and right, the water turns in huge spirals, pulling the boat here and there, seeming to swallow everything in its whirlpools. Rapidly, mirror-smooth sections alternate with hellishly rocking and greedily bubbling surface water; I feel as if the water is permanently splitting and one maw after another is opening in front of me. We, the boat and I are being pulled and torn; something is sucking us along to I-don’t-know-where…. I let go of the wheel, switch on the autopilot – I have no control at all.
A glance at my instruments confirms that nothing is happening normally: I am using 53 litres of fuel (which normally indicates a driving speed between 50 and 56 km/h). At the same time, my GPS shows that I’m speeding along at peaks of over 67 km/h, although I’m not doing anything about it (and nothing against it either) – that’s nice, in a way, but what’s happening? Could someone please tell me what’s going on?! And how do I get my ship back under control?!!!
I decide to do nothing. To just let myself go on – how else am I going to tell the spectacle? To then – out of here – head west around the island of Hoy to the north.
Breathe out, don’t let myself be impressed any further… The ArgoFram is floating, is there a problem? But as soon as I turn north, I am hit by unusually violent waves. Like in the Baltic Sea, only more pointed, more upright, and suddenly a thick fog envelops me! Can see maybe 30 metres. I switch on the radar and superimpose the electro-cloud image on my GPS chart. If someone in front of me doesn’t use AIS, I’ll get a bang. But slowing down doesn’t help either, because if I reduce my speed, I make ‘us’ even more the plaything of the elements (my high speed makes me less dependent on these currents; I’m in the middle of them but at the same time I’m flitting over them, that much I’ve realised – and the short waves I’m now tacking head-on against, that’s exactly the kind of conditions Makro built this boat for, or against). Maybe it’s not a bad thing that I can hardly see anything – a hellmouth that I don’t recognise can’t scare me.
AIS says there’s a boat two kilometres ahead of me. And so says the radar. And both make it disappear again shortly afterwards! – These are the moments that make even the most hardened sailor awestruck; these are the moments when adventure stories flourish, making sailor’s yarns proliferate and overflow! Heaven and hell play with me.
The sun seems to be shining above the fog bank, but all around me the water is roaring and I am in a frenzy, not really seeing through it. It rumbles and splashes, but the ArgoFram holds its course. After all.
Minutes later, salvation; I enter the bay off Stromness, the spook is over. A large ferry boat is coming towards me, heading for Scotland. I’m still standing; we greet each other professionally. Landscapes blooming in late summer pass me by, was it all in my imagination? – Yes, I am clueless and at a loss. And now I could create some heroic parables with words, just to overcome the previously oppressive feeling of being at the mercy of others. Shit, I think, what happened there?!
Or did basically nothing happen at all, except that the water didn’t behave the way I had learned (so far)? That the change from fair weather sunbathing to cloudy water pounding sent a spooky terror through my limbs? – Arriving in Stromness, completely drenched in sweat, I briefly tell the harbour master what I have experienced. But he just laughs, “today is harmless”, and promises to bring me tables later so that I can plan my onward journey ‘better’. Because something like today can go wrong, he says, especially going around Hoy to the west with a current from the north and a simultaneous wind from the south – wind? Have I noticed that?
As soon as I arrive, I go for a walk. Need to shake the limbs. Open the mind. Go up the next hill and enjoy the warming sun ‘topless’ – don’t quite believe what has just happened to me, and yet realise that something monstrous has shaken me. Then I finally take a shower again… And lie down in my cosy cabin to look up on the internet what I should have known before: https://www.vikingeskibsmuseet.dk/en/professions/education/the-viking-age-geography/the-vikings-in-the-west/scotland/pentland-firth; this is exactly what happened to me (don’t download anything, just pay attention to the graphic: https://www.tekportal.net/pentland-firth/ first drawn by ‘green’, then run up against ‘red’ in fog). – The further I read in, the more sinister it gets: Families mourning their husbands and sons who have been swallowed without a trace; sailors who report taking all sorts of precautions, only to be wrong, and authorities who have only been taking seriously for 25 years what people around this strait have been telling us for a long time.
In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t know too much about what to expect here, and that I entered the Pentland Firth so unconcernedly at my relatively high speed. As a sailboat, I would probably have made headway in this current, but even with engine power I would hardly have made it in a desired direction. As a fishing boat, I would have learned to move with the currents (and certainly not against them), or stay at home at this time of year. And as a rowing boat, I don’t even want to think about how far I would have got at all in the face of these whirlpools. But in the old days, there were only sails and oars! And powers of observation. And courage.
At least I didn’t have a strong wind, otherwise it would have been really uncomfortable.