Fifteen folk on a wooden boat from a century ago
LK 243
Fifteen folk on a wooden boat from a century ago. We share stories and experiences, speak our minds, and listen. At the end of long days we sleep like corpses in coffin-sized bunks. Cabin space is in short supply so we must share it and look out for each other.
Orkney is a small group of islands that has ended up in a pivotal position. It was critical previously during wartimes and is important again now as the place of intense renewable energy research, testing and development. It remains the home of people, birds and marine life too. Five thousand years ago people were living in settlements on Westray and farming. We see from an arrangement of stones in the earth that they had art and lived in groups together as an island community. Now, as then, some of the islanders work the land, doing what they can to survive modern competition.
We hoist the mainsail on our herring drifter – throat and peak together. A tonne or so of canvas and the wooden gaff. Hoops that hold the sail are the way to climb the mast. We must cooperate and work together to manually lift the sails and gear without killing someone.
We try to harness some power from light winds and make passage through the night to Fair Isle – a place so worthy of that name. The islanders here are unanimously proposing a no take marine reserve to protect fish stocks and conserve marine species. We walk to the top of a hill in the dark to photograph the northern lights, and take a small boat into a cave and through tunnels in a huge rock the shape of a shark’s fin, seals watching us with interest.
Both on Orkney and Fair Isle the islanders are encountering challenging layers of politics, law and socio-economics, as stakeholders from elsewhere are interested in exploiting natural resources from where the islanders live. Energy extraction, fishing, and impacts on the environment are issues that will ultimately affect us all. We have applied the concept of ownership on land for thousands of years but systems developed there have not existed before recent times in the marine context, bringing conflicts of interest into focus. Meanwhile, the ocean continues to rock our boat and our bodies’ motion compensation systems try to respond accordingly.
The ocean is sometimes serene, it can be unforgiving, is often terrifyingly beautiful and always awe-inspiring. With engineering – from ropes and sails to tidal turbines and enormous snakes of wave power generation devices – we have learned to take power and food from the ocean. Our challenge is now learning to take only what we need.
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