Friday 12 March

We haven’t shifted. Even the wide deep Orkney creel-boats with their tall bows are still tied-up today. The Southeasterly has moderated now but the forecast is still not great. We took the chance to speak to the men who know.

William Bremner is the last man to be born on Stroma, the island which divides the outer from the inner passages through Pentland Firth.

Gordon Morrison is a Wick man, doing his ticket here at the Stromness Maritime College. “Mountains,” he said. “You’ve to look at the whole picture. It’s what’s happening further out there in the North Sea. Days of gales building water and it’s all piling in to the shallow edges."

So the advice of the guys who run ferries, or haul creels, catching eddies, doing every trick to use rather than fight the tides here, is pretty clear. Stay put.
 

Southeasterly: Stromness

There’s a fair bit of east in it still,
the laziest wind, as they say,
“Doesn’t bother to go round you,
just straight, all the way through.”

And the gentle men at the harbour
warped our own white horse,
pretty wild on the rope,
round and out of the teeth of it.

A day to open the Rayburn oven,
“Wellies away, stick your feet in.”
Remembering, like steam from a browning scone
done on the oiled plate on the top.

If it’s about anything, it’s this,
the taste of the relations, out of town,
the watch-mates met again
in the Ferry Inn, on the bridge of the Hebrides.

The way one phrase talks to another.
The history of your way through weather.
The touch of your people.
 

 
Puck Kirkpatrick’s Orkney roadshow took us to the burial mound of Maes Howe. The three stones that make up the long, low entrance corridor can’t be imagined. This feat of quarrying and transportation was achieved before the pyramids. The Norse runes look delicate but the translated texts are pretty wild chunks of language. Another form of log-keeping.

Next stop, Skara Brae.
 

SKARA BRAE. Low Water, equinoctial springs

Anne’s office, perched at the site.
The filing cabinets face the door that
opens to winds that used to prevail.
That reef, the building bar of stones,
is extending out, she says,
like the bay is looking after itself.
 

Listen to today's audio log from the El Vigo: