The joke's on us, the ferry is undergoing maintenance, there are divers scraping the hull, didn't we get the message? All the locals know... except the bus driver, who dropped us off here and disappeared, leaving us stranded on the wrong side of a mountain from Tórshavn. One of the few instances of inefficiency in the bus system.
We ended up hitch-hiking back to Tórshavn, riding around in the city bus, then coming back later to take the ferry. The guy who gave us a lift was from the small town of Kirkjubøur on the other side of the mountain from Tórshavn, and while on the one hand deriding it as small and nowhere, was on the other hand telling us about what there was to see there, including the remains and ruins from around 1300 of what was to be the Cathedral of the Faroe Islands, abandoned when in the middle of building, the Reformation came to the Faroes and they went Protestant.