Trip to the Danish Strait 1949

By Hermann Bakke

"Tin", as he was popularly called, was probably one of our most skilled Arctic sea captains at the time and was this year the captain of the M/S "Brandal".

After a bit of back and forth, we were now only 17 and 18 years old, and we were given jobs and told to meet aboard the following Monday at the Hatløy workshop in Ulsteinvik, where the ship was being refitted after herring and western fishing trips.

Ernst and I happily returned home, and I can say this right away: this was an incredibly interesting trip, so full of experiences that the impressions remain with us to this day.

A young group of people showed up on board to begin preparations. The trip first went to Brandal, where we took on board blubber tanks, bing boards, ropes and blubber benches, etc. We also had to make several trips to Ålesund before we were ready to sail and had filled up with provisions, oil and water.

One day while we were in town, a guy came aboard and asked for the skipper. The man was dressed in knickers, sports socks and a knitted jacket, and had a backpack on his back. He also had glasses. The whole gang was worried, we were missing a man, but if this man were to join the trip, we would definitely miss out. “That’s a shame,” I heard someone say, “think of showing up in knickers, sports socks, glasses and a backpack and wanting a place on an Arctic cruise!” – No, it was probably best to try to get a place on “Aarvak” or “Polaric” if there was anything left for the trip.

Yes, we were all a little superstitious after hearing one Arctic Ocean story worse than the other from old Arctic visitors.

Sailing out on a Friday, for example, and the word horse was forbidden on board, whistling was also not good and the equipment had to be proper with wooden-bottomed boots, a leather hat and down mittens, and this should preferably be purchased from Dale in Skansen.

Well, the guy came out again from the skipper and don't you think he had gotten the job? What on earth had become of our good skipper now? The guy was Mons Nygård from Syvde, he was a student and wanted to use the summer to earn money for his studies, sensibly of course, and he turned out to be a sensible and likeable guy. Today he is a professor of law at the University of Bergen. I don't know who was to blame for the seal hunt this summer going wrong, but it was probably the dark shutter that was the worst cause, because it was worn out almost the entire trip. The sports socks and the louse-covered jacket as long as they lay unused on the bottom of the coffin.

I don't remember everyone's names, but the crew on "Brandal" this trip was:

Skipper Martinus Brandal

1st shooter Laurits Båtnes

2nd shooter Angel Brandal

Machinist Jon Røren

Motorman Tormod Hovlid

Butter Lars Petter Brandal

Stuert Oddmund Røren

Trapper Ernst Hovlid

Trapper Bjarne Klovning

Trapper Hermann Bakke

Trapper Oddmund Hovden

Trapper Odd Barstad

Trapper Mons Nygård

a Røren from Fosnavåg, a Sulebust from Sula and a var from Hjørundfjorden.

We sailed out of Fosnavågen one early morning, when the summer month of June had just begun. There was a fresh NE breeze that gave good wind both in the jib, jib and mizzen. The smell of pumping became terrible in the hold as the rolling caused waste oil and old water to get mixed up in the bottom of the ship. The seasickness showed itself for most of us, there had been a bit of a rattle the night before with dancing on the dock in Brandal and it wasn't completely free of rasp and home brew now either. But here being seasick didn't help, – the trip had begun, the course set for Langanes in Iceland – and everyone had to take their turn at the helm and with the skating of the sails.

There were many Sunnmøre ships in the Strait this year. From Brandal there were in addition to us: "Aarvak", "Signalhorn", "Polaric", and "Fangstmand". From Hareid there was "Flemsøy", and "Hvalrossen" from Hjørungavåg. The Vartdal ships "Buskøy", "Polhavet" and "Furenak" were also there, and from Ålesund we had "Kvitungen" and "Rundøy". I think "Sunnmøringen" from Tjørvåg was also there. A large fleet of good ships with skilled skippers and crews on board. I can mention names like Rolf Kvien, Bjørn Øvrelid, Monrad Pilskog, Bjarte Brandal, Karl J. Brandal and Johannes "Mur" Brandal - and our own Martinus "Tin" Brandal. These were all present this year and many, many more were men who gave their entire lives to the Arctic Ocean industry and helped put Sunnmøre at the top of the Arctic Ocean map.

We were met by thick banks of ice on the last leg of the crossing from Langanes to the ice, and when we encountered the first ice floes it was pitch black and there was zero visibility. "Tin" entered the Arctic Ocean barrel in the foremast with the telescope on her back and carefully maneuvered the ship through the ice edge. The heavy Atlantic swell, which was working with the ice, did not make it completely safe for the ship when the flakes became larger and the ice denser and some ugly blue ice appeared. But we had an expert in the barrel, so when the bright summer evening came we were far inside the ice and no longer noticed the main ice. We lay still for the night, the ice was still thick, all sounds seemed to be amplified, the main engine was silent, only the light engine chattered with its gentle sound.

Everyone was excited about what was hidden inside the shuttered world and what we would experience in the next few days. On the crossing we had made a sheath for the skinning knife and we had been given steel to sharpen it with, so now we were excited and ready.

Those who were not on duty were weighed early the next morning when "Tin" set "Brandal" off to search for seals. The ice was quite loose with a lot of open water between the floes and the floes. It was like that in the summer in the Strait, so the catching went well with the catching boats. That's why we had these hanging ready in the davits. Visibility was still poor, but there were long periods when we could see quite well. "Tin" had taken a barrel with him and when we caught sight of the first seal we approached with great caution. The helmsman on the wheelhouse roof had to stand completely calm and carefully follow every little gesture from the barrel. We who were standing down on the deck followed along eagerly. There it hit and the first seal lay still on the ice. It is extremely difficult to shoot from the barrel, but "Tin" was an excellent marksman and he himself shot almost all the animals we caught that summer.

As I have mentioned before, the seal hunt went completely wrong. We crossed the ice-hole in all directions, but we only caught one or two animals. I seem to remember that we were the best ship with 125 animals. It was long days and nights of going and not catching any – and the shutter lay like a clammy hand over us most of this first time we were going to catch the seal.

After all, we on board were young and optimistic, time passed with card games and songs, we had an old crank gramophone and, I remember, "Astrid mi Astrid som eine holdt på meg" was the theme song that summer. Yes, our thoughts often went home to one or another "Astrid" when the time got long and so it was now also an eternal topic of conversation between us young boys.

We kept company with "Aarvak", where Johannes Brandal, Mura-Johannes as he was called, was the skipper. Otherwise, the communication between the ships was now quite good via radio. One day we caught sight of the very king of the Arctic; the polar bear. It was a female with two cubs that was migrating across the ice. Mura-Johannes and Tin discussed how they should approach the matter. The polar bear was not protected at that time and was therefore a good prey. They agreed to shoot the female and try to catch the cubs, which were quite large, probably 2-year-old cubs – and there was a good price for such in zoos.

A hunting boat was trained from each of the ships and manned with a gunner and three men in each boat. The bears did not move quickly, so they were easy to catch and the bear was soon brought down by a well-aimed shot. The cubs stuck to their mother and we finally got a good rope around them and then we took them in tow one by one to each boat.

They resisted and babbled and bristled terribly, one of them we had to stop and pick up on a flat so he could rest for a while.

Finally we arrived at "Aarvak", where it was decided that the cubs would be caged. We hoisted them aboard and initially they were lashed to the mainmast. It was a difficult life when it had to be established whether it was male or female, even if they were only cubs they were quite heavy on the paws. Mura-Johannes got many tickles before he found out that it was actually a male and female. Two solid cages were built for them and they stood there on the deck and were well fed and flushed with sea water several times a day, so they were in no trouble. They eventually ended up in a zoo in Copenhagen.

Another experience we had out there in the ice was that one day we spotted something that looked like a shipwreck. There was dense ice there with large floes and a team was sent in to find out what this was all about. Angel Brandal led the group and they found a partially destroyed Russian river barge, which had drifted all the way from the Siberian coast. There was a Russian log book on the bridge, it was the only thing that could tell anything about where he came from.

In July the ships moved further towards the coast of East Greenland, where there was a lot of open water and here we started fishing for the hawksbill. Two ships fished together, we attached the lines to a heavy chain sling and each set off on our own way. There we lay looking after each other's buoys. After 4 hours of sitting we then pulled the lines towards each other again. If the lines were standing still for too long, we could risk only getting the head as the hawksbills are cannibalistic and each other.

The fishing was good at first. We just took the liver and dumped the carcass overboard again. I remember that the biggest hake we caught had 10 pieces of liver in it. We had a boiler house and a steamer, so the liver was turned into fine oil that was filled into the blubber tanks. Here too we were visited by the polar bear, it was a fantastic sight to see a large wrasse suck in the carcass of a hake as it dragged it onto the ice. Skuas and gulls flocked around to get a piece of the pie. Then the "king" got up in two and struck after them in the air.

The steward put bacon in the frying pan, and when the bear smelled this smell he stood still, then he came skulking after the ship along the banks, swam in open water, and actually followed us for several hours. He was allowed to live, his fur is yellow and red in the summer, so it is of little value.

We fished close to the coast, yes, actually far into the Storfjorden between Scoresbysund and Angmagssalik. One day we were visited by Eskimos who came paddling in their slim, fine kayaks. They brought salmon that they wanted to trade for anything. I remember I got two fine salmon for a pair of cheap sunglasses. Salmon abounded in the rivers and along the coast of East Greenland. The Eskimos would attach a piece of blubber to a half-meter-long line that they tied to the end of their spear and then they would sit there by the riverbank and stab the salmon as soon as it came and smelled the bait.

Greenland is a fantastic country, cold and blue with its jagged mountain peaks with the eternal ice crown on them, fjords with calving glaciers where you could hear rumbling and roaring every time an iceberg was born and created huge calving platforms far beyond that set already drifting mountains in motion. Not without danger for our ships that became like toy boats between these colossus of ice.

Along the beaches grew a fine vegetation of heather and plants and there were ducks and geese and other kinds of seabirds. We did some beach digging, south of the opening of Storfjorden, inside Aputiteq Island we found an abandoned American military base from the days of the war. There was a large warehouse of canned goods and I remember we found a lot of self-luminous orange parachute fabric. We had never seen anything like that before, we took some with us and this was nice to use as a buoy flag on our lines. Further south, outside Angmagssalik, we moored the fishing boat and traveled a little way to the settlement. We were well received and shown into the stone huts, which were already filled with adults, children and dogs. The Greenlanders were a gentle and hospitable people. Almost everything they wore and all their equipment was made of seal or whalebone. It was incredibly interesting to see where the people lived. We found a mass grave nearby that was made like a large ring of stones, it actually looked like the entire community had once laid down to die there.

We had a bad accident that could have been fatal for good old "Brandal". One early morning we were sailing at full speed between icebergs and large floes, but with a lot of open water in between, due to a misunderstanding between the gunner in the barrel and the helmsman on the wheelhouse roof, the wrong rudder was given and we collided with a large iceberg. Behind us came "Aarvak" at full speed, and in order not to run into us she had to take a hard starboard and go far up a large floe of ice so that she almost stood dry. Yes, you're talking about, I was standing in the forward cabin getting dressed, I had overslept, and it was I who should have been at the helm. As soon as it hit, the boom stopped and I was thrown forward towards the ladder and hit me hard.

I stood there looking straight up at the sky. The ship was so sunk that there was a wide opening between the edge of the gunwale and the deck planks on each side. The bow was sunk half a foot back, but we were lucky in spite of everything, where we hit the rock was perfectly straight so the whole stem hit level with the ice wall. But my, what a strain that must have been on the ship!

In the back of the galley everything was thrown forward so it didn't look like it was taken at all. Coffee and eggs and everything else in a nice mix. Skipper Tin calmly came up and wondered what had happened. I have often thought about it since and can only admire the calm he showed in such a situation. The ship was thoroughly examined by the skipper and engineer. A crack in the bow stem and the aforementioned damage seemed to be the whole thing. We got a man on board from another ship who knew how to drive decks. I don't remember for sure, but I think it was Einar Røren from Brandal. He stayed on board for a few days and got most of it sealed with driftwood and pitch.

When it came to illness, we were fortunately spared from serious cases, but Ernst Hovlid developed symptoms of appendicitis, and the skipper decided it was best to send him home on another ship that was about to end its journey in mid-August. He ended up at Volda Hospital, where he had his appendix removed without complications and with little shouting or screaming.

"Brandal" and "Aarvak" kept fishing for the longest time, the trip was much longer than expected and we only had provisions for two months. In late August, we began to run out of both food and supplies. Fortunately, we caught a few large halibut on the Håkjerring line and we had plenty of potatoes, flour and Viking milk. At the end of the trip, we ate boiled and fried halibut alternately, with a rasp ball as a treat every now and then. At night, we tricked ourselves into frying pancakes and sometimes we ate lightly salted halibut skin. The true king's diet must know.

It was almost mid-September when we headed into Breisundet. I had an infection in my wisdom tooth and my jaw was swollen like a balloon. It felt like a plague and I rushed straight to the dentist in Ålesund. But the joy of being home after three and a half months was great. The moors on Godøya and Hareidlandet shone in the most beautiful autumn colors and "Astrid mi Astrid" sounded perhaps a little extra joyfully from the old crank gramophone.

When I think back on this trip, I am happy for the good camaraderie we had on board. Some are dead, but those who are alive and reading this, I hope, have had a journey into the "world of memories". Remembering all the details from so many years ago is not possible, but I have tried to write down what has stuck best in my memory. We can all agree that we had an eventful trip that time. I greet everyone and thank you for joining me in this.