Nuuk Nuuk, Who’s there?

Sorry it’s been a few days since a post. We got caught up with some heavy sailing crossing the Labrador Sea and we now have to start being more conservative with our email usage because as we move farther North we are going to have to start downloading daily ice charts. We had a great sail coming across to Greenland other than the fact that we didn’t see the sun for 5 days, since we left Port Saunders… It was all grey sky, rain and fog. So much fog. We had good wind though, consistently 15-25kts either from the beam or a little bit from behind to make for fast sailing typically around 7-10kts. One unfortunate issue that we had to deal with while we were in Port Saunders that I failed to bring up in previous posts was a fraying forestay. It disabled our roller fuller and therefore the use of the yankee, which is the foremost sail and accounts for 2-3kts of boatspeed. While in Port Saunders we bought a replacement cable and jury rigged an entirely new forestay to back up the fraying one. We then rigged up our old stay sail to act as yankee of sorts by flying the tack of the sail, which is the part you normally attach to the boat, about 8 feet off the deck using a thick piece of spectra. This new jury rigged sail has been dubbed “The Cutré” which is a mix between a Spanish word for messy or ill kept (so I’m told) and cutter which is the style of boat which flies a rig similar to this. Surprisingly our Cutré works amazingly well and really pulls the boat and keeps that 2-3kts from the Yankee available for us. The most noticeable fact about the sail from Newfoundland to Greenland is that it has gotten REALLY COLD. The temperature during my watch last night was 4 degrees Celsius. Slowly but surely everyone has started pulling out their winter clothes and there have been a lot of jealous remarks all around when someone pulls out something especially warm like Alex and my rabbit fur hats. Alex has named his Ignacious. The other noticeable changes are the icebergs… they are freaking HUGE. Luckily for us the fog lifted for as we approached the Greenland coast yesterday and today so we had no problem seeing them. The final notable point is the utter lack of darkness. There is no more night. The sun sets around 11pm and you have a twilight from 11-2 and then you are into predawn light and the sun is up no later than 3:30am. It really throws your internal clock when you’re on the 2-5am watch and it looks like it’s 8 in the morning. I’m typing this as we sit at anchor in the harbor of Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. We are working right now on getting refueled with diesel, doing a big grocery shopping and hopefully finding hot showers and somewhere to do some laundry. While we do have a miniscule washing machine and dryer on the boat, we do our best to do big loads whenever we come ashore. Also, our grocery shopping list just got a lot longer when we heard word from Hans that instead of maybe bringing 1 friend with him when he joined us in Resolute, he may be bringing 4…it’s going to get real cozy on Nordwind up in the Arctic with possibly 11 people on board. With any luck we’ll be headed out of Nuuk tomorrow all loaded up and we will work our way up the Greenland coast checking out all the fiords and glaciers we can as we wait for the right time to cross Baffin Bay to Pond Inlet! We are at latitude 63 right now I believe and the Arctic Circle starts at 67…HERE WE COME!

Driving

Iceberg

Lunch

My bunk