Guðmundur Lárusson

Guðmundur Lárusson
Born 1945, Stykkishólmur
Member of the Marine Accident Investigation Board, former skipper

I don’t suffer mid-winter depression from the lack of light, that’s doubtless been bred out of me the way they can breed anything you care to mention out of people, as happens in nat ure. I might not be a barrel of laughs in the winter but I don’t get sad either. Still, I always keep an ear to the weather. Summer weather makes me feel good, when it’s warm and sunny. Calm weather at sea is extremely pleasant, when you almost need to keep your eyes closed because of the refraction of the light. But that damn fog is the worst because you don’t know where you are. You can’t locate yourself in the fog.

Everyone has to fear nature a bit. It can be terrible sometimes. But like everyone else, you don’t let it upset you just b ecause the weather’ s unpleasant. It depends so much where you are. The wind’ s so much stronger when you’ re st anding upright than when you’re lying down in the grass, and the difference is noticeable at sea. If you swim in the sea in a storm you can’t feel the weather, because there’s no wind, but the moment you come up out of the sea you feel it. A boat I was on sank once. I was just a youngster, I’d just started my life, and I found out that the same law applies at sea and out in the meadow when you lie down in the grass: the wind largely disappears down in the troughs of the waves. But it’s cold to swim in the sea. It was nasty weather, but not a tempest. A storm. A wave broke over the boat and it capsized. So there was nothing for it but to tread water and get swamped by all the waves. It was a very thick ocean wave, heavy seas, and I didn’ t know if I’d come back up on the wave I went down on. Two of the crew died, and one was a very good swimmer. He probably got trapped under a wave and couldn’t get back up.

That experience haunted me for decades. But I went straight back to sea. Soon afterwards we lost a man overboard – I was a young mate and the boat was cruising. It was one of those old herring boats with a ladder up the side of the fishing gear, which was naturally slippery from fish oil or the wet, and he lost his footing and fell overboard. He probably hit his head on the gunwale and knocked himself out because I saw him when I turned round and I ran after him. You should never do that, never do anything without thinking, because I only just made it back aboard and was in a much worse state than after swimming to land the month before. And that was in summer, the previous time it had still been winter. I went after him without any means of help, although they tried to pass me a life-line, which in fact was all twisted. It would probably have been better to tie it round me before I went, because when you’re in the sea you can’t see a thing. You can’ t see far, your eye-level is virtually zero and I never saw the man after that. Even though he definitely wasn’t far away from me.

The weather’s like that. If you don’t fight it, you become one with it and vanish. You cease to exist if you don’t show resistance and cunning. Some people are said to have an eye for the weather but that goes hand in hand with having an eye for life in general. They’re doubtless better hunters and fishermen and notice more things in nature. Some dream the future and the weather, but I don’ t. I was sent to my grandfather at an early age, he was an island farmer and I was his handy-man for a long time, I spent all the summers with him on Flatey, hunting seals and other tasks. He used sails even though boats had been motorized for fifty years. He always used sails to save gas when there was a tailwind. And then I got to know nature and started to pay attention to things I’d never noticed.

I don’t think the weather’s changed. What has changed is the ships. I started as a cook and there was no sink, we just washed up in a bucket. And for a seasick cook to be peeling potatoes in rolling seas with potatoes rolling all around him! Eating prunes was good, it was so good to throw them up! But there are just as many heavy storms today as twenty years ago.