Aurora Borealis

So I'm writing this at 8:30 pm central time on 8/27. We're at 68 deg 22´.50 N 112 deg 50.32´W doing 6 kts. We left Cambridge Bay yesterday afternoon around 4 o'clock after saying goodbye to Anthony, Wolfgang and Nestor; Hans' friends. We headed out of the harbor under warm clear sunny skies with 20-25 kts on the beam to slightly behind. It was perfect sailing conditions and it instantly got all of us into great spirits. We were cruising along at 8-9 kts and maintained that all through the night. Alex and I had the 11 pm to 2 am watch and as I just said had comfortable sailing at great speeds. Near the end of the watch Alex was down below fixing something and I was hanging out in the doghouse (the little nav station in front of the cockpit). I poked up on deck to make sure everything was still fine. We maintained a dark twilight all through the night so you could just barely still see everything ok. I looked up and there was a thin white cloud stretched across high above the horizon in front of us. All of a sudden it started moving, disappearing in one spot and getting brighter and bigger in another. I ran down got Alex and then we woke up the rest of the crew. It was our first sighting of the Aurora Borealis aka Northern Lights. We spent the next half hour watching the show. It looked like veils of dust falling out of the sky constantly changing shape. Unfortunately we didn't get any crazy coloration, only white, but it was still incredible and awe inspiring. Hopefully we get some more clear nights as it gets darker so the show will continue. We are now back under motor power as the wind died out around noon today and we are making ground towards our probable next stop of Dutch Harbor, Alaska. It's about 2,000 miles from here and we have to make it out of the Northwest Passage proper, across the top of Alaska, through the Bering Strait and down to the Aleutian Islands. It's a lot of ground to cover and should take us around 14 more days. It's a long stretch of sailing but there are not many exciting places to stop, or not any exciting places to stop for that matter, so we're going to try to press on and knock off this big chunk of our remaining trip as fast as we can.

Sh!t hits fan Bay

As I´m writing this it is 4:30 on 8/22. We are at 71 deg. 05.24N 96 deg. 38.90W motoring South through Peel Sound towards Cambridge Bay at 5.7 kts in calm seas and we are all safe and the boat is running properly. Now let me explain the hell we went through during the past 4 days. On 4/18 we left Bellot Strait and motored south. We anchored in a small bay in the Tasmania Islands 50 miles south of the strait to wait for the ice to clear ahead of us. That night was fine. 4/19 was a nice cloudy day but blowing 20-30kts out of the southeast, which was actually great because it cleared the ice away from the coast for us. Dodo´s Delight came in and anchored next to us on the 19th to also wait for the ice to clear. That night we had them over for drinks after dinner. As the night progressed the wind picked up and we started seeing gusts up to 40kts. We started to drag our anchor a little bit so we payed out more chain until we had all 100m out. While the Dodo´s guys were getting ready to go back to their boat around 1am our anchor chain snapped off the boat as the breeze clocked up to consistently over 40kts. We immediately threw the engine on and dove into getting safely out of the little bay and getting our emergency anchors out and assembled. Everyone worked fearlessly and tirelessly for a few hours as we got ourself out of danger. We then unsuccessfully tried to re-anchor as we kept dragging our backup anchor, so we decided to motor around for the night while the breeze died down. Only the owner of Dodo´s Delight was back aboard their boat and with the conditions as they were the 4 South African climbers ended up spending the night sleeping in our salon. After a very short few hours of sleep we went back into the bay to search for our lost anchor. With Hans at the helm we dragged an anchor back and forth trying to hook the chain. All the harsh forward and reversing involved in the process threw a bolt from the gear box of the engine and during the last hard reverse the drive shaft slipped in the coupling and slid out roughly 8 inches. Luckily we had the dinghy in the water and the wind was light when this happened and we were able to quickly tie the dinghy alongside and motor ourselves out into the middle of the bay away from the lee shore that we were less than 50ft from hitting...We were then able to secure ourselves with somewhat of a tripod with our 2 safety anchors and a line to a large boulder on shore. We then set directly to work analyzing the problems with the drive shaft and trying to figure out the best method to find and recover our anchor. The 4 Dodo´s climbers; Clinton, Dave, Andrew and Steve, all jumped right in to help us (they are our new best friends). These tasks turned into over 48 straight hours of trial and error work and a massive MASSIVE amount of jury rigging. We determined what had to be done with the shaft and confirmed our theories with a satellite phone call to an Argentine mechanic, Nico, who has worked on the boat before. He was in Ushuaia which is southern Chile, the complete opposite end of the America continents. We then rigged up two pulley systems to try to get the shaft back into the proper position. For those of you who know the boat, the access to the shaft and gearbox is right in front of the fridge which is at the bottom of the steps going from the doghouse just into the galley. We had one pulley system running in under the floor and out the doghouse to a pulley on the mizzen mast and then to a winch. The other pulley system was rigged up with a line around the propeller with both ends feeding to the bow of the boat, through pulleys and back to the largest winches on the boat. Xurxo had to dive to get the line around the propeller. Even in a 7mm wetsuit, a hood, boots and gloves he said it was veryyyyyy cold. These two pulley systems allowed us to simultaneously push and pull the drive shaft to move it back into place. We also then had to replace and reposition the bolts on the collar that holds the shaft in place. In the process of all this work we lost one of the nuts for one of the bolts...we couldn´t find a replacement anywhere on the boat. What we did find was 1 very large shackle that happened to be the exact size and thread pattern of an m24 nut. In order to use this we had to cut that end off the shackle...it is currently the sole reason our boat is working. That is basically the best explanation of the engine problems and solutions that I can give because I spent most of my time working on finding the anchor. Our first attempts were made by dragging a chain and grappling hook anchor across where we thought we had lost it. Of course the bottom of the bay happened to be covered in massive amounts of huge pieces of kelp which immediately fouled the anchor and eliminated this possibility. Our next option was to hope to see the anchor or chain because the visibility in the bay was amazing...however it was still about 10-16m deep where we think we lost the anchor and chain. We attached a GoPro camera to the longest pole we had on the boat (only 4m) and stuck it down but still didn´t have a clear picture. We then went back to jury rigging and I put together what basically became an unmanned submersible to use to search the bottom for the anchor. I used a GoPro camera on a headstrap mount and strapped and duct taped it onto the bottom of a "bruce" anchor. Then using the dinghy, a GPS and a stopwatch, Hans, myself and another assistant went out and trolled just off the bottom of the bay hoping to catch a glimpse of chain. We marked waypoints and the time at every turn and had the stopwatch synced to the GoPro footage so if we saw the chain we would be able to determine which way points it was between using the time. You would think that at some point we would be able to see part of the 100m of chain we lost. I spent 2 straight days dragging an anchor around behind a dinghy for 40 minutes at a time and then going back into the boat and watching the footage. Let me tell you, kelp and a rough sandy bottom look a hell of a lot like anchor chain and every time someone thought they saw the chain 2 other people disagreed. After filming basically the entire ocean floor in this bay we still had no conclusive sightings but had dropped marks in our most likely spots, most of which formed a rough line. As tempers wore thin we started fishing for our anchor where we thought it was likely to be, again to no avail. A passing motor yacht stopped for one night somewhere in here and, with a proper drysuit and the scuba gear we had on Nordwind, one of their crew, who Laura happened to know, attempted a dive where we had the highest likely hood of anchor chain based on filming. Unfortunately the cold water froze his regulator as soon as he got to the bottom and made for an unsuccessful adventure. Coincidentally Laura met Richard when the boat he was working on was fixing their drive shaft...lol. This morning we finally finished fixing the engine but we are only using forward and only at low rpms to reduce the risk of breaking anything and hopefully avoiding having the drive shaft slide back out. We then took a few more fishing trips with an anchor and chain in hopes of recovering our anchor but were still unsuccessful. By this point we were all incredibly frustrated and both mentally and physically exhausted. We finally gave up searching for the anchor and left that godforsaken bay with Dodo´s Delight close by for potential assistance. As I said at the beginning we are now headed for Cambridge Bay. There we hope to replace the shackle holding the drive shaft collar together with a real nut and potentially get a new anchor and chain delivered. As I also mentioned at the beginning we are all ok, aside from some very sore backs, myself included, and the boat is running well. As things progress I will keep you all updated but right now it seems hopeful that we will still be able to make it all the way to Vancouver. OH and our black water tank is full and not pumping right now so sh!t really is hitting the fan...

Peel Sound

(This is a long one sorry everyone) Current Position: 71 deg 14.45N 096 deg 28.24W So I said I hope Han's brings some good weather with him, and so far it's been pretty great. We left Resolute the night of the 15th after dinner and by the time we got the sails up we were in the middle of a blizzard and it was blowing 20-25 kts from the west. This may not be exactly what you would picture as good weather but it was a welcome change and gave for some good excitement. With the wind up we couldn't use the auto-pilot so I got some very cold but fun helm time in the snow. For the next 24 hours we only had to motor to get through a few strips of pack ice at the top of Peel Sound. We had great wind all the way down this first stretch of Peel Sound with 15-20 kts on the beam or just a little bit behind. Now I have to say, coincidence is an incredibly funny phenomenon. As we were sailing along I was thinking about how a marine photographer, who happened to also have lunch with us on Billy Budd a few days ago, said that Beluga whales only come up here for a few weeks, maybe a month tops, and she thought that at this point they had likely already come and gone. I was standing by the rail thinking well maybe there will still be a few up here and we'll see them on their way out. BAM Beluga instantly pops up right next to me. I couldn't believe it. After that we kept seeing the little white whales every 20 minutes or so as the swam North against us up the sound. They were amazing. We sailed all the way down to False Strait which is a bay just north of the entrance to Bellot Strait. There we spent the night alongside Dodo's Delight, a 33 ft. fiberglass boat owned by Bob Shepton out of Scotland. Bob is somewhat of an Arctic guru at this point and has been coming North to Greenland and the surrounding area for at least the past 10 years (not sure exactly). On board with him were 4 climbers from South Africa who he brought up to climb in Greenland. They sailed all the way from Scotland with him and are continuing on through the Northwest Passage. Before this trip 2 of them had never been on a sailboat…the phrase baptism by fire comes to mind but I think ice is more appropriate. The next day we both headed through Bellot Strait with plans of meeting on the other side at Fort Ross which is a hut from the old Hudson Bay Trading Co. Bellot Strait is beautiful and famous for its ripping current that can top 8 kts…It connects Peel Sound to Prince Regent Sound and marks the Northern most point of the continental Americas. Hans and Alex have now both rounded the Northern and Southern most points of the Americas on Nordwind…pretty impressive. We had a very relaxing motor through the strait and arrived at Fort Ross in the early afternoon and went ashore after lunch. I have to say that this is the first place on the trip that I would really like to come back to. It was beautiful. There were 2 buildings there, 1 was an old house from the 50s or 60s that was really beat up but had the remnants of an electric stove and refrigerator inside. The other was a fully intact and equipped hut maintained as a refuge for whoever may need one. The hut was fully stocked with beds, pots, pans, some food, matches, a stove, barrels of diesel, shotgun shells of a varying bear deterring variety, spray in insulating foam for any leaks in the existing insulation, shovels, brooms, and even a bit of what looked like very old rum… all in all very well provisioned. The hut was just up from the beach on a little peninsula on the Prince Regent side of the strait and had beautiful rolling, albeit rocky, hills for a backdrop. There was also a lake just up from the beach that had a field stretched out behind it. Maybe it was just the fact that there was grass, but I thought it was spectacular. That night we had the entire Dodo's crew over for dinner, which was a lot of fun and, thanks to Laura, a well fed success. Turning out food for 15 people on a boat is no small feat. We woke the next morning a little groggy but headed back to Bellot Strait to resume our trip south. This time through the strait we hit a 5-6 kt current head on and really put the 480hp engine to work. The water was flat calm other than the current ripples and with the sun out it was actually a really nice day. I was sitting on deck reading glancing up every so often, but we had just come through the strait the day before…on one of my glances I saw some seagulls flying around a white spot on land that looked like it had legs. Now I couldn't possibly tell you the number of times that in the heat of the moment I've turned chunks of ice into polar bears in my mind, and just the day before I excitedly thought a flock of Canadian geese by the lake might be Caribou…This time I said nothing, went and got the binoculars and took a good long hard look before shouting POLAR BEAR!!! We took the boat right up along shore, thanks to the 60m depth 4m from shore, and followed this massive polar bear along as he tried to scamper away from us along the beach. He even ended up swimming a little but gave up quickly because of the current. After lots of excited photo taking we continued on towards these beautiful orange cliffs with bright green grass patches which were equally photogenic. As we were taking pictures of the cliffs we happened on ANOTHER bear hanging out at the bottom! Boom 2 polar bears in 20 minutes. Great success. We are now anchored up in a cove on one of the "Tasmania Islands" 50 miles south of Bellot Strait. It's blowing 25-30 kts right now out of the south which is good because there is a massive plug of ice locked up all around King William Island that is blocking our progress. Hopefully the wind will break up the ice and allow us to pass but until then we are stuck waiting... To see the ice charts that we get, google "Canadian ice charts" and click the first link. Then click on the map for the area where we are, bottom left part of the Northwest Passage, and then you can download a bunch of .pdf or .gif files which will show you the daily ice flows for the area.

New Photos

If you scroll through this album you will come to some recent photos. http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.4428019979153.2186037.1248679119&type=3&l=c3b353c676

Two posts in two days! Like I said we're in Resolute until tomorrow so we have the luxury of relaxing and getting a couple consecutive days of internet access. Yesterday was an exciting day all around. We all went and had lunch on board Billy Budd which for the record is a 112 ft. Royal Huisman. The boat is BEAUTIFUL. IT looks like a 5 star hotel inside. We had a delicious lunch and then coordinated with them for how we were going to go about getting diesel...this is where it gets exciting. We worked out to get a diesel truck down to the beach with a long hose. Billy Budd went first and borrowed our spare anchor. They went in bow first, dropped our anchor off their stern then got a line to a tie point on land and pulled themselves in closer and got a spring line to an adjacent point of land. While they were in fueling up the wind picked up to around 15kts blowing directly onto the beach where we were trying to get to and it started to snow. Once they were done they took their bowline off the land, their dinghy took the anchor line and our dinghy took the spring line. We then came in off to one side, dropped our anchor and let the wind swing us around so we were stern towards the beach at which point we grabbed the anchor they had dropped so we had a Y off the bow of our boat and then got the spring line and brought our own line from our stern in to pull us towards shore. It was a hell of an operation and took us about 3 hours, but was still so much easier than figuring out how to get over 1000L of diesel from the gas station down to the beach and out to the boat. Today is a big prep day all around, we are getting all of our laundry done while I write this courtesy of the hotel in Resolute, then we are doing as big a grocery shopping as we can and then we have to get the boat all ready for the German invasion. We have to clean and organize and rearrange sleeping spaces. This includes moving the yankee back out of Rob and my cabin so that we can utilize the third bunk in the bow berth which should be fun. Once we're all set we have tomorrow to hopefully relax a little bit and prepare ourselves for the coming stretch which will hopefully take us all the way to Tuktoyaktuk, or if we can't make it there by the time Hans has to go then we'll drop them off in Cambridge Bay. One final note, I would like to give a shout out to my cousin Ellie who used to have a hot chocolate everyday. I have to say that I have now come close to this same behavior and it's amazing. Hot chocolate is delicious, and for me the hot part is also a big factor! As a boat we consume an immense amount of hot water in the form of coffee, tea, hot chocolate and cup of soup. Again all for the warmth factor.

Lancaster Sound

We made it safely to Resolute! As Alex put it, this is a huge accomplishment and what we’ve been trying to plan for since the boat left Maine - coordinating with Hans to pick him up in the North Arctic and then make it to wherever we are picking him 2 days before he gets there. Mission accomplished. We had a good trip over from Greenland even if it was mostly motoring. We went directly for Beechey Island which is where the Franklin Expedition wintered over and where the only 3 graves from their whole lost expedition are located. We anchored there for a few days and met some French people who were camping on the beach for 16 days. One guy was writing a book about a guy, Bellot, who was part of 2 search and rescue missions looking for the Franklin Expedition and drowned during his second trip when he fell through the ice. Another guy was doing some filming for a small documentary. Check out their blog at www.latitude.canalblog.com. Just a warning, I think it’s all in French. While we were at Beechey, Xurxo, Franco and Laura saw a polar bear! I’m very jealous. They were cruising around in the dinghy and saw one on the beach on the far side of the bay. The French people said they had seen 6 in total in the 10 days since being there including a mother and cub. Rob and I went exploring around the Island and climbed to the top and visited Franklin’s Cairn, which was nothing more than a massive pile of rocks with a big pole in the middle but it was the only thing to see other than the graves. Once you go ashore it becomes very apparent that the Arctic really is a desert. There is nothing up here, just rocks and rocks and ice. Beechey Island literally looked like Mars, as you will see in some of the pictures. The landscape was a mess of cracked shale and granite all chewed up by ice. We left Beechey yesterday, made the final 50 miles to Resolute, and pulled in the middle of a snow storm, still very strange in August. While the landscape looks like a desert we have had quite a bit of precipitation up here and not a whole lot of sun which has been a bit dismal. Hopefully Hans ordered some good weather for his 10 days so we get to enjoy it too. We are now anchored alongside the 100 something foot yacht, Billy Budd, whom we are having lunch with today. Resolute is a very bland very small town with nothing to do and a very open very bad anchorage. Regardless we are here until 6 o’clock on the 15th when Hans and company arrive and then we head off down Peel Sound.

TOP OF THE WORLD!

We are currently at 74 deg. 37.33N 75 deg 34.05W doing 8 kts under sail and motor and are nearly at the Northern most point of our trip! Resolute is 74 deg 41N...We are roughly 100 miles from Dundas Harbor and almost into Lancaster Sound. We encountered our first sea ice today which was crazy...all of a sudden you are in it and it's just everywhere all around you, little and not so little chunks of ice. We had to back track a little and make some more ground to the north to get around the little finger that was extending out into Baffin Bay. Our ice charts are very good and showed the ice just a little south of where we found it. We realized that it's very important to remember which way you are trying to go and to know which way is the shortest path out of the ice because once it's all around you its easy to get caught up in just trying to go for the immediate path of least resistance which can just dig you deeper into the ice area. We were able to go slow and make it through with someone on the bow or on the steps of the mast giving direction to the helmsman to avoid the larger chunks. Luckily our Inmarsat communication still seems to be working so we are hopeful that it will continue for the rest of the time we are at 74 degrees and after that its all downhill.

Latitude 72

Right now we are on our way out of Upernavik, our last stop in Greenland. Greenland has been a funny place with odd people. A mix of Inuit and Danish…and all their houses are painted very bright colors. It's really hard to remember that it's summer up here when we are all so cold, but then we see little kids riding around on bikes and guys heading out on their little motor boats to go fishing, hunting or sealing. I can only imagine what winter is like up here…cold. Today we actually had a good taste of summer though; it was sunny and warm (60s) for a while. Rob and I went swimming and hung out on deck and had pizza and a beer with icebergs in the background. Then on our way out we had a brief shower followed by the brightest most amazing rainbow I have ever seen. Anyway we are about to begin our trip across Baffin Bay to Dundas Harbor and into Lancaster Sound to Resolute. We are so far north at this point that we can barely pick up the Inmarsat satellite that we use for email. Last time we connected the satellite was at 4 degrees above the horizon…the earth is literally getting in the way. We have a back up Iridium satphone that will work up here for emergencies but email is going to be limited to none until we get to Resolute sometime around the 14th and then start heading back south! Hopefully we have good wind, fair weather and limited ice for our crossing and a clear shot into Lancaster Sound!

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.4428019979153.2186037.1248679119&type=3&l=c3b353c676

Ice Ice Baby

Hellloooo, we are working our way up the Greenland coast and right now we are near Disko Island. Last night we anchored in the lee of Unarrat Island. For those of you who haven't looked a map of Greenland the names of all the islands are ridiculous and most of them are impossible to say. Some such as this one also have funny translations into Spanish…we did not find the one rat on the island unfortunately. Rob, Franco and I did go ashore around midnight and climbed up to the rocky peak and had a great view of a massive iceberg on the other side of the island. There was an overcast sky and it honestly could have been any time of day. My internal clock is so screwed up it's not even funny. The islands and the coastline are basically just rock with a thick spongy moss and occasional grass that finds a way to hold on. We discovered that Unarrat had a little freshwater pond in the middle of the rocky hills and it trickled down to the ocean through a heavy bog of moss which was literally like walking on pillows. Oddly enough there is also cotton growing on the islands. Just small little patches, but cotton nonetheless. We are also near the biggest iceberg factory in the world. The Jakobshavns Isfjord Glacier has 4-5 miles of abutting coastline and kicks off icebergs like it's nobody's business and we've been seein em. We are cruising through fields of huge icebergs and have gotten some amazing pictures. Right now we are on our way over to the glacier to hopefully get a look, but the visibility is really poor and we're not sure how close we are going to be able to get because of the aforementioned icebergs. It's been smooth sailing since we left Nuuk, well mainly smooth motoring because there's barely been any wind. Regardless the calm is nice and makes it a little big warmer. ALSOOOOO we crossed 66033' a day or so ago so we are officially in the Arctic!