Step off a moving boat onto the quay

Mykines is the westernmost of the eighteen Faroe islands. What it has for a port is a concrete quay in a notch of the cliffs with a staircase going up from it, and nothing about the arrangement is sheltered.

The crossing is forty-five minutes of open Atlantic from Sørvágur, and it is the first thing the weather cancels. The island comes up as a wall rather than a shape and stays a wall until the last few minutes, which is when the size of it lands.

Then the transfer, one person at a time, with somebody's hand on an arm. The boat is moving and the quay is not, so getting off is a small step or a jump depending on what the water is doing at that second. Nobody has ever made this look graceful.

The boat's timetable and the island's are the same timetable, which is why the day is shaped the way it is: Mykines lets in two hundred visitors a day and the outfield is open from ten until five. The permanent population is around a dozen. In summer they are comprehensively outnumbered.