A huge fishing vessel out on the hard . This picture was taken at midnight.
My quarters in Reykjavik was the Marina Hotel right on the waterfront. By some standards the hotel looks old-fashioned and, dare I say it, a little ratty. My room was L shaped and the bed took up all but two feet of the width of one leg of the L. But one day a fire alarm went off (false alarm). Instantly fireproof doors closed at both ends of my second-floor hall. That’s pretty sophisticated fire suppression. I tried one of them and could open it and pass through, but it was quite heavy.
Out my window I looked at a boat repair yard much like Boat Haven in Pt Townsend, with a variety of working boats on the hard. That was almost as interesting as the tours I took. A huge vessel is what they were refurbishing right in front of me. I suspect it is a whaler.
The huge gears and donkey engine that hauls out the big vessels. Each gear is about four feet in diameter
So how do they get a vessel that size up on the land? I saw no sign of a boat lift such as we have here. Rather they drag it out. I looked in the window of a shed immediately in front of the hotel’s front door and saw the gear system from hell, used to pull huge vessels ashore on skids.
In the six days I was there, they completed painting the green hull, added some stripes, and chalked off their plimsoll marks. The green was spray-painted, but they edged the stripes by hand, the whole length of her. Signs posted around the area warned drivers not to park their cars unless they like green.
And I pondered a thought that day: No matter how large the vessel you’re looking at, no matter where in the world she may be, she is still gone over by a human hand, every inch of her.