Isles of the North by Ian Mitchell

Author:Ian Mitchell [Mitchell, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857900999
Publisher: Birlinn

5

FOULA

AT 3.30 A.M. NEXT morning there was hardly a breath of wind as Brian clambered up onto the quayside to slip the lines. I had raised the mainsail, but more in hope than in expectation. In almost complete darkness we nosed our way out into the apparently empty seascape. Outside, we encountered a long swell coming in from the north-west. This, I have been told, seldom varies and was what the nineteenth-century fishermen in their sixareens watched when navigating without a compass. They could ‘read the swell’, even when a cross sea was running, and so maintain a steady course over long distances, as the Vikings had done before them.

Once we had the north lighthouse astern, a lazy slop came in from the south-west, the effect of yesterday’s wind. The two wave patterns gave the boat a most uncomfortable motion. The slatting of the sail was such that it was impossible to sleep down below. Eventually I took it down, which made the motion even worse. Motoring, we made a good 5 knots, tide assisted, so that by 8 a.m. we had a clear view of Foula, dead ahead through the overcast. At one point a pod of perhaps six dolphins gambolled about the boat for ten minutes. Then a dead mist began to descend. By 9 a.m. visibility was down to half a mile or so. Approaching the island this decreased to no more than two hundred yards. We were alarmingly close inshore before we saw surf on the rocks ahead. With the GPS there was no question of any uncertainty about our position, so we were able to turn confidently to starboard and follow the coast as Jimmy Stout had recommended.

The reason for hugging the shore is the presence of the infamous Hoevdi Grund, a huge reef a mile long with a rock in the middle which breaks in a swell. That was where the SS Oceanic foundered on 8 September 1914, in flat calm weather. The Oceanic had been built in the same yard as the Titanic, though ten years before. She was an equally luxurious, though smaller, vessel designed for the north Atlantic run. Converted at the beginning of the First World War to an armed merchant cruiser, she was despatched to the Northern Isles to patrol the shipping lanes with a view to intercepting vessels trading with the enemy. In thick mist on her first patrol, while zig-zagging to avoid submarines, the navigator became confused with his dead reckoning calculations. When Foula was finally sighted it was not on the expected bearing. The captain ordered a sharp turn and the ship was borne, by immensely powerful currents running over the Hoevdi shallows, onto the reef where she stuck fast. Everyone was taken off alive, but efforts to refloat the vessel were unavailing. As autumn came on, the great liner was buffeted by storms. Though she appeared intact when seen from the shore, in fact she was disintegrating internally. On 29 September a north-westerly gale of exceptional ferocity blew up.

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