Matuse Family: Michael Kew – Faroe Islands

Photo: Michael Kew

Iceland was unkind. The weather was wicked, the surf was flat, and gas was 7 euros per gallon, which was quite a lot considering I spent several consecutive days driving around the entire island to find the wind onshore everywhere. I got flat tires, I got hangovers, I got sick, I got lost—fortune was astray in that land of fire and ice.

Escape arrived by way of a complimentary Atlantic Airways ticket from Reykjavík to Vágar, international gateway of the Faroe Islands, an interesting little windswept country halfway between Iceland and Norway. It was one of those obscure places I had always wanted to visit; the free one-hour flight was a boon. It was mid-April, so I figured there would be some residual North Atlantic swell to surf in a place the surf world knew nothing about.

“You are going to the Faroes?” asked a wide-eyed Icelandic brunette in the Reykjavík airport. “Well, I have a story. Two years ago my husband and I took the ferry to there. We were there for one night and he met a girl while we were dancing in Tórshavn. So I tell him he can stay in those f—ing Faroe Islands.”

She threw up her hands. “Asshole!”
“You left him there?” I asked.
“Of course! He is living there now. But I have new husband. He is from Shetland.”

At Vágar the plane landed in snowfall, which was interesting because as one of the world’s rainiest places, the Faroes rarely freeze. The Gulf Stream runs right through the 18 islands, causing relatively mild year-round air temperatures (45°F), and in a land where rain falls 280 days annually, snow is a treat.

“You got lucky,” the stewardess said to me, peering out the plane window as we taxied on the tarmac. “It’s never cold here.”

“After Iceland, I could use some good luck.”

You’d need luck, too—ideally poised in the stormy North Atlantic, the Faroes are full of swell but bereft of surf spots. The coastline is mostly sheer and inaccessible and the surfable beaches are few, typically located on the islands’ southern and eastern coasts, which are sheltered from prevailing west swells. East swells are rare and usually plagued with onshore wind. Sheepshit-scented offshores are anomalous but do occur.

And these are the islands of sheep—Føroyar—so named by 9th-century Norsemen who found the place crawling with sheep left by 6th-century Irish monks who, searching for an uninhabited, religion-free eden, sailed to the Faroes from Scotland. The monks were the first humans on Faroese soil, but nobody really knows what they did there, because, historically, what happened in the Faroe Islands before the 14th century remains a mystery.

Mystery and mystic are apt words for a place that uses its remoteness to retain itself, a green treeless archipelago of rocky, waterfall-laced isles far removed from the 21st century that penetrates the rest of Scandinavia. Tórshavn, the Faroese capital on Streymoy (“island of currents”) and Europe’s smallest capital, is home to 40 percent of the country’s 48,000 people. The other 60 percent are scattered throughout the islands in dozens of tiny medieval grass-roofed settlements, some so old and weather-beaten as to forever resist change, their daily winds resonant with isolation.

– Michael Kew