The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.2005, Blaðsíða 18

104
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 59 #3
bled a lot. Therefore we were afraid to sail
on, so we stopped and stayed where we
were. The ship rolled terribly when the
waves hit it.
The Turks, Shanol Osman, 30 years
old and Hussein Abbas who claimed to be
bom in 1338 by the Moslem calendar, were
terrified when the storm hit us. They start-
ed praying and invoking Allah loudly.
They were sure this was their last. It was
strange seeing them act this way. They had
soon started respecting Gudjon very much
and looked upon him as if he was supernat-
ural because of his knowledge of the ship's
engines. They though could not imagine
how that was possible. They were often
heard to mutter "Engineer very clever,"
and then they shook their heads. The fact
was that the main engines in the ferry were
the same kind as the electric generators in
the ship Vikingur, on which Gudjon had
worked as an engineer, except that they
were bigger in the ferry. He knew that
before we went on this journey, and it was
one of the reasons why this adventure was
the success it turned out to be.
The storm kept going through
Thursday. To tell the truth it didn't look
promising. We thought about it a lot and
kept calling ships to get the weather fore-
cast. There was a lot of noise when the
waves hit us.
The following night the storm still did-
n't go down and we didn't see any changes
ahead. We were getting low on oil supplies
and realized that we would run out of oil,
which in fact seemed unavoidable under
the circumstances. We were determined
from the beginning to try to reach Messina
or Malta. We had to go there, since we
couldn't go to Greece because of Johan's
affairs with the Turkish military.
He had sold them all sorts of machines
and vehicles so the Greeks would hardly
welcome him. If we would go ashore there,
we would probably all end up in prison.
For that reason we dcided early Friday
morning to take the risk of sailing to
Messina in the storm. We now went on full
speed and headed what we thought was the
right direction.
When we sailed against the wind, the
Turks weren't the only ones that got
scared. Everything went upside down. All
removable things went over board. Johan
and Philippe were seriousl talking about
the fact that we would not get out of this
storm alive. The Turks kept on bleating,
"Captain crazy." That became a phrase
between us "Engineer very clever, but
Captain crazy."
Once, the ferry almost rolled over on
the other side. Philippe had been half asleep
in the front room and woke with a start,
looked out of the window and saw straight
into the roaring sea. He ran into the hinder
room and calmed down a little when he
saw Erling and Gudjon lying down and
reading books. They did that so the others
wouldn"t be as scared. Philippe thought it
safer to go up to the bridge. In this hubbub,
partitions down belos cracked and small
things were all over.
After two hours of sailing the weather
calmed and in a short while the wind was
nearly still. Even though the storm had
been very bad , it still wasn't as bad as it can
be off the coast of Iceland.
We still didn't know where we were
though we were sailing by the compass,
because nobody knew for sure if it was cor-
rect. We tried to figure out ships we saw,
which way they were going, and we looked
and "smelled" around. When Erling said he
could smell a forest from land the Turks
said: "Captain crazy". They figured the
captain had now gone completely mad. The
truth was that we could clearly smell plants
from land, even though we couldn't see
anything through the mist. It stayed that
way through Friday and the following
night.