12 days at sea: Putting myself in danger with the safest people in this country.
When I read the email from the captain of Freyja, one of the Icelandic Coast Guards vessels, I felt a rush of adrenaline: He was confirming a twelve days lighthouse trip onboard his ship that I was invited to take part in.
In Iceland, every early summer, electricians from the road administration and the Coast guards take a trip around the island to do the maintenance of the most remote lighthouses. I had been in contact with them since the beginning of the Viti Project, but many factors had prevented me to join them. However, this time, the dates coincided with a calm period at my workplace.
As soon as I replied that I could join them, the excitement started to be accompanied by fear.
But after going to so many lighthouses and overcoming the challenges that came along, I knew that the combination of those two feelings meant I was on the right track. I had to go on these twelve days of adventure with them.
Today, I don’t have enough words or vocabulary to describe how amazing those twelve days at sea were! Every day was packed with adrenaline-filled actions.
We departed Siglufjörður in the North of Iceland and sailed towards the east, then to the south, then west all the way to Breiðafjörður, then back to Reykjavík, servicing more than a dozen lighthouses along the way.
I repainted ten lighthouses that I had already done before and reached three more that I had never been to.
I wish I had a much more rich vocabulary and enough words to describe how amazing this experience was ! I´ll be so proud of this adventure when I look back at it as an old lady: those memories will last a lifetime.
Lighthouse of Siglunes, near Siglufjörður. Gummi from Vegagerðin is doing the maintenance of the solar panels that are powering the light.
The lighthouses we went to during this trip are the most remote and inaccessible in Iceland. Meaning that we had to hop on an inflatable boat from the main ship Freyja, in sometimes very wavy situations, and then attempt to land by the lighthouses which never had a proper landing. Some missions had to be aborted due to the weather and the sea conditions.
We had to hastily jump on seaweed-covered rocks while the Coast Guard in charge of the stirring of the boat kept it as close as possible against the tidal rocks despite the waves making our embarkation move up and down. But sometimes once you reached land the challenge wasn’t over: for a couple of lighthouses, we had to climb up.
Gjögurtáaviti: it is a matter of time before this lighthouse falls from this unstable ledge.
Me climbing down the metal chain that was leading to Gjögurtáaviti.
Gjögurtáaviti for example was perched on a narrow ledge and looked like it was about to tumble down into the ocean at any moment. We had to climb up a ten meters metal chain to reach this precarious beacon.
Lundeyjarviti was another sort of climb: an almost vertical wall of grass riddled with the burrows of the Puffins nesting on this island. We had to be careful not to twist our ankles in one of those holes all the way to the lighthouse.
I can only sum all of this up by saying, “I was putting myself in the most dangerous situations among the safest people in this country to be with.”
Because if anything went wrong, I was surrounded by professionals specially trained for situations that go wrong. They made everything as safe as possible for the two electricians from Vegagerðin to do their maintenance job and for me to paint my watercolors.
Everybody was amazing and kind and I am so thankful for their work.
Despite knowing that, my mind had to kind of stay switched off, otherwise, I would have been paralyzed by fear. It was my body that took over and kept going mindlessly and relentlessly. Pulled by this constant will of reaching the lighthouses, even if I had already been to some of them.
It was deeply emotional for me to come back to some of them, like Glettinganesviti for example, where I had been caught in a brutal storm while camping there in the summer 2021.
Painting the lighthouse of Lundey. It was snowing when we reached the island but as soon as I took out my painting equipment the clouds parted and the sun started shining.
Life onboard Freyja was fascinating for me. I had never been in a boat for that long: that was something I had tried to avoid as much as I could due to my seasickness. Every piece of furniture in my cabin was attached so it wouldn’t move if the boat was to start rocking violently.
There was also a handle in the shower, which I was glad to use once so I wouldn’t slip! I think I must have looked very awkward when I was walking around the ship, trying to adjust my pace to Freyja’s movements while everyone else seemed to go on with their tasks as smoothly as if it was on land.
I had brought pills for the seasickness with me, but when the sea got really rough as we were sailing the south coast, the medicine wasn’t enough. It wasn’t until we reached the calmer waters of Breiðafjörður that I felt better and could go out of my cabin. I got cheers from the Coast Guards “She is alive!!” It felt as if I had passed a test to (almost) become one of them.
But I still walked around like a penguin.
Before heading straight back to Reykjavík the last lighthouse of the trip had to be serviced. Ever since I’d known about this particular lighthouse, I had been deeply excited to get there one day: Þormóðsskersviti.
Lighthouse of Þormóðssker
This lighthouse stands on the most south-western skerry of a cluster of treacherous rocks protruding in Faxaflói Bay, by the coast of Álftanes in Mýrar.
You may already know but I come from France, in a region called Brittany. My region’s culture is closely linked to the ocean because of the fishing industry there. Quite like Iceland actually! And if you look at the history, many fishermen, sailors, and explorers from Brittany have sailed to Iceland.
History also tells us that some of them never made it back home.
That is what happened to the captain and the crew of the French vessel Pourquoi Pas at the end of the summer of 1936 as they were sailing by the coast of Iceland. During an unexpected brutal storm, their ship got wrecked on one of the skerries in the area I mentioned above.
Thirty souls were on board, most of them were sailors from Brittany, and only one survived.
That is the reason why the lighthouse of Þormórðssker was built there, to prevent any more disasters like this one.