Arctic Lessons Number 3.

Destiny our Van de Stadt Samoa 48, my wife Janice and I have now spent 4 winters in the arctic circle (well Akureyi, in Iceland technically is 40 nm South). But this had been our first Greenland one and the lessons have been coming thick and fast.

Lesson 1.
Just because the locals can does not mean you can. I discovered that riding a snowmobile looks easy when you watch someone who has been riding one before they can walk. Practice proved otherwise, out one morning with one of our ski guides riding pillion with less than 5 hours experience we were traversing a snow slope of perhaps 15 degrees one that would not get even a novice skier worried, I managed to roll the machine 15m down the slope the guide jumping off correctly uphill and me rolling and tumbling just ahead of the 300kg berserk monster. I glanced up the slope at one point and decided I would keep up the tumble until I had more space to effect a sliding stop. Years of self-arrest practice with and without an ice axe whilst mountaineering paid off as I at least was able to stay aware of the situation. The machine stopped spewing fumes, petrol and steam and I stopped a few meters below. An evaluation of the mess once we both managed to right the machine was; We had gone out before breakfast, before the rest of the hut were awake, we were 10km or more from the hut which itself was 50km from the next humans. We had no snowshoes or skies and we needed that machine to start, which thankfully after a few minutes it did and after some worrying moments turning it around we extricated ourselves from the easily developing disaster. Penalty: Stiff neck and shoulder for a few days, a broken pair of sunglasses and £1,000 bill to repair the machine. Lesson: Walk before you can ride a snow mobile

Lession 2.
Fishing near the ice edge. The local logistics operator Bo Lings had told us that a few days before he had seen Arctic Char swimming around the outlet of the Hydropower plant near the ski hut we were running. So having driven the snowmobile over to the location I walked down near the ice edge to cast my fishing rod. The tide was out and the ice was attached to the shore and was about 1m thick. After a few minutes I moved on and stepped down a few more paces…. I began a slow but unstoppable slide that dumped me over the edge of the ice and deposited me feet first in the freezing water. Luckily it was only a couple of feet deep and I stayed upright. From this level I could see the reason, the ice was as smooth as a polished piece of glass from the sea lapping over it at high water and then the previous night a very thin layer of snow obscured it.

The next task was to get out of the water and climb up the bank. Normally I could have just walked but it was so smooth even kneeling did not work. I remembered that in my pocket I had a sheath knife that was supposed to be for gutting all those Char. Using this to stab the ice and haul myself up soon had me out of trouble. Penalty: Wet feet, cold hands further humiliation when I told the Greenlanders later that week. Lesson: Next time be more careful, if the tide had been in or the water deeper it could have been a much worse outcome. The Scandinavians who ice fish a lot often use an Ice pick that is attached by Velcro to their jacket shoulders so that they can drag themselves off thin ice.

Lession 3.
Anchoring in bays with lots of ice.
We had a forecast of three days of S winds which in Sisimiut is the worst direction, we have dragged previously in the only available anchorage a couple of times in only 30kts of wind, the bottom holding is thin sand with kelp and is steeply shelved. So we made a decision to move 8nm away to a sheltered bay with mud and a more even bottom and with shelter from the S wind.
This achieved we sat out the first 2 days with gusts up the 49 knots. On the 3rd day we had a wind shift and while still sheltered the wind now blew into the bay and the action of the wind and waves broke up the last of the ice still fast ashore but it remained out of our way. Then the wind shifted again and as usual with Sods law, we were just about to retire for the night tooth brushes in hand when I noticed that a huge sheet of ice, 200m wide by 50m deep and 70cm thick was just a few meters away and approaching fast. It is fair to say that the teeth were never finished, we dashed up on deck engine running to assess the situation. It was not great: The ice was clearly of enough mass that it would not be broken by our bow and it would easily overpower our engine if we tried to push it against the 25 knot wind and the rocky shore was just 10 boat lengths behind us, down wind.
We dumped the anchor as fast as possible until we had just the warp that attaches the bitter end of the chain to the inside of the chain box (To a strong point) out on deck, then after fixing a large buoy to the chain we cut the warp. Immediately the warp was cut the tremendous pressure of the ice that by now had been pressing up against the bow and had only been checked by the anchor itself started to move us toward the shore, but now free of the chain we quickly manoeuvred clear of the ice came around it upwind and set our second bow anchor (thank goodness for a twin anchor arrangement on Destiny) in almost exactly the same place as our other anchor had been but in the now ice clear bay.
As we extricated ourselves I noticed the buoy marking the end of the chain first getting dragged under the ice and then a minute later floating free…within a couple of minutes the whole sheet of ice ran aground and started to break up, luckily not with us included. Penalty: Dirty teeth, a late night and some cut warp. Lesson: Watch out for ice that appears to be relatively benign- Bits had been breaking of for days but a couple of square meters is not an issue, but when the whole sheet comes out…Winds in the mountainous fjords are of completely different directions to the main air mass. Make sure that you have your chain bitter end accessible on deck, and that you can easily dump it. Make sure that you have a second way to anchor. If possible use a tripping line to mark your anchor (that way we would have had two buoys to help retrieval). As it was we lost our marker buoy and the result was we then had to spend the next day in the dinghy trawling with the dinghy anchor trying to snag the chain. After 3 hours we found it, helped by the fact we found the original buoy up on the ice by the shore which gave us a reference line to trawl over between that and the original anchor position. Getting the anchor chain aboard was a whole new lesson…. That needs a more technical post! The anchor and chain had been dragged 70m from its original location by the weight of ice before the buoy line snapped. The chain we had snagged was of course snagged in the middle- Sods law again. 20m of chain- 70kg plus 50kg of anchor in one direction and 40m – 140kg and 60m of warp in the other direction, all well and truly deep in the mud- The RYA Day Skipper book showing you lifting the anchor back aboard in your tender…..Yeah RIGHT!! Guess they have never tried it with ½” chain.