– He was a bit of a joker.
This is how a driven Arctic sea captain speaks when the local newspaper asks and the ship is fully loaded and has encountered heavy seas in recent days on its way home from Newfoundland.
But the "grab" was a bit tight for the SMP journalist who had been waiting. It was despite everything the first trip with the first Norwegian steel seal catcher, equipped with a freezer so that the trappers did not have to bother with blubbering, but could leave it to the modern machine in Brandal. Could the skipper perhaps give a few more details?
– Well, a little rough the last two days before we passed the Faroe Islands, but not so much that it mattered. We had to back up for a day or two, we didn't dare push the ship against the seas as heavily laden as she is.
A fine ship both in the ice and in the sea, assured the skipper. He was a man to listen to. Kristoffer Marø had almost half a century behind him on the Arctic Ocean when he left Polar Star to the dock in Ålesund in April 1949 – after making a turn along Brandalstranda on the way in, in honor of co-owner Martin Karlsen and his hometown.
The Arctic Ocean Legend
The Arctic Ocean environment can boast many skipper legends, but few can compare to Kristoffer Marø. In his case, we can speak of national status.
This is how journalist Odd Arnesen described him in Aftenposten: “Marø…is one with his ship… he sees more than others and finds out where others look blindly. For more than a century he has been traveling in the polar ice. Not many words come from Marø – he travels confidently wherever he goes. He is one of the calm sailors that you quickly gain blind trust in because you realize he knows his stuff, because he masters the situation.” This was in 1939, just after the tragedy with the ships that were hit by a hurricane on their way to Newfoundland, and Polar bear, with Kristoffer Marø as skipper, saved, together with Polaris, the crew of The Salt Valley in the monster waves of the North Atlantic.
When Arnesen saw Marø standing in the barrel and steering the ship through seemingly completely closing ice, he saw an artist.
"The ship (is) in his hand like the foil in the fencer's",
Arnesen wrote in his tribute, "he swings and directs it, turns it around on the spot. He pries, he makes a rush on the flakes, where they might have a small weakness, he wedges his way where there is a tiny crack."
Or to quote another journalist, Odd Berset, who wrote this in Polar book 1954 after a coffee visit at the home of the Marø couple in Ratvika: "If you didn't know better, you could easily take him for a pleasant steward on a smooth and safe domestic voyage. And when the gentle Mrs. Marø sets the table with home-baked cakes in the cozy main room, you don't exactly feel any Arctic breeze. You can hardly imagine the modest, calm Kristoffer Marø as an Ulabrand in Kvitsjø storms, or during dangerous screwing in the Vesterisen, you have a little difficulty imagining him as the man in the barrel on board an iceberg ship at the end of the world."
There was also deep respect when author and Arctic veteran John Giæver portrayed the skipper in Hard-nosed polar men in 1957: "Some Arctic sea captains like a dram, others prefer beer. Marø does not taste alcohol... Some smoke snuff, and some torture paper and tobacco into questionable cigarettes. Marø sticks to chewing gum. Only once did he try to navigate a cigar; but the result was disgraceful. Otherwise he uses sugar on fish balls and boiled eggs. I have nothing else to reproach Kristoffer Marø for."
