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August 17th, 2009 – Cambridge Bay, Nunavut
by Herb McCormick
(August 17): The little all-purpose electronic wind-display unit at the navigation station aboard Ocean Watch – one of the nifty devices supplied to us by Raymarine – has other capabilities above and beyond telling you the strength and direction of the breeze. Push one button and you get the depth, tap it again and you have your seawater temperature. If you punch it a third time you get the log, or the distance traveled since the outset of your voyage.
Today, as Ocean Watch sits alongside a dock in Cambridge Bay, yet another tough Arctic town in the northern Canadian territory known as Nunavut, I was curious to see just how far we’d journeyed since leaving Seattle, so I started to scroll through the various displays. And I have to admit, the number, registered in nautical miles (1 n.m. = about 1.15 statute miles), was a bit of surprise.
So, just for the record, here’s the distance traveled since we dropped the dock lines at Shilshole Harbor a little over two-and-a-half months ago: 4,876 nautical miles.
It’s a long way gone, with a long way to go.
For the moment, however, things are stationary, and just fine. We’ve taken the opportunity here in Cambridge Bay to catch up on sleep, laundry and email; to wolf a hot restaurant breakfast or two; and to reacquaint ourselves with the underrated joys of indoor plumbing, particularly lengthy, hot showers. A couple of weeks at sea, even in as well appointed a boat as Ocean Watch, truly offers fresh perspectives on the truly important things in life.
We’ve also had some new company.
Regular readers of this log will be familiar with a couple of other boats currently in the midst of west-to-east
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| Ocean Watch is joined by Silent Sound, Fleur Australe and Baloum Gwen in Cambridge Bay. |
Northwest Passage transits. The Canadian yacht Silent Sound preceded us into Cambridge Bay, and we arrived here to find them in the midst of a major repair job: namely, pulling their diesel auxiliary to address some broken engine mounts. A third yacht, Baloum Gwen, was also en route to “Cam Bay,” and when a sail appeared making its way into the winding harbor here yesterday, at first everyone assumed it was our new friends on Baloum.
We soon discovered we were wrong.
It turned out the new arrival was another French boat, but this one, a ketch (a boat with two masts, not one) was clearly not the single-sparred Baloum Gwen. No, it was the first boat coming in from the east to have made it thus far this season, the French boat Fleur Australe. We’d heard the boat name before, but we didn’t realize that a very famous French sailor was skippering it.
In France, in fact, the owner of Fleur Australe is so popular that he’s known simply as “Philou.” Offshore yacht racing, particularly single-handed marathons across vast oceans, is an extremely popular sport, and few solo sailors are as accomplished as Cambridge Bay’s newest arrival, Philippe Poupon.
Back home in Newport, Rhode Island, I remember well the early morning in 1988 when Philou finished the famous solo race across the Atlantic in the remarkable winning time of 10 days, 9 hours, in the process shaving off six days from the race record. It was hard to believe he’d sailed his spindly 60-foot trimaran, Fleury Michon, so far, so fast, and so alone. But that was just one of many victories in his impressive resume. A protégé of the legendary French sailor, Eric Tabarly, with whom he sailed a couple of Whitbread Round-the-World Race, Philou also won the Route du Rhum and participated in a couple of solo Vendée Globe races – he was third in one and was rescued in the Southern Ocean after a capsize in the other.
And then, here he was, in Cam Bay.
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| Philou interviews Dave Logan. |
Now in his mid-50s, he still looks very much like he did on that misty morn back in ‘88. But he’s no longer flying solo: With him aboard Fleur Australe are his wife and four kids, who range in age from 9 months to 12 years. When asked how he was enjoying cruising, he flashed a big smile, and when queried about how the family was making out, he laughed again: “Ca va, bien!” he said.
Baloum Gwen arrived a few hours after Fleur Australe, and it was obviously very good news for all of us that a boat has made it through coming in from the east of us – our next, quite immediate obstacle – which is currently invested with the heaviest concentrations of ice in recent years. We asked Philou about his passage down Peel Sound, and he stopped smiling.
“We have pushed a lot of ice,” he said.
He also clearly had the boat to do so. His 60-footer was launched just last November and is a clean, handsome, clearly powerful boat that he helped design himself. It’s also extremely strong. “Fifteen millimeters of steel,” he said, his thumb and forefinger a half inch apart for emphasis. “Good for ice.”
Philou also said that in the town of Resolute a couple of weeks ago he saw the two boats that are currently lodged in the very ice that Fleur Australe was able to muscle through. “Fiberglass hulls, not steel,” he said. “Not so good for ice.”
Though not nearly a half-inch thick, Ocean Watch, thankfully, is also steel.
Philou is headed towards the direction from which we came, and said he’s planning on leaving the boat in Alaska for a couple of months this winter while he returns to France, and then he’ll resume his travels next spring.
Meanwhile, on Ocean Watch, if the weather holds, tomorrow we’ll resume our own travels. We have forty-eight hundred miles behind. And we’ll tick that rising odometer over five grand before the week’s out.
- Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson
This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos
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