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August 14th, 2009 – At Sea 69 02N, 114 04W
by Herb McCormick and Mark Schrader
(August 15): Here’s what we learned last evening: When you’re on a beach in the Arctic, and you startle a large brown bear, and it charges at you, and you raise your shotgun to fire a warning shot over it’s head, and you’ve forgotten to jack a round into the chamber, but you don’t realize that and you pull the trigger anyway, the tiny, ineffective and extremely disappointing sound you hear is called the Dead Man’s Click.
Now here’s what we learned this morning. If you anchor in a quiet Arctic cove in the wee hours, and you sleep for a while, and a tennis-court-sized iceberg drifts down on your anchor chain while everyone’s below, and you spend the next couple of hours dealing with the resulting mess, keeping your fingers crossed that you don’t lose the powerful anchor and the couple of hundred feet of chain, which are only two of the most important items on your entire boat, that initial rendezvous of solid ice and steel hull produces one very loud and annoying bump.
Today, the crew of Ocean Watch continues to zigzag their way down the Dolphin and Union Strait en route to Cambridge Bay, negotiating ice-strewn waters here, there and everywhere. Weaving through large expanses of ice is something like piecing together a giant jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the final picture is ultimately supposed to look like. It’s a tedious, trying, stressful process that doesn’t ever seem to really end; once you piece together one corner, you just have to go deal with another. In the “downtime,” such as it is, we’ve become acquainted with new clicks and bumps, and we’ll address these interesting noises in the order in which they were encountered.
So, first: that click.
Skipper Mark Schrader will begin our narrative with an excerpt from his captain’s log: “In the past 24 hours we’ve seen very little ice-free open water. All aboard are becoming experts at spotting bergy bits, opens leads, moving floes and all sorts of ice, cloud and fog formations that might indicate hazards to navigation. Everything up here is a hazard to navigation. Given the recent ice reports we expect to see more of the same. What we didn’t expect to see late yesterday were two British sailors and their 17-foot sailboat moored to an ice floe close to an otherwise barren and exposed shore.
“We had heard reports of an ‘expedition’ attempting to transit the Northwest Passage in a small, open sailboat. Along the way other details emerged. At the hunter’s cabin in our last anchorage at Pearce Point Harbor two sailors from a small boat left a note before leaving the harbor a day before our arrival. Their note was confirmation of what then looked to us like an odd, very risky, uncomfortable and wet adventure – from my experience not atypical behavior for British sailors.”
“Earlier in the day our radio contact in Cambridge Bay gave us the Brit’s latest position and mentioned they seemed to be ‘stuck’ on an ice floe after hoisting their boat aboard, so to speak, and merrily drifting along atop the floe. We plotted the position – it was just a few miles ahead of our track – made a couple of VHF calls and kept an eye out for their floating encampment. And then from their little boat amidst ice floes on an otherwise unremarkable beach they happened to see us go by about a mile offshore.
We heard their radio call and immediately made a plan to visit them – by dinghy, ours not theirs.”
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| Lancashire and Oliver are raising money to help servicemen who have lost limbs in Afghanistan get back into life through sailing. |
With that, the skipper, David Thoreson and I dropped Ocean Watch’s dinghy off its davits, hopped in, and made for shore. Moments later, we were shaking hands with Major Tony Lancashire and Lt. Col. Kevin Oliver of the Royal Marines, square in the midst of what, for them, might be described as a busman’s holiday. The former was wearing flip-flops, the latter Crocs, neither in socks. To contrast, the Ocean Watch contingent was swathed in fleece and foul-weather gear from head to toe. Over the next couple of hours or so, it wouldn’t be the last time we felt like wimps.
The Marines, we soon learned, were in the midst of a sabbatical of sorts – “adventure training” they called it – before returning to active duty next month, which meant repeat tours to Afghanistan. They’d been planning their eight-week Arctic voyage for over a year, one of the aims of which is to raise funds for a group called “Toe In the Water” that endeavors to get servicemen who’ve lost limbs in Afghanistan “back into life through sailing.” You can learn more about the organization and these extremely impressive and capable chaps via their website, http://www.arcticmariner.org.
We had a quick look at their boat (it didn’t take long!) before ferrying them back to Ocean Watch for a cup of tea and a visit. Tony had purchased the Canadian built Norseboat at last fall’s sailboat show in Annapolis, Maryland. They’d reinforced the hull with Kevlar, had a couple of sliding seats installed for rowing, had the boat trucked up to the Inuit village of Inuvik, and shoved off. For shelter, they had a small cuddy cabin and a couple of sleeping bags. All in all, they were quite happy with their trim little vessel, though as they stepped aboard Ocean Watch and took in our relatively palatial platform, Tony looked at Kevin and said, “We’re doing this the wrong way.”
Their trip had started out fine and was going quite swimmingly until they got some bad advice about the ice pack and ended up stuck, quite literally, for several days. With block and tackle, they managed to haul the boat up on the ice and parked there until things opened up enough to once again hoist sail. Finally, just a couple of hours before we met them, they’d made it across Amundsen Gulf and beached the boat, eager to stretch their legs for the first time in a week.
On the way back to the boat, they came across a small freshwater inlet with a flock of seagulls wading in the shallows. “There was a lump in the middle,” said Tony.
“And 25 yards out to the right, there was another big lump. That one moved, and a colossal brown bear stood up. We’d startled it. Kev reached for his camera and I reached for the gun. It was a full-on bear charge. I fired the shotgun and got the old dead man’s click. That got my attention. He was a big old fella’, now about 10-15 yards away. So I chambered one and fired over his head. That got his attention, and he ran away.”
“Every day we have an adventure,” said Kevin. “That was today’s.”
One thing was clear: If these guys were running the “British Empire,” there’d still be one.
After a cup of tea, several pieces of our own Zeta Strickland’s homemade fudge (“I’m losing focus here,” said Tony, as he gobbled another hunk), and a neat shot of what the skipper termed “medicinal” whiskey, we returned the lads to their boat with a goody bag of stuff.
“Sailing the Arctic is about a lot more than a couple of blokes on an open boat,” said Kevin, as we shook hands and bid farewell. “It’s about the people you meet.” We couldn’t have agreed more.
And now: that bump.
The skipper picks up the story: “A couple of hours later we found ourselves back amongst hard-to-see ice and looking for some place to anchor for a few hours. Falaise Bay, a big open bay exposed from the south and west, became the option. Sometime well after midnight we entered the bay, set the hook, shut off the engine, enjoyed the quiet and went to sleep.
“All seemed well until David Thoreson’s early morning yell for all-hands on deck – ICE! A very large ice floe had dislodged itself from the shore and was trying to remove us from the bay. Ocean Watch was almost encircled by the floe – now trapping our anchor and putting enormous pressure on the ground tackle. After quickly adding 400-feet of rope rode and several fenders to the 200-feet of anchor chain – and then dropping most of it to allow OW to move, and the floe to float over and away from our anchor and tackle, we managed to work ourselves free. Three hours later we retrieved the rode, chain and anchor and motored out of the harbor and into the ice, 1/10 to 3/10 – small to medium sized floes. We didn’t think Zeta could top the homemade fudge surprise, but the late breakfast this morning of pancakes, bacon and real maple syrup helped restore crew humor and energy.”
That brings us up to the minute, and with one more click and bump – this time, an icy bit nudged out of the way – the adventures of Ocean Watch continue.
- Herb McCormick and Mark Schrader with photographs by David Thoreson
This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos
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