Middle of the night, there you are in an Antarctic gale, thirty feet above the deck of your sailboat, mast swinging wildly, trying to attach a new halyard because the previous one snapped off. Probably because the only other person on the sailboat, who came on as crew knowing zero about sailing, put up the sail wrong and woke you up to fix it. Probably.

It’s enough to make you utter Norwegian curses. “Fy fæn! Helveta!” you might remark in a screaming sort of way. (“Holy fuck! Hell!”) Or you might get personal. “I have to go up and do this because I have an idiot for a first mate who cannot even pull up a sail properly without getting it twisted!” you might comment shoutily as you prepare to go up to change halyards – a job that requires exposing your hands to dangerously cold conditions.

The novice sailor/first mate, is David Mercy, author of Berserk: My Voyage to the Antarctic in a Twenty-Seven-Foot Sailboat. The boat is the Berserk. The Norwegian curser is Jarle Andoey, or Andhøy, a native of Larvik who sailed the Berserk from Norway all the way south to Antarctica. Mercy joined the ship in Ushuaia, Argentina.

After climbing the wildly swinging mast, Andhøy took off his gloves to work on the halyard. After 15 minutes he was able to descend. “[H]is hands were completely frozen, like gnarled branches,” Mercy writes. The painful process of recovery began. “First, the hot throbbing heat that felt like putting your hand on a burner… then the needles exploding like fireworks at the fingertips until you stare at them half expecting to see flames shooting out with the blood.”

While this was going on, Mercy told his captain, “I put up the sail right. But you would have blamed me no matter what.” Perhaps that had been evident once Andhøy got up there. It’s not clear from the account.

They retired below, trying to warm up. (They had to share a sleeping bag.)

Finally Andhøy said:

I’m sorry, man. I have a problem with that.

He went on to say that he had “a tendency to blame others when things went wrong.” But he didn’t really mean it.

“By now I knew that,” writes Mercy. “His apology, though welcome, was not really necessary.” The issue for Mercy was whether he had rigged the rope correctly, and he knew that he had, taking particular care. He writes that he let the yelling slide off him. “We were sailors. That kind of energy happens on the sea. Still, when he apologized, it alleviated some of the predawn chill.”

So Mercy says he was happy with the apology. He goes on to congratulate himself for not getting upset – “it could be said that I took my first step toward becoming a sailor.” And that Andhøy “truly ascended to the rank of captain.”

Interesting account. I wasn’t in that sleeping bag, and don’t know if Andhøy went beyond “that’s just how I roll, don’t let the things I say get to you.” Which isn’t adequate as an apology.

Actually, there’s a lot I don’t know. These two guys aren’t as uncomplicated as Mercy presents them in this book. Though the book came out in 2004, it makes no mention of a 2002 expedition the two made on the Berserk II along with Alex Rosén, about which they did a TV show. Meanwhile Andhøy is apparently being pursued by nautical bureaucrats of many lands for such piratical crimes as sailing without insurance, failing to file a route-plan, not paying previous fines, trying to smuggle a guy into Canada, entering New Zealand illegally, avoiding customs, landing in protected areas, and provoking a polar bear. The occasional flying of a pirate flag probably also increased official annoyance.

It was probably too late in the publishing process to put in the episode where Norwegian police searched the Berserk II for Mercy, who also had unpaid fines relating to a previous voyage. They didn’t find him. Ha ha! – “it transpired that he was hiding in Vardø, disguised as a taxi driver,” says Wikipedia. Maybe he was saving that for another book or TV special.

I would tell you more if I read Norwegian. Especially about the polar bear.

However, I think the apology episode did happen and impressed Mercy favorably. We’ll see if he signs up for Andhøy’s next voyage.