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.

Personal, Travel, Uncategorized, ,

A Bumpy Reentry

Motorsailing along on north-northwesterly course under overcast skies through which a weak, northern sun is trying to burn. It’s dry. It’s also cold: in the low 30s. Boogie and I are on watch, which means he’s down below at the navigation table snoozing.

It’s too cold to write in the cockpit so I’m sitting on the top step of the companionway, out of the light breeze (created mostly by the forward motion generated by our engine) in the little cuddy that slides over the hatch. This watch, with its montonous gray sea beneath a gray sky amid the drone of the engine, is a far cry from last night’s.

We got underway yesterday a little after 7pm in pretty calm conditions. After motoring around the spit of land that is Ísafjörður, we raised the mainsail (with two reefs) and turned out toward the sea. Boogie and I started our watch at 9pm and at first, things seemed like they were going to be great.

There was a decent wind out of the northeast so we were clipping along pretty nicely under reefed main, staysail and yankee. Just before 10pm, the sun emerged from below the thick clouds as it set in the northwest and the sky exploded into a canvas of reds and oranges and even, on the fresh snow that had fallen overnight up high, the pink of alpenglow. The sheer walls on the west side of the fjord, with their interspersed greens and browns, looked a lot like Hawaii, and the seas, while a bit lumpy, were nowhere near as bad as expected. The comforting beacons of a couple of lighthouses winked at us from behind, up the fjord, and as we exited into the open sea two more appeared, one on either side.

But things started going south, so to speak, shortly after it got dark around 10:45. Fortunately, we were off watch at midnight so it was only for an hour, but for that stretch of time I was in another world. In a not-so-good way.

For starters, I was fighting seasickness. It was one month to the day yesterday that I left Polar Bear in Akureyri. And in that time of shore-based living, my sea legs had softened. We loaded up on a pasta dinner before leaving the dock and while I knew I might have been better served doing without, I opted in on the meal. As a result, I felt dizzy for much of that final hour-plus on watch. I never heaved up dinner — never really got close — but that might have been a relief.

Between the swells running in from the northeast (sidenote: I gotta believe that last evening was the time to be surfing at Skálavik given the cleaned-up-yet-still-big conditions), the darkening sky, a surprising fatigue that set on once we were out in the fresh breeze and, the gathering cold (as I mentioned: a new dusting of snow was visible on the high points of the fjord…in mid-August), my head was swimming — to the point where I could not, for the life of me, steer a straight course and I even began hallucinating a bit. Lights on the horizon, ominous shapes in the water near the boat…I was seeing things out of the corner of my flickering eyes. Fighting to keep my eyes open, fighting to stay on course, and shivering in the chilly summer night all made for what was undoubtedly the most challenging watch I’ve had this summer.

Fortunately, the next watch came on right around midnight, at which point I retreated without hesitation to my bunk. I stripped off my outerwear, crawled into my sleeping bag and was out pretty quickly. I awoke around 3am when the shifts were changing again but managed another couple of hours of sleep before Boogie and I took over at 6am.

I guess it was just the bumps of reentry because I feel much better now. Not great, mind you, but I’m seeing clearly and my head is no longer swimming.

In fact, it’s now a wee bit monotonous. The wind has dropped further so the sea is a shiny black, smoothly undulating surface. The sun is shining a bit more forcefully as it climbs above the clouds in the southeast but it’s still not enough to warm things up. And off to the west, blue sky is visible on the horizon. No ice yet, but we have now reached the area where we’ll have to keep an eye out.

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And They’re Off!

It’s 12noon on Tuesday, 16 Aug., here in Ísafjörður, Iceland. The wind calmed overnight (although it’s picking up again) and the rain is just spitting a bit now. And in today’s news: Polar Bear is departing Ísafjörður in about three hours. And there was much rejoicing.

As detailed earlier, we’re going to head out of the fjord here and turn left (west) to ride the strong winds outside toward calmer conditions nearer the Greenland coast. Once we’re clear of the heaviest stuff, we’ll turn north and head for Scoresby Sund. We’ll hope for relatively benign conditions there — not too much wind and/or ice — so we can round the cape that protects the southern flank of the sound. If there’s too much ice, or if there’s too much wind with enough ice that combined there’s sufficient danger, then we’ll turn around and be back in Iceland (likely here in Ísafjörður) by Saturday. We should know, based on weather reports and satellite photographs of the ice conditions, by late Wednesday whether we can get into Scoresby Sund.

We spoke with the family of the skipper of Aurora, a charter sailboat based here in Ísafjörður (that we saw off Jan Mayen several weeks ago), who’s been in Kulusuk for a couple of weeks now. The skipper said he’s never seen so much ice and the locals in Greenland said there’s more ice than there’s been in 45 years. So…we’ll see what happens. (The irony is that Polar Bear could have made it the week before I rejoined the boat had Boy Wonder not skedaddled for the UK, but let’s not get into that here.)

I’ll be stoked if we can make it to Greenland. To see such a unique place would be a rare, if not unique, experience, hopefully surpassing even all that I’ve seen on this trip so far.

But more importantly, I’m anxious to get back to sea. Yes, I’ve been back on the boat for the past week, but I haven’t really been on the boat since I left in Akureyri in mid-July. Being tied to a dock is nowhere near the same as being at sea. That rhythm of daily life on board, the sounds and motions of the boat moving through the water, the way the universe is reduced to the 72-foot length of Polar Bear and the sea from horizon to horizon…these are not remotely replicated when in port. In port, the rhythms of life are driven by shore life and the hours kept by the town in which you’re docked. Being on a boat in port is just living in that town in a very small, damp apartment with a lousy bathroom.

At sea, though, the boat becomes a mobile castle, a bulwark against the harsh-yet-beautful environment that conveys you to ever new sights and destinations. The beds are sumptuous, the food extravagant and the bathrooms, well, they’re still not exactly plush. And the clarity that comes from being on a watch system — you’re either on or you’re off — enables one to be remarkably productive and still be refreshed at all times.

So, yeah…I’m looking forward to casting off the lines this afternoon. Once we depart, we’ll be out of contact until we return to Iceland, be that in a couple of days or a couple of weeks. I will, of course, post once we’re back in range. Talk to y’all then…

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