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Story by
Sandra Carrod
“Bear!”
yelled Chris as he turned and ran, his rifle still on his
shoulder.
“You’re kidding,” said Kelly. Chris was the joker
amongst our crew of eight.
As Kelly and
Steve crested the ridge overlooking the beach, the polar bear
stretched to her full height and looked straight at
them.
“Shit, he’s not,” said Steve and they, too, took to
their heels. The one thing we had been told was not to run; a polar
bear can cover the ground a lot faster. But luckily the bear felt
the same way. With her two cubs she bounded off in the opposite
direction, towards the sea, where the rest of the bears were
feeding.
It was our first polar bear sighting on our voyage
through Canada’s Arctic Archipelago. Our 25m ketch, Evohe, was lucky
to have got this far through the infamous Northwest Passage. Few
boats, particularly yachts, have made it through this hazardous
northern shortcut between the Pacific and the Atlantic. The ice
clears from the frigid straits for just a few weeks in mid-summer.
Some years it never clears. It can easily take two or three years to
transit the passage. A change of weather can suddenly close any
stretch of the 3000 miles of ice-choked waterways, forcing a boat to
winter over. We were hoping, against the odds, to manage the transit
in one season.
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Steve Kafka and his crew were used to the cold. Evohe had
spent the preceding months with a documentary film team in Alaska’s
Aleutian Islands. Filming had ended shortly after Midsummer Day. The
most direct route home to New Zealand was south, via Hawaii, but the
challenge of the Northwest Passage was irresistible. Family and
friends advised against it; scores of men lost their lives forging a
path through the Northwest Passage. The experts said we were going
the wrong way, from west to east. But there was no shortage of
volunteers.
Now, three-quarters of the way through the
passage, there were still no guarantees we’d make it safely through
to Baffin Bay. We were anchored off an Inuit whaling camp on Prince
of Wales Island, waiting for favourable conditions to attempt Bellot
Strait. This 16-mile long channel is only 400m wide in places,
subject to unpredictable rips and currents and liable to become
clogged with ice. A nasty submerged rock, Magpie Rock, straddles its
narrow eastern end, our exit. As we recounted our polar bear stories
from the safety of the boat, the weather closed in and a blizzard
enveloped the beach encampment.
Every summer Inuit hunters
camp on the shores of this shallow bay where beluga whales
congregate to rub parasites off their white skin. So far we hadn’t
seen a beluga. At least, not a live one. The Inuit strip these
whales of their blubber, a delicacy they call muktuk, which was
packed in barrels standing amongst the tents. Polar bears came from
far and wide to gorge on the carcasses left on the beach. The bears
skirted around the line of tents, ignoring the occupants. They had
plenty to eat.
It hadn’t been an easy ride so far. Three
weeks earlier, the Evohe had sailed from Dutch Harbour, Alaska,
through the Bering Strait to the Arctic Circle, in the hope of
finding a way through the ice-choked Beaufort Sea. Chris had climbed
the mast to look for leads, navigable fractures in the sea ice.
Sometimes leads turned into dead-ends, forcing us to
back-track.
After a few such attempts we found that following
the shore lead was the most effective way of making progress. The
shore lead was formed by pieces of ice grounding and making a
barrier to the pack ice but it was not without problems: we were
often in shallow waters, with only a foot under the keel for hours
at a time. Nerve-wracking, even though the bottom was soft mud. At
the end of our second day in the Northwest Passage we received a
severe storm warning. We headed for what looked like a safe
anchorage. The chart showed 15ft, just deep enough for us. As we
approached, the wind began to pick up. We touched bottom outside the
anchorage and, after trying a couple of different approaches,
finally anchored outside in 11ft of water, hoping that at least the
larger pieces of ice would ground before they reached us. We had
nowhere to go; ice on one side and land on the other. The ice kept
coming at us, some pieces the size of a car. We used the engines to
dodge the worst of it. It was hard keeping a lookout in driving rain
and snow, difficult to spot the ice drifting towards us. It was a
harrowing night.
In the early hours the anchor chain sheared
with a bang after a particularly violent tug. Fortunately the ice
had cleared a little by then and we motored off in search of
shelter. All we could find was the lee of a small oil-rig which gave
little protection; we motored slow-ahead to reduce the strain on the
ground tackle. Not a good start.
Our compass became sluggish
and erratic, then useless. As we approached magnetic north the
horizontal component of the earth’s magnetic field became too weak
to move the compass. It stayed on 330 degrees for hundreds of miles.
Our GPS fixes seldom agreed with the charts, some of which had been
produced to an obscure conical projection. Radar became our only
useful navigation tool. But, though extremely accurate for position
fixing, radar could not be relied upon for ice spotting. Some kinds
of ice can easily be mistaken for surface clutter and growlers worn
smooth by wave action make poor radar targets. We learned a whole
new vocabulary: from frazil and grease ice, (the early stages of
freezing sea) via pancake ice and polynyas (patches of open water)
to the most formidable of all, glacier ice - growlers and bergy
bits!
And then there were pingos, hills with a central core
of ice, which pop up from the earth’s surface like frozen milk out
of a bottle. The Beaufort Sea is peppered with them. Pingo-free
corridors have been surveyed and charted, but new pingos constantly
emerge from the seabed and they are not always detected by echo
sounder.
Three days after the storm, the ice had thinned from
seven-tenths cover to two-tenths but it posed no less a threat. The
small pieces were the most dangerous because they were the hardest
to detect. A piece the size of a kitchen table would have been large
enough to hole us. Evohe is a well-built steel boat, but not ice
strengthened.
We kept a constant lookout but in the murk of
the Mackenzie Delta we met what we had been dreading. Our bow rode
up on a submerged tongue of ice and crashed through it. The hull was
unscathed but our starboard propeller was wrecked. Chris and Steve
dived to take a look. Visibility was only a few centimeters. They
tried straightening the prop with an adjustable spanner on the end
of a long bar. That didn’t work so we motored for 24 hours on one
engine, until the water cleared and tied up to an ice
floe.
We had a spare prop with us but only one nut. In a
depth of more than 1000ft there would be no chance of recovering it
if it fell. We held our breath as Steve removed the nut. Once the
new prop was in place we had a quick celebration. There was no time
to spare.
The central and most southerly section of the
passage had been largely ice-free and the weather almost balmy. In
Cambridge Bay, a bustling hamlet on Victoria Island, the supermarket
was stocked, amongst the usual wares, with an amazing array of furs,
some with heads and claws. Supplies come in once a year by barge
from Tuktoyaktuk and we happened to arrive when the barge was there.
A lucky break because the charts we’d ordered hadn’t arrived and the
captain kindly lent us some of his. We couldn’t afford to
wait.
We headed east from Cambridge Bay, watching the sky for
ice blink, the shiny glow reflected on the underside of clouds which
are above ice.
It was starting to get dark at night. In the
early days of our voyage the sun barely dipped below the horizon and
an apricot glow lit the sky the entire night. During the hours of
darkness we used night vision goggles. In spite of all our layers of
clothing, 20 minutes on bow watch was the most anyone could take at
a stretch. The kettle was constantly on the boil for hot drinks. We
were anxious to make up for time we’d lost in the ice further west
but were forced to sit out a gale before attempting the shifting
shoals of Simpson Strait.
Now, more than 2000 miles into the
Northwest Passage and heading north, we were delayed by bad weather
once again. We knew the worst of the ice might be still to come. At
74 degrees north, Lancaster Sound, our gateway to Baffin Bay, had
thwarted many explorers of old. Bellot Strait is just on 72 degrees
north. Here the flat and featureless western Canadian Arctic had
given way to rugged, snow-topped hills and mountains. The blizzard
continued. We didn’t envy the whale hunters in their tents on the
beach. Summer was definitely over. As we waited for the wind to die
down and visibility to improve we studied the tide tables, wrestling
with time zones.
The Sailing Directions were not reassuring.
The best time to arrive at Magpie Rock, at the eastern end of the
strait, was slack water but the tides were notoriously flukey. The
directions cautioned that any report of a clear strait was valid for
a mere 30 minutes - conditions can change that fast. Unless using
close air reconnaissance, passage without icebreaker support is not
recommended. Over the radio the Coast Guard told us that Bellot
Strait was ice-free. But would it remain ice-free for the time it
took to cover its 16 miles?
By next morning snow and wind had
eased. We swept several centimeters of snow from the deck before
weighing anchor. The sea spray froze as it touched the deck. Snowy
crags towered on either side of us, just a couple of hundred meters
away. Most of the ice in the strait had collected along the
shoreline and presented no real problem. A tiny but plump bird, like
a severely obese sparrow, hitched a ride on deck. A solitary polar
bear, surprisingly yellow against the snow, loped across the
mountain. A seal popped its head fleetingly above the surface. We
motored without incident through the brash ice and the churning
waters at the eastern end of Bellot Strait.
As sea ice ages,
growing downwards, partially thawing in summer and then refreezing,
it becomes less salty. The lower the salinity, the denser the ice
and the more dangerous it is to shipping. Icebergs, which are carved
from glaciers, are the densest form of ice at sea and the most
dangerous.
Eclipse Sound, at the eastern end of the Passage,
was full of them. They towered over us, exquisitely beautiful,
turquoise ice palaces, liable to topple and roll at any moment. We
arrived at Pond Inlet, our last Canadian port of call, in a howling
gale. Next day, when we finally managed to get ashore, we met a
Greenlander called Ole. He and two Danes had been making a sponsored
power-boat attempt on the Northwest Passage, but their boat had sunk
in the gale. We offered Ole a ride home to Greenland, our next
destination.
We had completed the Northwest
Passage.
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