Didn’t Custer Have a Plan Too?

Sitting in the bar/restaurant across the street from Polar Bear watching the Icelandic soccer national championship match on TV. It’s not exactly Liverpool-Sunderland (which I watched earlier) but in contrast to that consummately professional English Premier League match, the action has been fierce in this one: two crossbars hit in the past five minutes along with another point-blank save, and the yellow cards are a-flyin’ (and rightly so).

I’m sitting here because as you may have surmised by the publication of this post, I’m still in Ísafjörður. Boy Wonder arrived on the morning flight from Reykjavik sans chart for Kulusuk so the current plan is to put to sea tomorrow and head west in an attempt to not beat into the fierce northerly winds that are forecast. We’ll head that way for the hundred-or-so-mile width of the heaviest swath of winds and then turn north along the coast of Greenland to our original destination (and a place we have a chart for), Scoresby Sund. Hey, it sounds like a plan…

And since you’re dying to know: the score is 1-0 to the team in orange at halftime.

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Welcome to a Goat Rodeo…Polar Bear Style

Finally chilling out after a busy Friday here in Ísafjörður. We got Polar Bear mostly ready to go tomorrow by stowing the two inflatable dinghies, washing the boat down, cleaning the interior, doing laundry, moving some of the berths around to accommodate incoming guests, etc.

But the Polar Bear goat rodeo continues. The weather forecast is still more moderate than it was a few days ago, and while a run due north to Scoresby Sund/Ittoorqqortormiit/Constable Pynt is still out due to heavy winds and seas in the forecast for that area, the drive to reach Greenland remains so strong that now we’re going to head west-southwest to Kulusuk but…

…but we don’t know if the guests arriving tomorrow can get a flight out of Kulusuk next week.

— No worries. There are several daily flights to Reykjavik from Kulusuk tomorrow so that’s OK

…but (and this is my personal favorite) we don’t have a chart for the Kulusuk area.

— Despite being told to get a chart in England yesterday, Boy Wonder called this afternoon to say the chandlery in Reykjavik was closing today (Friday) and wouldn’t open again until Monday, so his plan to get a chart en route was out and could we do anything about a chart? And did we really need a chart? Legally, yes, we need a chart, and Boogie won’t go without one, regardless. Boogie spoke with the harbormaster who checked with an ancient local who used to sail to Kulusuk regularly to see if he still had an old chart lying around…no luck. Then he tried a friend of the skipper of a local boat (Aurora, a boat we saw at Jan Mayen way back when, now currently in Greenland with guests) to see if he had a chart lying around…well, that friend-of-the-skipper is playing in the band at the bar/restaurant across the street from Polar Bear so we’re going to check in with him later, see if there’s a chart in his car or something.

The bottom line is: if we don’t get out by midday tomorrow, the weather is forecast to get nasty enough that we’ll be here for at least a couple of days. We’d still get Boogie and Marlies’ friends to Greenland, and we’d get there for next week’s guests, but it’ll be close AND we’ll be hanging out in Ísafjörður for another couple of days…which wouldn’t bother the surfer in me (see yesterday’s post), especially since my wetsuit boots and gloves arrived this morning from home (thanks, Mom!). I’d also get to check out opening day of the English Premier League (a lot of Man U and EPL fans here in Iceland, it turns out). And frankly, the three of us had such a great day yesterday — we rented a car and spent the day touring the Westfjords region — that the guests could have plenty of fun in the interim.

More on that later…either in the next day or so, or after we return to civilization in a couple of weeks. Either way, I’ll get at least a quick update posted tomorrow if we’re heading to sea.

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Perspective, Baby

I sure as hell can’t complain about the weather on the trip this summer. Sure, we had some nasty, cold crap on the Norwegian Sea as we headed to Iceland from Jan Mayen, but that’s to be expected out there. Whenever we’ve been somewhere, we’ve only had a wee bit of unpleasantness. Other than those couple of rainy days in Lerwick, Shetland, we’ve enjoyed crazy-good conditions pretty much the entire time (and we had plenty of crazy-good days in Shetland, too).

And that streak continues to this day, which finds me sitting here in the sun in Ísafjörður in a pair of shorts, a T-shirt and flip-flops. Seriously. I’m getting sunburned. In Iceland. At 66 degrees north latitude. I mean: really?! I’ve been simultaneously watching a small boat working the light breeze on the waters of the fjord and taking in the snow-dappled mountainsides ringing the southern, western and northern boundaries of town. It’s probably in the mid-60s officially, but in the direct sunlight, it’s seriously toasty. 70-plus? Seems likely. Ahhh!

Boogie and I took advantage of the weather and ambled out for a run this morning. We covered about 5.5 miles at a leisurely pace, and got to see some of the town in the process. After the run, I grabbed a swim, sauna and hot tub, and shower/shave at the community pool — EVERY town in Iceland, no matter how small, has a pool (many of them heated geothermically)…it’s kinda the national pastime — and then we did some chores on Polar Bear, chipping away at the to-do list for the Greenland run…

…which now looks more likely. Yesterday’s grim weather forecast has moderated considerably and it’s looking like we’ll head north Saturday morning. Ironically, I welcomed the initial forecast because it meant two things: one, that we’d be stuck in port while, two, the surf was big. Even Arctic Surfers, a tour company down south, called out the forecast for this area for the weekend, but alas. It’s interesting (to me, anyway) how my perpsective changed over time: as a sailor, I was bummed by the forecast and then I realized that as a surfer, I was stoked by that same forecast. With the forecast easing, the surfer in me is now bummed, but the sailor/adventurer who wants to see Greenland is stoked. It’s a no-lose situation, I’m well aware, but I must confess to having looked forward to some big waves hereabouts. Perhaps come September…

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