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August 13th, 2009 – At Sea 69 19N, 116 36W
by Herb McCormick
(August 13): Remember that awful, annoying sound, when you were a kid, of fingernails scraped across a chalkboard? It was the sort of grating noise you just don’t hear – you can almost feel it. Well, when you’re down below in the otherwise cozy cabin of our steel yacht Ocean Watch, with the engine shut down as you drift within an arena of ice, the nasty, scraping clatter of a big frozen chunk skidding along the length of the 64-foot hull resonates to a different, though equally disturbing racket. The scratching and rattle is one thing, but the way it gets right under your skin is quite another. Like a bad headache, it feels real good when it stops.
Today, Ocean Watch’s ongoing quest to put the Northwest Passage behind us continued, in fits and starts, as we made our way out of the Amundsen Gulf and into a relatively narrow waterway called the Dolphin and Union Strait. For almost the entire summer now, this passage flanking the southwestern coastline of formidable Victoria Island has been choked with ice, and for weeks we’ve been studying the ice charts published by the Canadian Ice Service waiting for the blockade to fissure and melt. It’s been a long wait. But yesterday, with the hint of a lead opening right along the Victoria shoreline, we set out from Pearce Point Harbor on the Arctic mainland of Canada to see what might transpire.
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| The sun set just before midnight. |
Holding a heading just north of east, we made good progress throughout the day. Around dinnertime, our mates on the Canadian yacht Silent Sound came up on the daily SSB-radio net with surprising news: They’d successfully made it through the strait, and were proceeding into Coronation Gulf, the next patch of water on the way to Cambridge Bay. We’d last seen skipper Cameron Dueck and his crew in Tuktoyaktuk, where we split tacks: They headed for Banks Island, to the north, and we proceeded on a southerly board along the coast. At the time, it appeared that a southern lead would open first, but like racing sailors who are on the correct side of the course when the wind shifts, Silent Sound was in perfect position when the ice in Dolphin and Union finally cracked to the north. In any event, Cameron confirmed what we suspected; at least for the time being, there was an inshore path down the strait.
As the evening progressed, the ice became more formidable. Ice concentrations are listed in tenths: 0/0 means ice free, 10/10 means completely solid ice. Our resident ice expert is Arctic veteran David Thoreson, and in the subsequent hours he’d usefully point out – often from his position hoisted up the rig to the spreaders, where he could see far and wide – that Ocean Watch was negotiating anywhere from 2/10 to 4/10, all the way up to 6/10 of ice. Let me just state for the record: The latter is a fairly serious patch of ice.
We made good progress right through the gorgeous pastel sunset, just before midnight, but by 0130 visibility
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| The refracted ice looked five stories tall, though it was nowhere near that high. |
became difficult – the refracted ice looked five stories tall, though it was nowhere near that high – so we exercised discretion over valor and shut the boat down for about three hours while the boat drifted to the northwest, in company with the pack ice, at almost a full knot while most everyone had a nap. Wednesday had been long and tiring, and Thursday promised more of the same.
The sun rose a little before 5 a.m. local time, and we resumed progress. Our old, long-lost friend, the moon above, has re-entered our lives, and as we eased back into the floe, the lunar light, about half full, was reflected in the slender windows of icy film just at the interface of the new morning air and the cold Arctic Sea. We were cruising through slush.
After a winding tour of the maze of ice, we made landfall off Cape Baring on Victoria’s big knuckle of land, the Wollaston Peninsula, and closed to within an eighth of a mile of shore before finally hanging a hard left-hand turn and making our way to the relatively clear corridor of open water along the coast. And I do mean relative: there was ice aplenty. Negotiating these hazardous waters was a total team effort, with ice spotters in the cockpit, on the bow, and occasionally aloft, feeding the helmsman a constant stream of information as we slid to the east.
As I’ve been typing down in the main cabin, I have a view via our flat-screen TV of the floes and bergy bits we’re currently negotiating from a camera mounted on the spreaders. Every time I lull myself into thinking I’m watching a documentary about madmen – as opposed to, you know, a live shot of the movie we’re in the midst of – I pop up from my seat and can see a rather large blue iceberg out the port window, sometimes less than half a boat-length away. There’s a word for all this, and that word is “surreal.”
But we’ve been lucky. It’s cold work on deck – the air temperature is a brisk 33-degrees, but it’s blowing a good 15-knots out of the east, and the wind-chill factor is in the single digits – but for the second straight day we’ve got unlimited visibility under blue skies. At mid-afternoon, we downloaded a new ice chart, and though we’ll believe it when we see it, it looks like there’s ice-free, blue water not so far ahead. We just have to stay safe, and calm, and get there.
Several weeks ago, we encountered our first significant ice on the approach to Barrow, and I can’t speak for the entire crew, but I found the entire experience more than a little unsettling. The onboard vibe today is different. We’re in the Dolphin and Union Strait, making miles and progress towards Cambridge Bay. And when we don’t think too hard about it, we’re even having a little fun.
- Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson
This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos
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