Home Port

She was built here. That is the part I keep coming back to.

Höfrungur AK 91 — the Dolphin — came off the ways at Akranes in 1955 and went to work for Haraldur Böðvarsson’s fleet, out of the harbour a few hundred metres from where she is now. Herring, in the years when herring was the whole reason a town like this existed. Seventy years later she is still in Akranes, up on a cradle of steel beams on the north shore, a couple of minutes’ walk from the water she was launched into. Most boats end somewhere else. This one never left the address.

I came in early, before eight, the light still low and coming in flat off the sea. There is no drama to the approach — a road, a mountain behind the town, a stretch of black rock and wet grass, and then a wooden ship standing on the shore at the size of a house. The tide had left a pool in front of her and she was doubled in it, right way up and upside down at once.

She isn’t wrecked, which took me a moment to work out. She is hauled out. Propped upright on beams, chocked, a plank leaning against her side — the posture of a boat waiting on a repair, except that the repair stopped being possible a very long time ago. So I went up the plank and over the side, to see what time had left behind.

Beauty and decay, side by side. That is the whole of it.

There is no deck. You stand at the bow and look the length of her and there is nothing but the frames, curving up on both sides like ribs, the beams still crossing between them, and at the far end the wheelhouse with the open sea behind it. The oak has gone silver where the weather gets at it and black where the water sits. Everything iron has gone orange and is bleeding down into the wood. Amidships the engine room is open to the sky: the block still wearing its yellow paint, pipes, a tangle of cable, a red bulkhead — an engine room being rained into.

And it is beautiful. Not in spite of the rust, because of it. The planking has taken on a grain and a colour that no boatyard could put there and no one would have wanted at the time. She is being unmade slowly and in public, in good light, at the edge of the town that made her.

I climbed back down. She’s in plain sight of the road, and nobody is hurrying her.