Long ago, on a far-flung Finnish island, I met a fisherman with two daughters. One had studied at Harvard and spoke perfect American. Her sister had followed the family’s ancient calling as a fisher girl. The salmon weren’t biting, but she had a proper seaman’s optimism. As she shoved off from the dock one night to try her luck, I asked her why she still bothered.
‘Ah,’ she replied shrewdly. ‘You never know what you’ll find swimming in the sea….’
As the years have passed, I’ve often thought how right she was, and never more so than the day I went to sea in a skip. I’d been filming a show for BBC4 that centred on how the allies got troops ashore on the Normandy Beaches in 1944. The programme was really about the Higgins Boat, a classic landing craft made in America. In my ignorance I’d assumed that landingslid down the ways.
