What does a seaman do to get a favourable wind? Some say that he should tickle the mast and then leave all the rest to the Clerk of the Weather.
On the Sea Stallion, however, we have a man who is throwing himself into the battle to get the westerly wind to do a 180 degrees turn. His name is Kim and he is one of the crew.
After the day’s test sailings off the southern point of Norway, a group of the men left Båly harbour to go to the local Spar-grocer in Spangereid. One of these was Kim. On the bridge across the newly-opened canal he all unwittingly came to put himself and his new Sea Stallion parade jacket in the way of an airborne seagull’s afternoon toilette.
“I damn well thought that someone had thrown something at me”, says Kim, who was struck close to his heart.
But there was no perfidious Norwegian armed with a slingshot that was lying in ambush in the ditch. There was no passing car-driver emptying his rubbish on the head of an innocent pedestrian.
Eyewitnesses relate that the so-called ‘gangster-seagull’ fled eastwards after the attack and disappeared.
It is said that the white droppings bring good fortune and it is true that when Kim returned to Båly harbour, quite different weather forecasts had begun to come in, promising several days with easterly winds, beginning on Thursday. But the seagull is not going to get off so lightly.
Kim has announced that he will “most certainly” go and find the delinquent seagull from Sørlandet and settle up with it:
“If I get hold of it, I shall have it roasted...or maybe I’ll have it stuffed!”
Dried seagull droppings on one of the windows of the office at Jarle and Anne Tone’s ‘The Fish Corner’ is a more or less certain indication that the seagull has been spying on Kim for some time.
Some eye-witnesses who saw the seagull flying eastwards this afternoon can namely relate that Kim has quite often been sitting at the dining-table with his back to this very window.
Just as unwelcome it is to feel that one is a living target for a southern Norwegian herring gull, just as thankful are undoubtedly the crew on board the Sea Stallion that Kim put his soft shell at the disposal of good fortune when it came flying..