Anchor Watch

Yes, it’s anchor watch again! I just took over for Boogie and will be here for an hour and a half, keeping an eye on the radar and the GPS, with a regular peek outside. Polar Bear is anchored in about 15 meters of water at the end of the runway in Constable Pynt, Greenland.

The airport here might be the most improbable thing I’ve ever seen. There are runway lights, taxiway lights, runway-end strobes and a small terminal — all here in what one could call “the middle of nowhere” and not be exaggerating. There is absolutely nothing here in the way human civilization and yet this airport — built during an oil-exploration phase — exists. All around Constable Pynt are low rolling foothills, higher alpine-style peaks, a fjord, glaciers and reportedly a bunch of musk oxen and, at times, polar bears (lower case). Ittoqqortoormiit is a 50-minute straight-line helicopter flight — or seven-hour motor in a sailboat — away. And yet, Air Iceland flies into here twice a week and there’s a helicopter service that runs the ITQ shuttle and other area flights.

Not that I can see any of this because outside right now is a London-style pea-soup fog. Visibility might be generously called 30 meters or so.

We arrived here just before midnight, after picking up four hikers from the other side of the fjord and running them over here. The fog was as thick then as it is now; of course, right after we dropped the hook, things cleared up and we could see right where we were and what the situation was. It was an impressive bit of navigation given the ice floes en route and the fact that we were within 50 meters of the shore when we turned and contoured north to find this known anchorage. It was also a shame we had to work in such conditions as the view as we motored across the fjord was spectacular: a waning gibbous moon in the northeast with a piercingly bright planet to its lower left (I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve been so out of touch with the night sky this high-latitude summer that I don’t know which planet it was: I’d guess Venus or Jupiter given its brightness and color); high cirrus clouds shining pink in the late-night-sunset alpenglow; a hulking glacier at the head of a valley tucked between sawtooth peaks; smooth black water with phantasmagorically shaped ice sculptures thrown here and there in the sky’s reflection. A sublime evening, to be sure.

The hikers we picked up are ashore, secure in a the tongue-in-cheek-named Airport Hilton, awaiting tomorrow’s midday flight to Reykjavik. Our two guests will join them and they’ll all head out for lower latitudes en route to civilization, and a new crop of 10 guests will join us, the final group of this never-a-dull-moment summer.

The plan is to spend the next week here in Scoresby Sund, exploring a huge island up-fjord called Milne Land. Next Saturday, we’ll put three of the 10 ashore here at Constable Pynt for a flight home and then we’ll head out into the open sea bound for Iceland where, after a couple of days we’ll put another guest (a friend of the putative marketing woman for this boat and its company) ashore. The remaining guests will stay aboard and we’ll take Polar Bear back to the UK via the Faroe Islands and/or the Orkney Islands and/or the Shetland Islands. Originally planned stops on this leg in St. Kilda or western Scotland are out.

Also in jeopardy if we stop in Iceland is the 600-mile offshore passage required by one of the paying guests for his yachtmaster certification. As if this enterprise needed another example of why it’s so poorly managed and operated: they’re going to accommodate a friend on a last-minute cut-rate deal rather than a early-booking full-fare client. It’s a case of priorities, near as I can tell, and this one sums up Polar Bear perfectly: a service-industry venture that puts the owners’ wishes ahead of its guests. Case closed.

Just looked outside for the every-10-minute check at 3am and the breeze has cleared the fog away, probably only temporarily but enough to let me confirm that we haven’t drifted at all and that there’s no imminent danger from any ice floating down onto us as we lie at the end of our anchor chain. Another half-hour and I can pass the baton on to Boy Wonder.

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Too Much of a Good Thing?

We’re now in Ittoqqortoormiit. Well, we’re in the small cove above which the colorfully painted wood houses that constitute Ittoqqortoormiit are perched. They cling to this rocky land that the world forgot. Third World? Forget it; we’re talkin’ 10th World. We are off the map here, for sure. Actually, there was cell-phone coverage in the bay so maybe it’s not so 10th World after all. But why anyone would live out here is beyond me…and I love far-out places. But this is on-the-edge living in a good year; a particularly long winter must be brutal.

We made our way in this morning, weaving for a couple of hours through ice floes of all imaginable sizes and shapes. Only a few big, proper ice bergs — and they were on the outer edge, out near the open water of Scoresby Sund — but there were plenty of boat-killing pieces of ice. Slow going, with hand signals relayed from the bow to the helmsman at the wheel.

Once in open water close to the village, we had an open-air lunch in the cockpit. The sun shone brightly from a bright, clear, blue sky, with the only clouds down over the land south of the fjord, and it was, in all seriousness, comfortably warm enough, despite the presence of ice all around us.

Following lunch, Boy Wonder, Marlies and the two guests went ashore in the dinghy for a bit of exploration. Boogie and I were going to go after they returned but while the landing party was ashore, the tide and a light breeze started moving the pack of ice into the little cove. Boogie had to keep Polar Bear moving around the western edge of the bay to keep the boat clear and the shore party were summoned back.

They returned and now we’re headed back out to Scoresby Sund. Slowly. The ice has indeed funneled into the bay that links Ittoqqortoormiit’s cove with the fjord, so Boy Wonder was hoisted into the spreaders, from which he can get the bigger picture of leads in the ice and relay directions to the helm via radio.

The ice continues to be the amazing factor in our recent experiences. The varied shapes they adopt — shapes that change based on the light, our position in relationship to the ice, the ice’s position in the water — are every bit a driver for the imagination as a sky full of puffy white clouds. One large berg recently evolved from a schnauzer puppy in a shoe to a castle out of Sleeping Beauty to a horse to a whale’s diving tail…all in the space of a few minutes.

And the underwater shapes of the ice floes, now visible with the sun shining high overhead, has been equally fascinating — but with the sinister overtones of what that below-the-waterline ice can do to unwary ships (think: Titanic). An innocuous flat pan of white ice can sport a jagged, knife-edged underwater blade that extends well out from its above-water perimeter. An unsuspecting boat might pass too near the floe and into peril, but with the overhead sun the cold-blue protrusion glows and winks as a natural work of art visible to the boat steering just out of the danger zone.

Not that we were in any real danger. Polar Bear’s steel hull can handle most of the ice in this bay. Even the really serious underwater lances would likely just bounce and groan and push Polar Bear in opposition of the force exerted by the boat’s motion. But there are a handful of major-league icebergs that we would have had to give wide berth to — as did the 125-foot steel tourist cruise ship that left shortly after we arrived in Ittoqqortoormiit, leaving as the tide ushered the thickening ice back in behind it.

It’s not like we would have gotten stuck in that thickening ice if we hadn’t left a little while ago…at least not for too long. But better safe than sorry. And we have no idea what’s going on ice- and weather-wise one fjord over to the west, the fjord where the Constable Pynt airport and our rendezvous with our final set of guests for the season will take place tomorrow.

We’ll be losing our two current guests — the friends of Boogie and Marlies who’ve been wonderful this trip, cooking magnificent meals (often) and being generally very cool. Here’s hoping the 10 who take their places are equally as cool.

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Into the Ice

Dark shapes emerge from the predawn twilight. They loom, a shade darker than the smooth black glass of the sea surface. As they drift past, the light from the still-to-rise sun reflects off of their north-facing sides, showing colors of soft white, light gray and cold blue.

That’s what it was like on the 3-6am watch this morning. Bergie bits, growlers and other funky-named ice pieces floated by in an unsteady stream all during watch, but they were all fascinating shapes and sizes: some low and flat, others tall and thin, most a combination of the two. And that’s just what we could see above the waterline.

The sizes of the big ones, too, were staggering. One proper iceberg came into view late during the watch. I estimated its distance at a mile or mile-and-a-half away; radar revealed it to be six miles away. Yikes. And then, taking that distance into consideration, the height of the thing ran in the 250-meter range. Double yikes. And that’s pretty small compared to the big bergs out farther to the east.

Yes, east. At Kap Brewster, the cape that forms the southern boundary of the mouth of Scoresby Sund, the coastline veers to the southwest after having run pretty much north-south for many hundreds of miles. The ocean currents along the east coast of Greenland push the ice southward — and continue mostly southerly at Kap Brewster. So as planned, we sailed a bit west of north from Ísafjörður and have now ducked inside the ice that lies offshore (and that turned back Polar Bear on its earlier attempt because it was thicker and the winds had curled the pack in towards shore).

We’re making our way northeasterly, about 15 miles or so off the coast of Greenland. We’re currently in pretty thick fog but for much of the morning visibility was pretty good.

The mountains and glaciers of east Greenland, which came into view yesterday when we were about 68 miles offshore — 68 miles! — loomed massive when they were in view. Seeing them at such size from such a distance called to mind the view of Denali from Anchorage; that something could appear so impressive when so far away staggers the mind. And this is just one small stretch of coast on what is the world’s largest island. If Greenland is this big and on this scale already, well, it’s more than an island. It’s a continent.

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