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August 11th, 2009 – Pearce Point Harbor, Amundsen Gulf
by Herb McCormick
(August 11): As the first pot of coffee was brewing this morning here at our temporary home above the Arctic Circle (at least we’re hoping it’s temporary), a most unusual occurrence happened: We had company. It was our friends from the Belgium-flagged yacht Baloum Gwen, skippered by a retired commercial tugboat skipper named Thierry Fabing. Thierry and his crew had just arrived at Pearce Point after an overnight sail from a small town about fifty miles to the west called Paulatuk. We’d last seen them in another small Inuit village called Tuktoyaktuk, so we put the kettle back on and had a nice chat in Ocean Watch’s cockpit. It was good to catch up again and swap sea stories.
In the Bahamas, Mexico and French Polynesia – in fact, wherever cruising sailors congregate – the assembled voyagers often refer themselves as the “Class of…” These assemblages can number in the dozens, or even hundreds. So the tradition continues here at 70N, where a handful of boats, including Ocean Watch, comprise the Northwest Passage Class of 2009.
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| Ocean Watch skipper, Mark Schrader works on his log. |
Before we delve deeper into the make-up of the Class of ‘09, here’s a current status report from skipper Mark Schrader’s personal log: “Slowly, very slowly the ice at the east end of Amundsen Gulf is letting go and moving away from the north shore. Big pieces of ice are drifting west on the 3-knot/per day current, accelerated just slightly by the recent easterly winds. The concentration of ice is changing from 9/10 to 7/10 to 3/10 and so on in some parts of the pack. Waiting here for another day is the prudent course of action. Other than our ‘schedule’ suffering a little, another day here isn’t an unpleasant choice – sailboats don’t have schedules, they have destinations.”
Here on the west side of Amundsen Gulf, in addition to Baloum Gwen and Ocean Watch, is Canadian skipper Cameron Dueck’s Silent Sound, which last night set sail from a small island called Holman to the north of our present position. All three boats are currently attempting a west-to-east transit of the Northwest Passage. We’ve just learned of a fourth vessel heading in the same direction, a small boat with a crew of two Englishmen aboard who are maintaining a website at www.arcticmariner.org.
British servicemen have a long tradition of embarking on arduous voyages – perhaps the most famous pair was John Ridgeway and Chay Blythe, who rowed across the Atlantic together in the 1960s and then had long, storied careers as voyagers and adventurers – and though we don’t know much about these chaps, it appears they’re cut from the same cloth. They were apparently here at Pearce Point the day before we arrived; in fact, we found their card in the abandoned shed at the head of the bay, with a note of thanks to the owners after they’d spent the night there. For some reason, they left just as the big easterlies filled in, and the last we heard, they were stuck in the pack ice to the east of us, having dragged their small boat up onto an ice floe. They were low on water, their batteries were depleted…and they were no doubt having the adventure of their lives.
Several hundred miles to the east of us, another set of boats is trying to negotiate the Northwest Passage from
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| The crews of Ocean Watch and the Baloum Gwen get together to swap sea stories. |
east-to-west. A couple of them are reportedly in the town of Resolute, including a well-traveled American yacht called Fiona. Though it’s hard to fathom, there are also reports of an English powerboat headed for the Passage that’s just recently started off from the other side of the Atlantic. There was also a light Corsair 31 trimaran with a solo sailor aboard who’d planned an east/west run at the passage, but has since abandoned the quest and is currently in Labrador. All things considered, that sounded like a very prudent decision.
South of Resolute, in Peel Sound, are two more boats bound east-to-west: One, a Nordhavn trawler called Bagan, set out from my hometown of Newport, Rhode Island, a few months ago, and is skippered by an old acquaintance of mine, filmmaker Sprague Theobold. The other boat in Peel is called Fleur Australe, flying a French flag with a family of adventurers aboard. The ice charts we’ve seen show Peel as currently impassable, with a threat of more ice filling in from the north. It sounds like a precarious position, and we not only wish those crews good luck, we’ll be following their exploits with more than passing interest.
The clearinghouse for nearly all of this information is a longtime Arctic hand named Peter Semotiuk, who is based in Cambridge Bay each summer (our next planned-of-call). Via his high-seas SSB radio, Peter maintains a daily radio schedule at 0030 UTC that we try to monitor and check into on a regular basis. In fact, the net has become a highlight of each day, and Peter’s updates on boats and weather, and his insights on ice reports and forecasts, are invaluable.
Here in the Arctic, the next month or so will be, to put it mildly, very interesting. We’re about to see whether the Northwest Passage Class of ‘09 goes on to graduate…or, truth be told, if they’re held back and get a head start on the Class of 2010.
- Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson
This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos
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