Gdańsk: a Sunday at home

We wake to the muted ringing of church bells as pale sunshine spills onto the wooden floorboards of our little apartment. There's no rush to get up, not today—it is Sunday morning, our day off.

Sunday brunch at home: tiny fragrant fraises du bois, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries on local yoghurt
with dark honey and waffles

It is a year since my last post, and we are back in the old city of Gdańsk. Once again, we are here to oversee the work on a new boat. We've watched her take shape, day by day, timing our shipyard visits to coincide with the workers' break so we don't get underfoot. We swipe our security cards on the unimposing little door that opens out into the huge hangar-like workspace, and walk the yellow safety lines towards our new boat. Dusty sunlight high on the rafters, the rasping and clanking and hammering cacophony, the melange of new-boat smells: sweetish thin solvent fumes, the phenolic dryness of wood shavings with the occasional hint of vanillic coumarin, the dull blandness of epoxy resin—and out of all this emerges the shape we are learning inside and out. Day by day, we watch as her structural bones are fleshed out and panelled and polished, as she is inlaid with neat bundles of wire and circuitry whose electrical pulsings will order her movement and fill her with light and sound, as ridged and curved tunnels of plumbing are laid in her bowels. We snap photos, so we know what lies behind each panel; we record serial numbers of each pump and each bubble-wrapped appliance. We ask questions. We make lists, and compile orders for suites of spare parts, for water toys, for uniforms. It is work, and it is fun.

But not today. Today, we sit back in bed to enjoy the sounds of home—the leafy rustling outside the windows, the birdsong, the bells. There will be a lazy leisurely brunch made from our eager selections at the open markets the day before—there were generously heaped pyramids of fruit, and brown eggs, and dark honey and delicious local yoghurt as thick as clotted cream; there were fine-boned little elderly women speaking a stately formal English, sitting behind displays of ruffled chanterelles and the plump lewd shapes of ceps. There will be seconds of coffee (and perhaps thirds). Later on, when the bright panels of sunlight elongate and fade, there will be the deep red gleam of wine. It is Sunday, the day off. 

only 10 zloty per kilo of these beauties!

fresh succulent berries at the markets

we bought plants to brighten up the flat—a pot of lavender to crush between the fingers for the scent, mint for tea and salads, basil for everything

our sun-filled little flat in the Stare Miasto (old city)

so sweet and juicy—even the inimitable Mrs Elton could have had no cavil with these

the best of shopping at the open markets

New boat

Ten days ago—

 

The boat is beautiful. Her glossy white topsides catch the light, and the vivid red of the genoa cover and the gennaker, the bimini and the sailbag, look cheery even under cloud. The light teak of the cockpit harmonises with the blonde wood and dark accent panels of the saloon and galley, giving the interior a pleasantly warm, airy look. Only ten days ago, she looked so different—bubblewrap and protective foam layers everywhere, cardboard sheets underfoot and the ceiling and walls gaping uncovered, bristling  with neatly tied bundles of wire and cable. 

We are so impressed with workmanship of the boat—quality materials through and through, and the attention to detail is very pleasing to observe: even the backs of the wall and ceiling panels (which no one but us crew or the occasional technician will ever see) are neatly finished. She has been so well-designed to make sure that maintenance of all her systems (plumbing, electrical, hydraulic) are easily accessible—which makes the 'invisible' part of our job as crew, the behind-the-scenes work that keep a charter running smoothly, much easier.

We can't wait to start welcoming our first charter guests aboard—she is a stunning boat, and will be a real joy to work on.

Poland: Stocznia Gdańsk

cranes near our dock

The day is overcast; against the flat grey sky, the articulated skeletal limbs of cranes move slowly, as if numbed with cold. The weather suits the place, which on superficial inspection appears to be a great heaped junkyard—a grave of robot bones, vast warehouses filled with little more than dusty light and populated only by crumbling piles of plastic refuse, remnants of hoses like dead snakes on the floor, walls patched with fading posters of women with glossy open mouths. Layered traces of old grafitti emerge from the peeling shreds of newer ones. There is every shade of drab, from oxidized ferrous russet to mossy copper viridian to soot-stained lead. It is as if the clean outlines of a Charles Sheeler painting had been filled in with the raucous visual textures of Robert Rauschenberg. A pair of incongruous white swans glide as gracefully upon the dull green canal as if it were a pristine lake.

This is Stocznia Gdańsk, the historic shipyard built on a sluggish canal of the river Martwa Visla (the aptly named "dead Vistula") which empties into the Baltic Sea. To this day, perhaps precisely because its modern industry lives both on the surface of and in-between the undemolished relics of its former life, a ramshackle grandeur suffuses even the disused tram tracks burrowing into the chipped and sprouted cobblestones, and lends a sort of apocalyptic glamour to the rusting abandoned pipe systems that rear abruptly against the sky like mechanized robots from a 1950s science fiction film. Their great welded joins must once have safeguarded the passage of oil and gas through the labyrinth of pipes that fed the industrial beast of old. Now, many of them carry only echoing wind and history.

But on the rare sunny day, the working cranes can look almost festive against a surprisingly blue sky, as they come alive with explosive insectile creakings. A row of dwarfish metal blowers guards the front lines of a troop of of taller machines—a squat robot army with large blank heads standing sentry over their discarded former demesne. The machines have not won, after all; humans now occupy the day. Unusually, there seem to be as many women as men here, all clad in an Orwellian uniform of dull overalls, swarming purposefully over the hulks and shells of pleasure-boats in the making.

Walking in the shipyard, each step kicks up a small puff of storied dust that settles back into the ground or on the strewn debris, powdering them with a protective sprinkling of drab. And yet in shaded corners and on the ragged periphery, the trees—tender of leaf and sweet of bud—are reminders that this is Maytime. Cheerful weeds like the bright yellow dandelions—pisse-en-lit, as the French call them—push determinedly between cracks in the paving. They grow so lush that one morning, we arrive at the shipyard and see them being mown down. The air is faintly peppery with the smell of their dismemberment.

I like being here in the spring, imagining (probably inaccurately) that some of these walks take me through the very grounds where the thousands of workers of the Solidarność movement also walked; I like thinking that from here, the dominoes began to fall, and the oppressive former regimes of Eastern Europe began to crumble away—a giddy thought. It makes me think of the other side of the world, of the other spring of liberty awakening, albeit more painfully, in countries as isolated from hope as this one may once have been. So it all changes.

Omnia mutantur nos et mutamur in illis. Everything changes, and we change with them. Here in Poland, with cold yellow clouds above me, surrounded by the sweet steely fumes of solvents and the urgent whispered conversations of shipwrights and electricians, our former Caribbean life shrinks into the distance. Yet it was only forty-seven days ago when the Captain and I were crouched over the laptop in our cabin, while our charter guests were off snorkeling the gentle blue waters nearby. A stray patch of sunshine fell across the computer screen. The email we were re-reading offered us a job on a new 70' catamaran chartering the Mediterranean in the summer months followed by a transatlantic voyage and the winter months chartering the Caribbean. We looked at each other one more time, a silent question, asking,  Are you sure? Are we sure? He nodded. A drop of sweat trickled down my arm as I moved the keyboard towards me. I typed out our answer and clicked the "Send" button with a smart nervous flourish.  

Yes, I had written, yes we will, yes.

old pipe systems

disused cranes in front of the office

a robot army

another view