Tag Archives: monumental storm off Newfoundland
Storm Birds – an Icelandic trawler in peril
In the winter of 1959, Gudlaugsson was first engineer on a trawler that endured a monumental storm off Newfoundland. All hands were put to hacking ice from the decks in a bid to stop the vessel sinking under its weight. “It was 72 hours of fighting.” In Storm Birds, Icelandic novelist Einar Kárason has taken the story of Gudlaugsson and his crew and turned it into a pulse-quickening piece of fiction. Here the trawler is the Mávur, the Icelandic word for “seagull”, and the maelstrom is evoked by an unnamed crew member recalling the events in later life. He makes it clear that being a fisherman in Icelandic waters “could be as dangerous as soldiering in times of war”. >click to read< 09:49
