Tokimata's Travels

Vessel Name: Tokimata
Vessel Make/Model: Ganley S130 steel cutter
Hailing Port: Coromandel, New Zealand
Crew: Peter, Rachel, Danny and Tom Garden
06 September 2023 | Bahia Nonda
07 August 2023
30 June 2023
07 June 2023
03 October 2022 | Santa Marta, Colombia
23 September 2022
18 September 2022 | Curaçao
11 September 2022
30 August 2022 | Grenada
13 August 2022 | St Lucia
21 December 2019
26 November 2019
19 November 2019
10 November 2019
24 October 2019
18 September 2019
Recent Blog Posts
06 September 2023 | Bahia Nonda

Panama Pacific Coast

It’s now well over a month since we left Panama City. La Brisas the free anchorage on the long causeway joining three islands, was free but not the greatest pace to stay, with poor holding and many disintegrating boats, but this amazing backdrop of skyscrapers behind. These free places where yachts [...]

07 August 2023

Panama City

We fuelled up on 20th July 2023 and filled with water, ready for the passage through the Panama Canal. We were to leave around 2 pm next day, staying overnight in Gatun lake with our local line-handlers, and should be through by 3 pm on the following day.

21 July 2023

Rio Chagres and Portabelo on the Caribbean coast of Panama.

We left the San Blas islands on July 10 2023, after a last visit to Ivin, the wonderful chef at Hollandais Cays. He gave a few more image files for his recipe book and we bought his terrific coconut cake one last time. At 11.30 we upped anchor and were off on our way back east, the transit through the [...]

13 July 2023

The islands of San Blas

On Friday 23rd June at last we headed across the busy canal entrance from Shelter Bay marina and into the Caribbean sea. We were sailing to the San Blas islands, Kuna Yala to the inhabitants, hundreds of small islands and coastal villages that are still administered by the indigenous owners of the land. [...]

30 June 2023

The jungles of Panama

Grinding rust on the hull of Tokimata eventually gave way to grinding rust on the decks, but this was made much easier by hiring energetic boatyard workers. Eventually this progressed to painting, using two part polyurethane over the various anti-rust treatments and primers they had applied. However [...]

07 June 2023

Two weeks in Panama

We arrived in Panama City Tuesday 23rd May from Manchester, with our usual heavy luggage: this time a Starlink system was the bulk of it along with other boat essentials. After travel via Amsterdam we arrived at last to see our taxi-driver holding a “Mr Peter” sign and were off for the hour and a [...]

Nuuk to Narsarsuarq

10 June 2013 | Narsarsuaq, Greenland
Pete, Rachel and Phil
We left Nuuk in snow flurries and deep cold. On Monday 3rd June Pete got the latest weather using wifi at the Seaman's home in Nuuk then we headed to the fuel dock and left at 1.00 pm in 20 knots, slight seas and snow. We took the inside route to Faeringhavn, one of many abandoned settlements here, left by people encouraged by the government to consolidate in towns. Although some houses are used as "holiday homes" there was no-ne there - just a 40ft fishing boat who's Greenlandic skipper motored over to say hello and ask us what the weather was like to the north as he had been waiting 3 days to get back to Nuuk.

Tuesday evening found us 90 miles south of Nuuk, anchored off Ravns Storo (Ravens Island in Danish). En route here a Danish naval vessel came racing out of a fjord and zoomed around us: Pete hurriedly put up the NZ flag and updated the log book... They interrogated us but were ever so polite: "If you don't mind me asking how many people do have on board?" They were very interested in our trip all the way from NZ perhaps not having encountered many sailing boats before. They were also keen that we did the 4 hourly reporting but Pete pointed out how difficult this is for small boats - we've heard of many here who have had attempted "rescues" when their messages do not get through to the Greenland MRCC. So they agreed that when we got past Cape Farewell it would be good to at least do the reporting there.

Heading south was been a mix of sailing and motor sailing with some great runs through low lying islands and increasingly huge icebergs. Compared to the North American arctic we saw very little wildlife, the odd frightened seal and seabirds but little animal life in the water, though heaps of healthy seaweed on the anchor each time we leave... the lack of animals no doubt has something to do with the large number of men in boats with guns...

Wednesday 5th June we were anchored near Pamiaat and Thursday we called into the small busy harbour. Our plans to tie up to a fishing boat changed drastically when a huge dog thundered out of it leaping and barking while three locals, semi-interested, indicated with snapping motions of their hands that he would bite. They gestured to a small and filthy dock nearby so with some difficulty we manoeuvered in growing winds over a rubbish pit of dead bikes and prams and old ladders underwater to a dock that could only just fit us (we protruded a metre each end). We spent ages scrambling up steep broken ladders in rain and wind to find appropriate places to tie up - there's a big tidal range so the boat must be allowed to move 3 or 4 metres up and down... The town itself had pretty houses and church around the harbour (which was clogged with rubbish), giving way to hideous old concrete apartment blocks in the hinterland, evidence too no doubt of the abandoned settlements. These had a dirty down at heel look. The people inscrutable, not as friendly as one sometimes finds.. and even some little good natured punks slouching by with dyed hair and tattoos...

Friday June 7th we headed south past Arsuk, huge towering peaks above and the small town of high pitched coloured houses huddled on a plain below. Here it was great to meet a young minke whale slowly breathing by. The landscape is spectacular down here with patches of densely thick fog. As we rounded a headland (and the autopilot suddenly lost its brain: "No comp" on screen and compass points flashing by) the fog cleared and beside us we could see these hugely high cliffs, their shapes exaggerated by great bands of snow running in gashes to the sea, only 100 m or so away from us with no bottom on the depth sounder so more than 150 m below our keel. Huge rocky hills often topped with a cairn, and amazing high icebergs, some the most heavenly blue, make this a wonderful landscape.

By Saturday 8th we were sailing up a winding fjord on the Island of Tuttutooq, not far from the town of Narsaq, and anchored where the pilot book said an ancient Norse farm had been. The Norsemen had their "eastern settlement" in this area between about 950 and 1450 AD before it mysteriously died out. There were two modern little huts/houses there and some extensive livestock yards - from the boat we couldn't tell if they were for reindeer or sheep - both of which are farmed in these parts in the little green valleys. In the morning a fast speedboat came into the bay and unloaded two blokes and a load of gear. They walked around a bit and then started setting up camp a few hundred meters above the beach.

Pete went ashore in the kayak to investigate and found dead reindeer in the yards: maybe 50 skulls with antlers, lower legs and feet and quite a few skins all around the place. It seems they take the meat away leaving quite a mess. NZ made post bangers and wire spinning jennies lying around showed this is a professional operation, with kms of high netting fence snaking across the the hills where they must drive the reindeer off the hills and into the yards and a race leading down to the beach where they could load them into a boat. It is early in summer here but already green shoots are poking through.

Next the men who had now setup their tents were investigated, clearly scientists with their aluminium cases of important looking stuff. These men turned out to be very friendly - Alex and Tom - one German and one Swiss but both working for the Danish Geological Survey. They were doing field work for about 5 days mapping some alkaline dykes - they said this whole valley was a huge dyke. The surrounding granite is abut 1.8 billion years old and the basalt 1.2 billion. They are doing several sites in the area then going north to where the cryolite mine was (now worked out) which we passed a few days ago - apparently near the oldest rock on the planet (can't remember if they were 2.8 or 3.8 billion years old). How geologists do get about!

Sunday we sailed on up the fjord past Narsaaq and saw several farms - smooth fields with huge piles of boulders all around where they had dug them out of the ground so they could plow. At one large farm tractors were ploughing and at another big portable irrigators spraying water or slurry over the fields. There are huge barns where they keep their sheep and cows for 9 months of the year, and behind a small cemetry of white crosses. Each farm has about 10 or 20 acres of irrigated fields and much more rough brown rough grazing. In the evening we paused in a fjord full of icebergs, then tied alongside a dock opposite where Eric the Red had his farm. We moored inside big concrete dock just outside the ice boom that protects the small boats inside but we can't get over it as it is too shallow for us - we just watched one car sized berg get blown in past us and neatly glide through the gap in the boom reserved for small boats - just like it was radar guided. There is a lot of ice here from the glacier nearby and we may need the ice poles in the night!

Here is the heart of the Norse farmland a beautiful place with slopes of verdant green in front of tall snowy mountains, and huge icebergs in the bay. The lower slopes already ploughed and sown and even a few animals already let out to graze, spry leggy sheep with little horns and lambs already at foot, some hairy small horses and a few cattle too. In Eric the Red's time a hundred or so souls traveled here from Iceland, the Inuit had not come this far south at that time. At the Norsemen's peak a few hundred years later there were 5000 or so on more than 200 farms here and in the fjords of Nuuk. But by 1450 they were all gone. An interesting historian at a local museum argues that they probably simply moved back to Europe to take up opportunities presented by the huge mortality of the plague in the late 1300's, leaving just the best farms occupied and too small a community to survive once the Inuit were here competing for resources.

Also here is a huge airfield constructed by the Americans during WWII - known as "Bluie West 1" - at one time more than 5000 servicemen served here, the USA building this crucial airfield before they joined the war so that aircraft could be sent from Canada and USA to Europe - the USA declared an interest in Greenland as part of the American continent after Germany had invaded Denmark, ensuring this staging post came under their control. Huge ships took enough people and resources to build a runway hospital and barracks for thousands: perhaps the most interesting photo in the museum was of a man in a kayak "the first local to see the ships" - his face upturned to the great height of the deck above from a tiny frail but elegant kayak his jaw open and eyes wide in utter amazement a man completely gobsmacked by what he saw!! The scale of the operation was boggling to our modern eyes - to a local in that remote place it must have been unbelievable. At it peak in 1943 more than 300 planes landed or took off in a day from the airfield en-route from New Foundland to Iceland and then Scotland. Starting next week there are two tourist jets a week coming into Narsarsuaq from Copenhagen. Flights onwards to the local towns from here all being by helicopter, or else travel is by small speedboat. There are a few sleepy hostels and cafes that as in the Pacific are closed and half asleep but spring to life when these few flights start

In spite of the balmy weather here it's been storms and winter ice blowing on shore in the south. We consulted the "Ice Central" office at the airport who had latest satellite pictures showing the fjords we hoped to exit from (on the south east coast just north of Cape Farewell) are blocked by ice as is the eastern coast where we had hoped to wait for a weather window to Iceland. They reckoned it might be blocked for another 2 weeks. This office conducts the ice surveillance flights from here and publishes the ice charts for Greenland. Denmark took over the airfield form the US in 1958 as a base for the ice patrol after a ship on its maiden voyage from Denmark to Greenland was lost off Cape Farewell in ice with all 95 on board lost without trace. The ice analysts explained that the ice free section of the east coast we had been watching for the last 10 days was unusual and was caused by a gap in the pack ice working it way down the east coast from further north, rather than a melting of the pack itself. So it is now back to normal with heavy polar pack ice right down the east coast of Greenland and around the bottom of Cape Farewell.

As we arrived back from our walk into the small village at the airport a Danish Navy frigate was tying up on the outside of the big dock. We must have now seen the entire Danish Navy - two large patrol boats and a frigate. They were operating their helicopter from the deck just across the dock from us and Tokimata got sprayed with all the small sand and pebbles on the dirty dock. Between take-offs and landings we slipped out right under their stern with crewman anxiously peerong over as our mast towered above the landing pad as we slipped through just between some large icebergs and the rear end of the frigate.

We're heading across the fjord now (10th June) to Brattahlid (Qassiarsuk) where "Eric the Red", the first European discoverer of Greenland had his farm in the 980's. These will be our first Norse ruins.
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