M.A.R.I.N.

DropZone.

8th September – they say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and that is how we commenced our first workshop with the DropZone lads in Barrow in Furnace - armed with a well prepared power-point brimming with interesting content, our minds primed with burning environmental and economic issues. From a navigational perspective we were way off our mark – the power-point acted like a sleeping draft and our questions probing the local environmental and economic situation ricocheted around the room, in short we had seriously misread the local context.

We struggled, we floundered and at three pm all the lads abruptly stood up and announced they were off – end of story! Maybe, we suggest to the youth workers, the lads could think about our topics and collect some oral histories and photos (please!).

15th September
We stay overnight in Tapio’s Manchester apartment and on the morning of the 15th September Andreas and I drive up to Barrow for our second session, not really knowing what to expect. This time the session is in the DropZone centre and the crew are feeling more at home, playing pool and armed with laptops. Karen, one of the youth workers, had taken them on a Barrow-wide excursion and produced a good range of images but still no audio recordings. Again we tried in a very casual manner to encourage the crew to talk about their experiences and perceptions of growing up in Barrow, with its single industry economy, the Nuclear Submarine business, but again we encountered a mix of reluctance and resistance.

One of the lads had written a rap especially for the workshop and I began to nudge him gently to perform it but again no dice. Looking around the chill-out space we realised that it was equipped with a DJ rig so we try again with the rap business and suddenly the penny dropped – we were saying it was cool to turn the decks on in the middle of the day. The youth workers flinched a bit but the surge of enthusiasm was overwhelming, the guys exchanged their reticence and truculence for high-octane activity – and so the afternoon continued, high volume, high energy and total immersion in the medium. We end the day with a series of high-fives and dude handshakes – think we survived the experience!

The moral of the story – The Medium is the Message.

“Once the second biggest port in the country…..” reads the legend on the harbourside public art project, well this is hard to imagine as Whitehaven is a barnacle of a harbour, brooding stone walls clinging to a wave wracked, cliff-bound coastline and boasting an entrance that can be terrifying in rough weather (see previous post “White Knuckle to Whitehaven”). Some large amount of EU money must have been poured into the town since the collapse of the Coal industry as it carries its history in a proud and well ‘interpreted’ manner.

Not everybody liked the place however, one of its own, Jean Paul Jones, who sailed from here at the age of thirteen came back as a commander of a US naval vessel during the war of independence, spiking the guns of the shore batteries and sinking shipping around the coast ~ he must have had a bone or two to pick!

We are harboured here whilst making forays up and down the coast, workshopping with regional arts groups, discussing their connections with the local communities and the environment. Our plans to visit Barrow in Furness in the boat are abandoned as the English summer continues to emulate the Icelandic winter, howling winds driving breakers over the harbour mole - we happily revert to land lubbers!

We’ve been looking at animated weather maps on our iPhones, little arrows with fletched tails showing way too much wind, but from the right direction. To confirm the situation we read and re-read the met. reports posted in the Harbour Masters office window ~ again way too much wind but in a perfect direction. With a modicum of indecision we slip away from St Mary’s intending to run up the coast knowing that we can head for cover in Douglas harbour if things deteriorate.

We have two reefs in the mainsail and half a headsail but we surge ahead in the rollers passing close to the rocky coastline and the havoc of surf. I tempt fate by sitting at the very tip the port bow (safety-line clipped on) watching the nose plunge into the back of the swells as the ship corkscrews through the rollers. We pass an isolated Lighthouse with a massive iron foghorn staring out to sea, a real piece of Klang-Kunst and I regret not being able to take a photograph but I’m not letting go for the moment!

The wind increases and we are sizzling along in following seas, at times hitting 15 knots, so we decide to maintain course for Whitehaven on the Cumbrian coast heading for open sea and even bigger rollers. The ship needs to be hand steered in these conditions which is physically demanding but which induces a trance like concentration, sensing the pitch of the swell and driving the ship down the face of the waves; by the end of the day we all have raw palms! The ship is racing the clock, as Whitehaven is a tidal harbour and we have to meet a 16h00 cut-off for the Sea Lock. We leave the sails up until the very last moment as we approach the massive outer harbour wall, sails down and engines on ~ I’m forward hanging onto the mast, paying out the main halyard; the ship is lifted by the stern, the two bows dig in into the trough of a huge swell, the harbour wall some 20 metres away. I look astern, Lars has the rudder on full lock with a look of consternation on his face, I muse that going for a swim here would be bad! The ship recovers its composure, flashes past the two stone beacons and swerves into the outer harbour ~ the lock keeper is already opening the sea gates and before we know it we are tied up in the lock and soon to our berth. Instead of the anticipated 12 hour crossing we took 7 ~ the local bar has free WiFi ~ we are happy!

The Herring is a lucky fish,
from all disease inured,
for as soon as it is caught at sea,
immediately it’s cured!
Anon

Up on watch at 06h00 Wednesday 2nd August, dawn is just breaking and the ship is entering a narrow channel at the Southern end of the Calf of Man. On the port bow jagged inky black cliffs rise out of a foaming sea and to the starboard a solitary rock boasting an ancient stone lighthouse ~ not one of those National Trust lime-washed structures with geraniums in window-boxes but a gloomy dark tower set in a cold sea emitting a hard white light. I rub my eyes feeling as if I am still in a dream, traveling through a mythic seascape but the cold spray soon grounds my reverie. We follow under looming cliffs and draw alongside the Isle of Man scanning the coast with binoculars for the entrance to St Mary’s. I spy a stout harbour mole with yacht masts protruding above it and we make through the breakers for the entrance. St Mary’s has a very congenial harbour master who lets up raft up alongside a large fishing trawler working the Scallop beds. The weather has been so bad that most of the fleet is tied up in port ~ but a few brave souls are still hauling in a catch and we visit the small processing shed next to our berth where “Queenie” Scallops are being shucked. Later that day we feast on pan fried Scallops bought directly from the quay at a ridiculously low price ~ best ones we have ever tasted everyone declares!

Many years before Hull Time Based Arts were kind enough to provide me with a trawler for “Drift” a massive 3D sound installation. The “Arctic Corsair” was the last sidewinder trawler to operate out of Hull after the Cod War and the collapse of the Cod Fishing industry. Whilst I was wiring up the speaker rig in the fish hold I came across a poem pinned to a bulkhead which stopped me in my tracks. My fathers family were said to hail from Northern Germany generations ago, migrating to the North East to establish a fishing fleet but all this is lost in the haze of time, the poem bought a surge of salt through my veins.

This is the old Hessle Road,
The home of Bear Island Cod,
Where the Hudsons speak only to the Helyers,
And the Helyers speak only to God.
Anon

Just like the good cop bad cop routine Belfast seems to have a calm logical Harbour Master (good) and an infernal assistant Harbour Master. (bad). Neither of them are easy to comprehend on channel 12 of the VHF and it falls to my lot to deal with them on the radio as I’m the only native english speaker (the logic goes I stand a better chance!).

The Assistant Harbour Master who must get out of his hammock on the wrong side each day, is of a stout build and who prefers to wear a suit topped by a life jacket, soon earns the nickname “The Fat Controller” as he develops a passion for being bossy and moving our ship from berth to berth ~ this we tolerate and try to prevent Lars, our voluble Danish skipper from arguing the toss, as this makes the Fat Controller build up steam! So a tacit peace is maintained until the fateful day of the Tall Ships departure, when in a rush of enthusiasm, Lars decides to leave our berth (grimy industrial) without the normal formality of a VHF request. Even worse as we slip our berth our skipper leaves the wheel, dives for his camera and proceeds to snap away, our vessel cuts across the bows of an HM Coastgaurd ship, and then fatefully across the bow of a Pilot vessel.

Unfortunately this is the Pilot vessel that the Assistant Harbour Master has commandeered to orchestrate the serial departure of square riggers down the Lagan River. In short order the Pilot boat roars alongside in a flurry of bow waves with the Fat Controller on the aft deck, his face an angry shade of red and voicing a string of expletives designed to make even the most hard bitten stevedore blush! We are banished (under threat of being towed to the nautical equivalent of purgatory) to the butt end of a dock and instructed to stay put and miss the fun!

What happened since our arrival in Belfast ~ the space-time delerium of the voyage, of watches blurring one day into the next was quickly replaced by the delerium of pulling together the stage one of the EcoLocated exhibition, a bare three days to install and arrange an opening Thursday 06th August.

This was followed in short turn by commencing on both the content collection and the physical design and installation of the stage two installation, driven by the AudioNomad 12.2 sound rig and interactive interface table. Normally the content acquisition phase would take a three to six month period ~ this time a slender two weeks until the soft launch on August 25th followed by the ISEA opening (and Catalyst BBQ) on Friday 28th. Real delerium followed by real delerium!