Mon Aug 29 10:02:00 EDT 2011, Dolphin and Union Strait, Arctic
As we sailed slowly in light winds, this seal came over to inspect Issuma's hull.
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Comments [1]
Sat Aug 27 10:01:00 EDT 2011, Dolphin and Union Strait
I have been very surprised by the lack of ice this year (not that I'm complaining--the idea of getting stuck in the ice has absolutely no appeal). We have seen hardly any ice since Lancaster Sound. The long range forecasts for this year indicated a slightly later breakup than last year, not nearly so much ice free water. I suppose it is only a difference of a few degrees in average temperature for a few weeks that results in suddenly there being so little ice, and that small a temperature difference being difficult to forecast.
The lack of ice makes for pleasant sailing (at times).
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I looked too cursorily at the site - saw the old schooner post and figured you were staying in Cambridge Bay! But now I see Tim's posts - and your awesome progress. Well done!
Sat Aug 27 10:01:00 EDT 2011, Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, Canada
This was once a schooner, but the main mast was removed when the engine was put in. It was towed to Cambridge Bay from Tuktoyaktuk. One of the builders of the church bought the vessel, but was stationed elsewhere when it arrived, and it was never used.
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+69° 5' 2.00", -133° 1' 5.00"
I'm guessing it's +69° 52' , -133° 15', not far from where you had it. Hope the Sat phone gets fixed so more updates can come through. Amazing journey - looks like only a few more days to Alaska!
Best Regards,
312027UTC/AL
The Barrow Communications Centre (Chukchi Sea), Inupiat Communicator kindly emailed me today (Sept 5) advising that he was unable to anchor in Barrow AK, and is now heading to Dutch Harbor which seems to be in the middle of the pacific in the Aleutians. Looks to me almost as close to Japan as Vancouver! He estimated his arrival there to be roughly two weeks.
I don't have Lat/Long, but both Barrow AK and Dutch Harbor AK can be located with Google Maps.
Thanks again to the Barrow Communications Centre for the update!
I hate to think what the weather is going to be like along the Aleutians in September.
Best wishes,
Steve & Sini
BTW, thanks, Timothy.
chukchi seas. The southwest winds will occur over a long fetch length which will cause sea levels to rise a foot above normal
along the Arctic coast of Alaska during the day Friday."
Fingers crossed for a safe transit.
A
Tonight...Cloudy. Scattered rain showers. Patchy fog. Lows 40 to 45. Southwest winds 15 to 30 mph.
Sunday...Cloudy. Scattered rain showers in the morning. Patchy fog. Highs around 50. South winds 15 to 30 mph.
So it looks not too bad. They had a high surf advisory earlier today.
Rooting for you, Richard!
Fri Aug 26 10:01:00 EDT 2011, Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, Canada
Ruins of the first Catholic Church in Cambridge Bay, built with rocks, seal oil and clay.
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Almost through the NWP too, quite the feat.
Thu Aug 25 10:01:00 EDT 2011, Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, Canada
I was surprised by the number of cruise ships visiting Cambridge Bay. There were three on one day when we were there (I'm not sure whether the one on the right is a cruise ship or a yacht, but there was another big cruise ship anchored there earlier in the day). There aren't always that many cruise ships, but the hamlet does a very good job of promoting tourism. They have a great visitors center/museum, and everyone is pleasant.
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did you see narwhals, belugas, whales?
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Wed Aug 24 10:01:00 EDT 2011, Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, Canada
Jordan and Lin standing on a sledge, surrounded by drying muskox hides. We asked around, but didn't really ever find out what the hides are used for after they are dried.
Cambridge Bay is a large hamlet in Arctic Canada, population about 1800. It was named after the Duke of Cambridge by Warren Dease and Thomas Simpson of the Hudson's bay Company in 1839. The area had been an important Inuit camp-site for many years because it had plentiful caribou, seal, fish and birds. The permanent settlement was established in 1955 when a DEW (Distant Early Warning--a line of radar stations setup in northern Canada during the Cold War) line station was put there. It is now an Arctic adminstration, transportation, tourism and supply center.
We cleared into Canada in Cambridge Bay with the assistance of the RCMP (police), who were extremely helpful and hospitable. In fact, everyone in Cambridge Bay was pleasant and helpful.
We arrived too late in the year to buy any musxkox or caribou meat (next harvest starts soon) at the store, but did try the muskox burgers in the hotel, which were very good.
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Richard, how far west do you intend to go? All the way to the gulf of Alaska? Down the West Coast? It's exciting watching your progress (from an armchair) :D!
I'm in Oban, SCotland laying Taonui up for the winterr. I'll be back in Victoria in a week. Looking forward to welcoming you to Victoria.
Fair winds
Tony
I think Google Earth tends to be several weeks or months behind, so yes, they are not a good way to look at ice concentrations. When i'm on the internet, I look at Environment Canada's website to see their ice charts.
The areas of the NW Passage that I have so far been through have been shockingly free of ice. I paid a lot of attention to the seasonal and 30-day ice forecasts and they did not indicate this little ice.
Tony, thanks, I understand you had a quick and windy trip from Labrador to Scotland. Glad to hear it went well and look forward to meeting up with you later.
Mon Aug 22 10:01:00 EDT 2011, Nunavut
George asked a while back about how we were deciding where to stop. At the time, I was pushing hard to get up the Greenland coast so that if ice forecasts for Canada were good, we would have the opportunity to head towards northern Canada from northern Greenland (there is a warm ocean current going up the west side of Greenland, and a cold current going down the NE side of Canada, so if you want to get to the north of Canada by sailboat, it is best to go there via the west coast of Greenland). So my priorities were to make as few stops as possible in the interests of keeping moving during the short time we had. It was extremely tempting to go into Disko Bay, which is full of icebergs, just to see the spectacle, but we sailed by without stopping because we didn't have time.
When deciding where to stop, we look at things like the expected weather, to see if there will be shelter from it, the possible weather, to see under what conditions we'd need to leave, how complicated the navigation is, can we sail in or do we have to motor, is there likely space to anchor or tie up, if there is a settlement there, what facilities (ie water, fuel, groceries) are there, and what interesting things are there. How complicated the navigation is means things like how many shallow areas/rocks need to be avoided and how difficult are they to identify and avoid and how well are the charts likely to agree with the GPS positions--always something to consider in places not frequently travelled.
To give an example of choosing a stop, I really wanted to visit Gjoa Haven. This settlement is named after Roald Amundsen's Gjoa (the first vessel to go thru the Northwest Passage), which spent two winters in what one of the crew called "the finest little harbor in the world", so there is a lot of historical interest in going there. There is a community in Gjoa Haven to visit, and we could clear customs, buy fuel (via jerrycans) and food, and have a safe place to leave the boat while we were ashore. Gjoa Haven is also along the best-travelled route through the Northwest Passage, as the shallow waters stop the icebergs, so the waters that need to be sailed to get to Gjoa Haven tend to be free of ice earlier.
As we sailed towards Gjoa Haven, a problem became apparant about 100 miles away. The wind was shifting, and it was now dead to windward that we would have to sail for about 50 miles to get through James Ross Strait. The picture shows a portion of the chart for that area. Depths are marked in fathoms (a fathom is six feet), and there are only depths marked in a small area--the rest--white space--has not been surveyed, and is full of unmarked shallow areas. So we were looking at beating dead to windward through a relatively narrow channel. While that alone is not a big problem, the furler for the (yankee) jib had failed, so sailing to windward was more difficult than usual.
So we reluctantly bypassed James Ross Strait and our planned stop at Gjoa Haven, and sailed via Victoria Strait instead.
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The yankee jib uses the old Sarma furler. The drum was modified to take carbon-steel DIN bearings and seals. They work ok for a while (couple of years), then fail and need to be replaced. I now have two spare drums, it was just a matter of getting somewhere out of the wind where I could disconnect the jibstay and remove the old drum. It was complicated by the fact that I'd used grease on the threads of that furler instead of lanolin (I couldn't find any lanolin in Argentina, where I last put it together), so it took some soaking with PB Blaster to get the bolts out. After replacing the drum, and waiting for light winds to put the sail back on, it is working well again.
Sun Aug 21 12:44:02 EDT 2011, Victoria Strait
We often sail in the fog. I guess this is really a rainbow obscured by fog.
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Knowing the compass would not work for much of the time, I wanted to inscribe a kind of pelorus on the doghouse top for taking bearings for fixes, but never got around to it. The other requirement for taking bearings for fixes is a three-arm protractor (or at least it makes plotting them much easier, though I suppose one could use a protractor and cut a sheet of paper at the right angle for a two-point fix), which I don't think anyone sells anymore and is another thing I didn't get around to making beforehand.
I have not been using a sunstone (as long as the GPSes work, nothing compares to them for accuracy :) ).
Sat Aug 20 10:01:00 EDT 2011, Franklin Strait
A few days ago, sailing down Franklin Strait, we overheard a call from Canadian Patrol Aircraft 102 to two vessels by name. From the name, I knew one vessel was a sailboat, its name was on the transom, which was vertical, and the letters weren't all that big, so I thought it would be difficult to read that name from an airplane. I also knew that sailboat had an AIS transmitter (this transmits vessel name, course, speed and position automatically, for collision avoidance), so figured the plane was decoding the AIS transmission--otherwise, they would have called the vessel by position, not by name.
About twenty minutes later, I heard a plane. There were enough clouds in the sky that I did not think a plane would see a boat, but within a few seconds, a low-flying plane that looked to be a military Hercules flew by about 100m away (too fast to get a good blog pic). Clearly they had picked us up on radar (we have no AIS transmitter, and the steel deck would make a good radar target). About 30 seconds later, Canadian Patrol Aircraft 102 called us on the VHF by name. I thought they had impressive cameras to be able to take pictures of the boat that were clear enough--at the speed they were going--to be able to read the name on the side of the hull. They said they were on a routine patrol, and wanted to know Vessel Name, Country, Home Port, # of people aboard, Last Port, Next Port and Owners Name. I gave them all the information and they continued on their way.
Today, in Victoria Strait (the blog is a bit behind), in somewhat foggy conditions, the same plane announced it was conduting a routine patrol and flew over us. They were farther away this time (a good idea in fog!), and took a few minutes before calling us by our position. We replied, same information as before, and they continued on their way.
We have heard nothing else on the VHF since leaving Greenland.
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Fri Aug 19 10:02:00 EDT 2011, Bellot Strait
Bellot Strait is an 18 mile long passage between Prince Regent Inlet and Peel Sound. It was named after Lieutenant Bellot of the French Navy who came across it in 1852. It has a difficult reputation due to its fast tidal currents and a rock that is awash (so hard to see) near the eastern end of it. While there was no ice when we passed, Bellot Strait has a reputation for quickly jamming with ice. The Sailing Directions note: "The tidal streams run with great strength through Bellot Strait...In the vicinity of Magpie Rock, the currents are highly variable; localised 7-8 knot westerly currents have been reported on the north side of the channel at the same time that equally strong easterly currents were flowing on the south side. Mariners should exercise extreme caution in this area."
There is a range (two markers on shore, if you keep the boat in line with the two markers, you know what course you are on, despite not knowing how the currents are pushing you around) which the Sailing Directions mention as in need of paint in 1977 (no updates since then--this is not a frequently-travelled route). The ranges were visible enough (we had good visibility), and we entered the strait, intending to pass Magpie Rock (the real danger) just before the current turned and started going in our direction (so we would pass slowly, with more control). The chart notes that the current turns there about two hours before High Water at nearby Fort Ross.
To figure out when the current would turn (ie, when was High Water at Fort Ross), we had three methods of getting tide information, the Canadian Tide & Current Tables for the Arctic, NOAA's Tide Tables for East Coast of North & South America, and wxtide32, the free tidal calculation software program. The three methods of determining the tide resulted in three answers, differing by as much as two hours :). We left in time to be early, so no matter which source of tidal information was correct, by slowing down as necessary, we could arrive on time. Of the three methods we used to figure the tides, the free software program came up with what seemed the closest result.
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Thanks all for the comments and greetings. I've not heard of the Mars on Earth Project (when we get to a town where we can get internet access, I'll look into it).
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