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August 18th, 2009 – At Sea 60 02N, 105 11W
by Herb McCormick
(August 18): Now things get interesting. At just before five in the afternoon local time today, the crew of Ocean Watch cast off their dock lines in the small northern village of Cambridge Bay to begin the next leg of their ongoing attempt to transit the Northwest Passage. It was a sad day indeed for the local children of “Cam Bay,” who will no longer have the decks of Ocean Watch to ping rocks across all night long. Luckily for the kids, two other sailboats, Silent Sound and Baloum Gwen, are still tied alongside. We wish everyone involved continued good times in this most delightful of Cambridge Bay pastimes.
That, however, isn’t the interesting part, which is literally just around the corner. Ocean Watch’s next destination is
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| The children of “Cam Bay” enjoyed pinging rocks across Ocean Watch’s deck all night long. |
another small Inuit town called Gjoa Haven (Gjoa is pronounced Joe-ah). The place was named after Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen’s stout little ship, the Gjoa, aboard which he became the first sailor to negotiate the Northwest Passage in an arduous voyage that actually took three years, from 1903-1906. During that time, twice Amundsen chose to spend the winter in Gjoa while conducting research on the location of the geomagnetic North Pole. We, too, are involved with scientific research. And while we’re all fans of history here on Ocean Watch, in this particular instance, we have absolutely no interest in repeating it.
In truth, however, moving onward from Gjoa is, at this moment in time, anything but a foregone conclusion.
If you were to take a map of North America and draw a big semi-circle from Seattle to Boston over the top of Canada, Ocean Watch is roughly situated about two-thirds of the way along the track. Another way of looking at it is that we’re just about due north from the very center of the continental United States. So we’ve come a goodly way, and are pleased with our progress to date. But as in Amundsen’s day, the most crucial and challenging portion of the voyage is the next several hundred miles, and that statement is underscored by several dramatic episodes currently unfolding just a little ways to the north. There were, as of early Tuesday evening, three vessels in or near a body of water known as Larsen Sound. One is a Westsail 42 called Fiona, sailed by a vastly experienced American sailor named Eric Forsyth, a two-time circumnavigator and a former winner of the Cruising Club of America’s highly prestigious Blue Water Medal. Another sailboat is a Bavaria 44 called Perithia, reportedly sailed by a German couple of unknown experience. The third is a Nordhavn 57 powerboat called Bagan skippered by another American, filmmaker Sprague Theobold. According to several reports, a l l three boats left a town called Resolute several days ago and all three are currently in extremely uncomfortable, if not outright dangerous, situations.
On a website maintained by a Fiona crewmember (http://www.fiona2009northwestpassage.blogspot.com) there is a photograph of the boat that very clearly illustrates their current predicament: They’re hard aground, close to an icy shore, and heeled over to roughly 35 degrees. Apparently, they encountered ice and tied up to a floe that drifted ashore and into the shallows, taking the boat with it. Forsyth is clearly a fine sailor and the Westsail 42 is a stout, heavily built boat; we’d guess their current dilemma is a temporary one.
In a short update on the same site, we’ve learned that Bagan is also in a deep pickle, locked into a pack of 9/10 ice. A Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker is supposedly en route to the area, but for the moment that won’t be of much help to Bagan, as even an icebreaker can’t pierce such dense concentrations.
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| Herb McCormick helps with the lines. |
Reportedly, the German boat is also now stuck in impassable ice. Over the course of my career as a sailing writer I’ve written dozens and dozens of boat reviews, and I know the Bavaria brand quite well. They are nice, simple, mass-produced coastal cruisers that are priced to sell and actually sail quite nicely. But frankly, unless the boat has been extensively modified – and perhaps even then – in my opinion (and let me stress, it’s only my opinion) it’s an extremely poor choice for extensive voyaging in ice-strewn waters. I very much hope to be eating those words before the month is out.
In voyaging circles, no matter what transpires in the next days and weeks, what’s unfolding this season in the Northwest Passage will be debated long and hard amongst long-distance sailors and adventurers. There is no question that in future years the Northwest Passage will be attempted by sailors with vastly different levels of experience in all manner of vessels and craft. What will that mean to small towns like Cambridge Bay and Tuktoyaktuk with limited services and facilities? Will cruising boats and recreational sailors be a burden or a windfall? And what role should the U.S. and Canadian Coast Guards play in monitoring, or even facilitating, such voyages? Those are just a few of the pertinent questions that need to be asked.
But for now, we’ll leave them for another day. We’re on the trail of Amundsen and Gjoa. And like all the boats now in the north, we can only hope we’re not following in his footsteps.
- Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson
This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos
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