Our friends at Jeanneau USA have put together a short video about Norwegian sailor and environmental researcher Andreas B. Heide and his plans to lead a four-month-long expedition to Svalbard and the arctic waters beyond aboard his Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 37 Barba (barba.no).

Dubbed “Arctic Sense,” the mission will take researchers along the northern coast of Norway to Svalbard. From there, they’ll sail as far north as ice will allow before voyaging on to the remote island of Jan Mayen, and then to London via the Faroe and Shetland islands.

In the video, Heide talks about the mission and what researchers hope to find. He said that he believes the whales they will encounter send a message of hope that several species are rebounding after years of over hunting and despite threats to the marine environment. Aside from the high-latitude sailing, the images of Heide and his companions in the water, swimming alongside orcas and other whales, are spectacular. To watch Heide’s extensive interview with Cruising World editors last summer visit Cocktails with Cruising World featuring Andreas B. Heide.

The post Arctic Sailor Launches Summer Research Voyage appeared first on Cruising World.

The crew aboard sailing vessel Barba is preparing to set sail again to return to the far north in search of whales.

This summer’s expedition, dubbed Arctic Sense, will see Barba’s owner and captain, Andreas B. Heide, welcoming researchers aboard his Jeanneau 37, this time bound for Svalbard, Jan Mayen, the Faroe and Shetland Islands and London before returning to their homeport of Stavanger, Norway. The goal of the 3,000-mile research voyage—Barba and Heide’s fourth—is to explore the polar Atlantic ecosystem, including its whales and other sea life. They will depart June 1 on the four-month adventure.

Previous Barba voyages have been to Arctic waters as well, including two wintertime trips to far northern Norway when Heide and crew swam with and filmed orcas and other whales. Other voyages have included visits to Svalbard as well as Jan Mayan, and Norway’s wild northwest coast.

The goal, says Heide, will be to document and share valuable information about the fragility and beauty of marine life in the region. They also aim to improve knowledge surrounding urgent ocean health issues.

“The expedition will focus on keystone Arctic and sub-Arctic whale species. By unravelling the mysteries of their lives using scientific research and storytelling, the team will celebrate the importance of our planet’s largest animals in maintaining the health of the Arctic ecosystem,” Heide says in a release.

“In partnership with leading research institutions and led by the collaborative research group Whale Wise, the team will conduct innovative and world-first studies of Arctic whale populations while researching the region’s vulnerability to persistent organic pollutants, plastic pollution and climate change. In this way, the species being researched act as ocean sentinels, with shifts in whale populations reflecting broader marine-ecosystem changes.”

Heide adds, “The impacts of climate change are unfolding far more rapidly and intensely in the Arctic than anywhere else. Soaring temperatures, rapidly melting ice, acidification and rising sea levels, combined with pervasive levels of marine plastic pollution, are all threatening Arctic ecosystems. With the clock ticking, documenting and researching the threats faced by marine life in this highly inaccessible region is more important than ever to inform and inspire effective safeguards for this fragile environment.”

The expedition is being supported in part by TD Veen, a Norwegian venture fund; academic partners include the University of Iceland and Universitetet i Stavanger. Jeanneau and North Sails have also signed on as technical partners, along with several other sailing-gear suppliers.

“We are excited to support Andreas and his team for yet another expedition to the High North. His work with the Orcas and the marine environment in general is in complete alignment with our own values of protecting our natural resources for further generations to enjoy,” Jeanneau’s director of special projects Paul Fenn said.

To get a glimpse of what Heide and crew have been up to of late, he posted a stunning video clip on the newly revamped Barba website, showing Team Barba during the winter of 2019/20 in the water with whales while diving under active fishing vessels.

To watch a conversation Heide had with Cruising World editors last summer during the pandemic lockdown, click here.

The schedule for this summer’s expedition includes:

June 1: Departure Stavanger

June 7: 11 Andenes

June 13-18: Tromsø

June 28: July 21 Longyearbyen

Aug 13 – 17: Longyearbyen

September 5: Faroe Islands

September 14: Shetland Islands

September 17: Edinburgh

September 24: Arrival London (staying 1 week)

October 5: Arrival Stavanger

The post ‘Barba’ Sails in Search of Whales appeared first on Cruising World.

In Jules Verne’s science-fiction classic Journey to the Center of the Earth, the entrance to the underground world is in western Iceland, at the top of the ice-covered Snæfellsnes volcano. His explorers have many fantastic adventures underground, encountering giant beasts and taking a punishing sail through a raging subterranean sea.

So when our two chartered 50-foot Bavaria sloops rounded the tip of the mystical Snæfellsnes Peninsula this past June, in the shadow of the volcano, we were not surprised to see some fantastic (but real) beasts: A huge whale—probably a minke—breached off the stern, large pods of orcas and dolphins passed by, and countless beautiful North Atlantic seabirds soared around us.

And when the inevitable Arctic winds kicked in from the north a day later, it almost felt as though we too could be sailing in a storm at the center of Earth.

Here’s how Verne described it: “Low clouds and fog, heavy wind and seething waves, a sunless, engulfing dull grey haze.” In the novel, it got toasty down below, so his sailors were warm; but it was bitterly cold up on the surface in the real world, and we piled on all the warm and heavy-weather gear we could muster.

Our group of a dozen friends had come here to spend two weeks sailing the incredibly beautiful coast of Iceland, where everything is—or quickly can become—extreme: the winds and ocean rollers, tides and currents, temperature, and an unforgiving volcanic shore. At the time of our visit, while various outfits offered crewed charters, only one company, Iceland Yacht Charter, was willing to rent its handful of yachts as bareboats to private sailors without a professional captain and crew, although the charter captain had to be licensed.

If you want to sail in Iceland but don’t want to make an ocean passage to get there, bareboat chartering is the next best way to go. There’s just one cruising ground, but it’s big: the western coast. Sailors set off from the capital city of Reykjavik, and head north toward the remote Westfjords and the Arctic Circle. The southern coast has no natural harbors and is swept by dangerous currents. The entire northern coast is a lee shore to Arctic winds blasting down from the North Pole, and can be mined with icebergs that drift over from glaciers calving off the coast of Greenland, some 300 miles to the northwest.

Our crew gathered and held a long safety briefing before setting off, emphasizing Rule No. 1: Once we left the dock, nobody left the cockpit unless tethered to a jackline. Going overboard while underway would be a death sentence.

“Anyone sailing here should be ­prepared for the conditions—strong winds, big seas and tides, cold weather—and should be self-sufficient,” says Jay Kenlan, a Vermont lawyer and licensed captain of our boat, Esja. “The reward is the beauty and remoteness of the place.”

Adds Ben Gardner, a New Hampshire physician and our first mate: “The crew needs to be people who understand this is not a warm cruise around a sunny lake. You are going to be cold and wet.”

There is virtually no cruising or ­chartering infrastructure outside Reykjavik. The commercial-fishing industry dominates the coast, and every harbor is industrial. We tied up every night to vertical steel bulkheads protected by old tires, clambering up and down wall ladders to get on or off the boat—sometimes 20 feet, at low tide. With no recreational marinas, we used local public swimming pools to shower (there’s one in almost every town, and it’s a terrific way to meet locals). In two weeks, we saw only four other sailboats; cruisers are rare up here, which opened some wonderful conversations with local Icelanders who were surprised to see us.

One night, because the local harbormaster needed all the bulkhead space he had for fishing boats, we rafted up to a 100-foot steel fishing trawler. Getting ashore meant scaling its hull ladder and crawling over the heavy-duty dragging gear sprawled across the deck.

So why go? For experienced sailors, a big attraction is that it’s not just another sodden tour of Caribbean beach bars. Iceland suffers from bad overtourism in summer (especially around Reykjavik) and the nearby Golden Circle attractions, so exploring by sailboat is the perfect way to escape the crowds and traffic jams. If you want to see the incredible natural beauty of Iceland and meet locals in a way few visitors ever will, setting your own course in your own boat is a deeply rewarding experience. You earn your vistas.

A Volcanic Hotspot

Iceland floats atop a volcanic hotspot in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, between the American and Eurasian tectonic plates. Spreading apart a few millimeters each year, these shifting plates produce extremely active volcanic activity.

On the west coast, part of the defining geography created by these forces is the long and narrow Snæfellsnes Peninsula, which lies across Faxa Bay, or Faxaflói in Icelandic, roughly 90 miles northwest of Reykjavik. Farther north, across another big bay called Breiðafjörður, or widening fjord (and looking vaguely like a lobster pointing toward the North Pole), are the craggy and starkly beautiful Westfjords. Geologically, this is the oldest part of Iceland, and by far its most remote and interesting corner to explore, with sharp mountains, flat volcanic mesas, deep waters and a heavily indented coastline.

With a big cold front forecast to drop out of the Arctic within three days, our two boats pushed out of Reykjavik as hard and fast as we could to get as far north as we could. Day one was 100 miles, to the small fishing town of Ólafsvík, on the north shore of Snæfellsnes; luckily we had a rare clear day, revealing the dramatic volcanic glacier as we rounded the tip of the peninsula.

That was followed by an 80-mile push into the southern end of the Westfjords and another small fishing village, Patreksfjörður (Patrick’s Fjord). Day three was a final 80-mile slog through building weather to Ísafjörður (Ice Fjord), one of the northernmost towns in all of Iceland and the largest in the Westfjords.

That night the crews of our two boats celebrated our arrival with a warm and lively communal dinner. The chef aboard Katya cooked up fresh-caught salmon, while Esja provided baked potatoes and salad. The well-lubricated evening was capped off with rounds of Shackleton scotch, a modern blended malt re-created from the three cases of original century-­old whiskey discovered in 2007 frozen into the ice under Earnest Shackleton’s base camp in Antarctica.

A major fishing center in the ­region, Ísafjörður is home to the terrific Westfjord Heritage Museum, which depicts the harsh and bleak life of early fishermen there. It is attached to one of the best seafood restaurants in Europe: the Tar House, set in a beautiful, old post-and-beam fishing shed. With only two seatings a night served buffet-style on heavy picnic tables, the meal started with rich lobster soup, followed by several huge cast-iron frying pans filled with magnificently prepared fish, all just hours out of the water: cod, salmon, halibut, haddock, and others I did not recognize. Epicures from all over the world come to eat here, and we stumbled into it by luck.

After a lay day exploring the town, our two boats separated, Katya turning back south to keep to a shorter schedule, while we pushed farther north. This was our shortest leg of the trip—a motorsail of just 18 miles—and took us into a narrow and extremely remote branch of Jökulfirðir (Glacier Fjords), in the Hornstrandir Nature Preserve, just below Iceland’s northern coast.

This was the day the bad weather arrived, spitting cold misty rain, fog and strong northeast wind. As the day’s muted light began to fade, Iceland’s renowned “magnificent desolation” in the far north seemed to become just gray, grim, barren and bleak, and intensely lonely, punctuated with blasts of stingingly frigid wind. And it’s a long day of light in Iceland in June: Anchoring at 66 degrees 21.5 minutes north, 22 degrees 26.8 minutes west, we were less than 10 linear miles from the Arctic Circle and the never-setting midnight sun.

Given its volcanic nature, Iceland can be a hard place to anchor. There is precious little soil above or below the water, so the flukes don’t always dig in well. Although we finally got a good set after several attempts, a powerful williwaw hit around 0200 and pushed our boat hard over, dragging the anchor. With about a football field to spare from grounding on sharp lava, we motored back upwind. After several failed attempts to reanchor, we gave up and motored out.

Heading South

Once we left the cover of the fjords and entered the open sea, the strong Arctic wind quickly produced our wildest day of sailing, with 25-foot seas and a full gale at our back. Thus began our hopscotching down the coast of the Westfjords. Our first stop was the small fishing village of Flateyri, a former whaling station that lost 20 people in a snow avalanche in 1996, a tragic record for Iceland. Next was Bíldudalur, home of Iceland’s wonderfully tacky Sea Monster Museum, and, not coincidentally, the site of more sea monster sightings than anywhere in Iceland. It’s worth the price of admission just to see all the misspellings and leaps of logic in the exhibits, let alone the life-size monster models.

After a return trip to Patreksfjörður, we left the Westfjords behind and spent three days exploring the north shore of Snæfellsnes Peninsula, a notable place in the ancient Sagas of Icelanders. We first anchored in the hurricane-hole bay of Elliðaey Island, a refuge for colorful tufted puffins and Arctic terns. Then, the next day was a short hop to Stykkishólmur, a large and charming fishing town—but a little too popular, with tour buses clogging the streets.

Continuing down the coast, we stopped in Grundarfjörður, widely known both for its photogenic Kirkjufell, or Church Mountain, and legendary summer-solstice party. The crew of Katya, who stumbled into the party by chance on their way south, later confirmed that modern-day Vikings live up to their reputations as friendly and wild party animals.

Our last stop before returning to Reykjavik was a second visit to Ólafsvík, where we discovered the challenges of refueling in Iceland. There are two main fuel companies that provide dockside diesel in Iceland using all-automated pumps. The pumps have red and green covers denoting the brand of diesel, not fuel type (gasoline is rare at the dock). To use one, you must have a proprietary charge card and code to pump your own fuel.

Our experience turned into a classic example of cascading bad luck and a mistake: We arrived on a falling tide, and the only pump we could use was in very shallow water. Our depth alarm wouldn’t shut up, so we couldn’t wait, and besides, the card we had wouldn’t work. And, of course, human help did not exist. Our mistake? Our calculations of fuel reserve turned out to be based on a bigger tank than we actually had. The next day, in dead calm and within sight of Reykjavik, the engine sputtered out.

Despite the embarrassment of having our grand adventure end with a tow back into the harbor, our bareboat expedition in Iceland was a huge success and a lot of fun. No, it might not be a warm cruise around a sunny lake, but for the right crew, it’s a wonderful experience.

Stephen Blakely sails Bearboat, his Island Packet 26, on Chesapeake Bay.

Resources for the Journey

Iceland Yacht Charter: The company has five bareboat charter vessels available, four Bavaria sailboats, ranging from 37 to 50 feet, and an Arvor 215 power cabin cruiser. They are docked behind Reykjavik’s famous concert hall, the Harpa. A licensed captain is required to charter. Boats come with a good chart plotter at the helm and paper charts, but bring tablet or phone navigation as backup. Our Bavaria 50s were fully capable and comfortable even in the worst weather; as with any charter boat, check out your boat thoroughly during the briefing. Cruising season is June through early September. We were their first American customers.

Cruising guide: Arctic and Northern Waters, including Faeroe, Iceland and Greenland, by Andrew Wells, RCC Pilotage Foundation. Written by hardcore cold-weather sailors, it has a wealth of useful (and sometimes intimidating) information about Arctic cruising.

Currents and tides: The northerly flowing Irminger Current prevails in western Iceland, and is a branch of the North American Drift. Tidal currents run clockwise around Iceland starting in the southwest and are strongest on the west coast, usually running 1 to 3 knots but able to hit 5 to 7 knots in narrows and off headlands.

Weather forecasts: Reykjavik Radio broadcasts forecasts in English throughout the day. Iceland is one of the most wired countries in Europe, so Wi-Fi internet connections and forecasts were available in all but the most remote areas. Online wind apps were extremely helpful.

Radio and safety: The Icelandic government has only three Coast Guard ships, dedicated mostly to buoy maintenance (and there aren’t many). If you get in trouble, you will depend on the Icelandic Association for Search and Rescue, run by volunteers and funded by donations and contributions from the fishing industry. ICE-SAR has stations around the country, uses a fleet of old British lifeboats and, as does the US Coast Guard, monitors VHF radio Channel 16. In extremely remote areas blocked by sharp fjord walls, neither VHF nor cellphones might work. Virtually all boats have AIS, and the fishing fleet will clutter your chart-plotter screen.

Harbors: Contact the local harbormaster when you arrive; some charged us a fee, some did not, but all were friendly and helpful. Potable water is routinely available; electricity rarely is. Go to the public pools for showers. Outside Reykjavik, there were no marinas, and in the remote waterfront areas we visited, public toilets were nonexistent; you will often need to hunt for an unlocked commercial bin to dispose of your garbage. Larger towns have Bonus or Kronan grocery stores, but reprovisioning in rural areas can be difficult. Chandleries do not exist outside Reykjavik.

What to Expect

Prices are high in Iceland, especially for food and alcohol. A $15 bottle of Beefeaters gin in the US was $30 in the duty-free store in Keflavik Airport and $60 in the Vinbudin state-run liquor stores. We found that these stores have irregular hours and can be hard to catch while open.

The country’s environmental record is mixed. Eighty percent of Iceland’s energy is produced by clean geothermal or hydropower sources, yet Iceland is the only country that allows hunting of endangered puffins and one of the few that still permits whaling. There is only one company in Iceland that hunts whales but many that run tourist whale-watching trips. Icelanders note that only tourists tend to eat whale meat.

And while Iceland is famous for its world-class cooking, it’s also infamous for its winter food festival that serves up such historically accurate (and to me, vile) ancient Viking dishes as fermented shark. Chef, author and travel journalist Anthony Bourdain, in his No Reservations segment on Iceland, was one of the few reporters to explain why: “They serve only Greenland shark, a unique and rare fish that excretes its waste through the skin, making the meat both toxic and foul. Only after fermenting in the ground for six months does it become safe to eat—and the Vikings were willing to wait.” When he tasted the dish, Bourdain pronounced it “the single worst thing I’ve ever put in my mouth.” For someone who made a career of traveling all over the world seeking out weird, gross and disgusting things to eat, Iceland ranked No. 1.

The post An Iceland Sailing Adventure appeared first on Cruising World.

Bob Shepton skied in the darkness, down a Greenland fjord that he’d sailed up only a month before. It was January 2005, and he was overwintering his Westerly 33, Dodo’s Delight, just outside Upernavik, a settlement so far north that there was only a blush of dusk at local noon. “Must fill the diesel heater,” he thought to himself when he reached his icebound boat. He walked along the deck, removed the plug, and began to pour. Almost instantly, red flames leapt from below. Something had gone terribly wrong.

A single thought blared in his mind: I’ve got to put out this fire. He jumped down onto the ice and began scraping up snow with a bucket and dumping it into the saloon. But the fire quickly took hold, driving him off. All he could do was watch as Dodo’s Delight burned through the ice.

A Sailor in the Mountains

“One day I’ll sail for pleasure,” Shepton joked when I met him at the Banff Centre Film and Book Festival. He was giving a presentation about his high-latitude climbing and sailing adventures, much of which are recounted in his memoir, Addicted to Adventure: Between Rocks and Cold Places.

“I’m having a terrible time trying to fit 80-plus years of life and adventures into 35 minutes,” Shepton told me while preparing for the presentation. The 85-year-old has sailed over 130,000 miles, circumnavigated, sailed in every latitude from the Arctic to Antarctica, and twice transited the Northwest Passage­—the latter for which he was awarded Britain’s YJA Apollo Yachtsman of the Year in 2013 (Sir Ben Ainslie and Sir Robin Knox-Johnston were the 2012 and 2014 winners). Feats, made all the more incredible, considering he accomplished them in retirement and didn’t start sailing until the age of 43.

Sailing, however, is just half the story. Shepton is also an accomplished climber and has scaled many previously unclimbed Arctic peaks. His adventures have been documented in films such as Vertical Sailing Greenland and The Adventures of the Dodo, and earned him legendary status in the climbing community as well as a Piolet d’Or, one of climbing’s highest honors.

It’s no surprise that he’s also a two-time winner of the Royal Cruising Club’s Tilman Medal and often compared to its namesake, Bill Tilman, an adventurer who gained legendary status by sailing and climbing in some of the world’s most extreme and remote places.

Being a sailor in a sea of puffy jackets and beanies (the Banff Festival is an international mecca for mountain folk), I was excited to sit down with Shepton after his presentation and chat sailing. We convened over coffee in the cabin of Elsie, a 10-meter fish-boat-cum-artist-studio, permanently moored in the middle of the woods at the Banff Centre.

A Higher Calling

Shepton spent much of his early life in search of high places. “The Royal Marines instilled in me a passion for rock climbing,” he said. He went on to spend much of his time developing climbing routes on the south coast of England in the 1960s and ’70s, and trained as a mountaineer and ski instructor.

After two years of service, Shepton studied theology at Cambridge University. In his memoir, he describes his decision to become ordained: “Immediately before I began my final year, I received what I felt was a definite call to be ordained as a ‘pastor and teacher.’ I have always been grateful for these definite callings, as in another sense I was not a ‘natural.’”

Shepton interwove climbing with his work as a school chaplain, at times with unconventional results. He would often take students out climbing and skiing, and wasn’t opposed to using his rope skills to underscore a point in a sermon. One Sunday, he climbed up into the church rafters during a service, and fell (with a rope) as an example of faith. “I found [climbing and mountaineering] great complements to being a chaplain at a school and running full-time youth clubs. It helped them know me and me know them,” he said.

Shepton came to sailing later in life, while looking for a family activity. At 43, he bought his first boat, Faraway, an old pilot cutter for a World War II battleship that had been converted into a gaff-rigged ketch. “This was the first boat we owned on the west coast of Scotland. There were no sailing courses in those days. You just got out there and did it.”

Shepton’s second boat was a Westerly 33. “When I went back down south and became chaplain of another school, we sold the house in Scotland and bought the boat instead—a very unwise decision!” He outfitted the boat with a solid fiberglass cuddy and spray hood and later an inner forestay with roller reefing. “Otherwise it was an ordinary production 33-foot boat. That’s what we’ve done the expeditions in.”

The first significant expedition was across the Atlantic and back. “My wife at this stage was heard to remark, ‘Well that’s all I possess there, going away.’ She was talking about the boat, not me.”

In Tilman’s Wake

“My mentor with all this Arctic sailing was this guy Bill Tilman,” he said. “Tilman was a Himalayan climber before and after World War II, and toward the end of his life, he bought an old Bristol pilot cutter that he used to sail off to remote areas and climb from the boat.” Shepton knew that it would take three to four months just to reach Antarctica and then three months back again, so when he read about Tilman sailing to Greenland, climbing and returning in the same summer, he was hooked on the idea.

He began spending summers in Greenland, sailing 15 to 18 days across the Atlantic to Paamiut, and then up the west coast of Greenland, climbing along the way. “At that stage, it was mainly peak bagging,” he said, “because there were a lot of peaks that hadn’t been climbed.” After a while, Shepton began leaving the boat in Greenland over the winter.

In 2012, at the age of 77, Shepton transited the Northwest Passage from east to west, and then again the following year from west to east. “Some people asked, ‘Well, why would you go back to do it again the next year?’ But you’ve got to remember, it’s a long way down to get to the west coast to Scotland. And there was this terrible rumor that if you went down to the Panama Canal that you might have to pay!”

Shepton estimates there was nearly 60 percent more ice in the Arctic on the return journey. “When we got to Fort Ross, an old Hudson Bay trading post, there was this Damocles of ice all the way down the Prince Regent Inlet. We were effectively stuck. It was now into September, and we were getting a little bit concerned as to whether we were going to be able to get out.

“At first I didn’t understand what was happening. One hears all about global warming, but somehow the fjords seemed much fuller with ice than they did before. I learned that [with warming temperatures], the glaciers are calving more rapidly, more frequently, so the fjords have a lot more ice in them.”

Fortunately, Dodo’s Delight made it through the Northwest Passage that year, though few other boats did.

Fire and Ice

Perhaps one of the greatest trials the reverend has faced to date was in 2005 when, while overwintering in Greenland, Dodo’s Delight burned through the ice. Shepton was taken out that night via snowmobile by the Upernavik Fire Service but returned the next morning to survey the wreckage: one-third of the mast sticking out of the ice and a few scattered cannisters and fenders he’d managed to pull from the burning boat. “I was left standing in what I was wearing at the time,” he said (they were borrowed clothes). “Fortunately, the Danes were very helpful and were able to procure me a passport, and my wife sent some money to a bank account to get me through the winter and bring me back home again.”

For many cruisers, such an episode would have marked the end of their adventures. But not so for Shepton. “When I started to look around for another boat, I came very quickly to the conclusion that I couldn’t do much better than what I had already. So, I looked for and found another Westerly 33.”

When asked why he does what he does, Shepton explained: “It’s always been the challenge aspect that has been the main motive, and that involves achieving the end that you’ve set in sight. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy the sailing—I do thoroughly enjoy the sailing—but the sailing is in that sense not the main purpose. The main purpose is to get there and to achieve your objective (which usually involves a bit of climbing). So yes, the sailing is great, I enjoy that, but the challenge of achieving your objective is the main motivation.”

When I asked him about future plans, he mentioned an expedition to Norway (he acts as an Arctic adviser, ice pilot and skipper to sailing expeditions). He also hinted at the possibility of another book. “Addicted to Adventure ended with the first Northwest Passage transit,” Shepton said. “When I get really old and decrepit, I will sit down and write another book. I’ve got enough material.”

Fiona McGlynn is a freelance writer and runs waterbornemag.com, a website devoted to­ ­millennial sailing culture.

The post Sailor Profile: Bob Shepton appeared first on Cruising World.

Everyone knows there’s no such thing as a free boat. Just don’t tell Matt Rutherford, who can gaze from the deck of his latest one—which he hopes will take him to the ends of the earth—to the tarnished remains of his former one, which already did.

Pretty little St. Brendan lies these days on the hard, at the end of a gravel lane of old-timers that have seen better times and places. Eight years ago, in one of the great sea-voyaging triumphs of all time, Rutherford sailed the donated 27-foot, 40-year-old Albin Vega from Annapolis, Maryland, back to Annapolis—via the Northwest Passage and Cape Horn, some 27,000 nautical miles in 309 days, nonstop and singlehanded at an average rate of 3.5 knots (see “Fortitudine Vincimus,” July 2012).

Now St. Brendan, named for an Irish cleric who braved the uncharted North Atlantic in a leather curragh 1,500 years ago, sits on jack stands at Herrington Harbor North near Annapolis, waiting like a sleepy old dog at a shelter for a softhearted buyer who may never materialize. Rutherford can see her easily from the steel deck of his newest project, the massive sailing vessel Marie Tharp, which sits just two rows away and towers above everything. She’s so big, he had to buy a 20-foot extension ladder just to get up the side.

The schooner is 72 feet long from bowsprit to massive, barn-door transom, custom-built of fine Dutch steel following lines drawn by heralded offshore-yacht designer Bruce Roberts. Fully outfitted for sea, she’ll weigh a staggering 115,000 pounds, more than 20 times the displacement of little St. Brendan.

The price for both was the same: zero. And, of course, both needed work, which is right up Rutherford’s alley.

I first met Rutherford in 2010, when he was rooting around Annapolis looking for help on a most unpromising project. He’d been working as a volunteer fixing up boats for Chesapeake Region Accessible Boating, a local nonprofit with a clever acronym—CRAB— whose mission is to get disabled folks out sailing for recreation. He and the group’s founder, Don Backe, who had lost use of his legs in a car crash, hatched the idea of Rutherford taking a donated CRAB boat “around the Americas” to raise money for and awareness of the group’s mission. The aged Vega was wasting away in a boatyard then, but Rutherford saw in it the makings of an adventure he’d long wanted to tackle.

“I went down in the cabin and lay down on the bunk one day, and it fit me. I thought, This can work!”

He spent months ­dumpster-diving and cajoling bits of gear from local enablers, most of whom (including me) thought the whole idea was nuts. And he worked like a farmer, largely alone, installing bulkheads and a Samson post, redoing rigging, fitting sails and cramming the little craft with freeze-dried food, an old bladder tank for diesel that completely covered the cabin floor, a hand-­operated watermaker, sea anchors, radios, navigation gear, boots and foulies.

When he left Annapolis heavily laden in June 2011, few thought we’d ever see the then-30-year-old or his little boat again. When he popped back up at City Dock the following April, having survived the most perilous marine obstacles on Earth, the governor and local sailing celebrity Gary Jobson were there to greet him, along with hundreds more. He was a penniless hero, having left with $30 and come back with the same thin, soggy wallet.

Rutherford, who grew up rough and rowdy in the Rust Belt of Ohio, was used to being broke. But he leveraged his short, bright fame well, giving paid talks about his trip and making connections that helped him set up a nonprofit, the Ocean Research Project, dedicated to doing scientific research to save the aqueous two-thirds of the planet. He also found a fine partner, Nicole Trenholm, who is almost as fearless as him. Together they have gone to the ends of the earth, more than once.

Rutherford’s goal, ever since he graduated from an alternative high school for troubled kids at age 20, has been to roam the globe and do some good. He’s never had two nickels to rub together but figured out early that a sailboat costs nothing to operate as long as you stay away from land, and he’s grown adept at getting free or almost-free sailboats in which to do that.

His first was a Coronado 25 bought sight unseen for $2,000. When he went to claim it in a Maryland boatyard, “the weeds were higher than the boat.” He and an old Ohio girlfriend, knowing nothing about boats or the sea, patched it up, evicted the mud daubers, and made it to Key West before three straight hurricanes did the boat in. He acquired a succession of storm-damaged beaters after that, the last of which, a Pearson 323, took him solo across the Atlantic, down the West Africa coast, and back home.

He eventually fetched up on that boat, broke again, in Annapolis, where Backe and the Albin Vega awaited. Trenholm popped up shortly after Rutherford’s voyage around the Americas. He wowed her at a yacht-club talk he gave, and she wowed him when she said she was a budding scientist specializing in the marine environment—just what he needed to lend credibility to his nonprofit. She’s now a doctoral candidate in marine climate science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, studying when she’s not off at sea with Rutherford.

They did most of their traveling on Ault, a 42-foot steel cat-ketch Rutherford bought with the gains from his voyage around the Americas and some borrowed cash from family. It was a rust-streaked wreck that needed 12 steel plates welded on by an unemployed motorcycle mechanic before it could be trusted to leave the bay.

You’d see Rutherford and Trenholm around town that summer, looking like a pair of Welsh coal miners fresh from the job site, in tattered rags streaked with dust and grease. It was hot, as always for the Chesapeake, and as damp as a jungle, but Trenholm gave as good as she got with sander, chipper and paintbrush, and after a shower, she still looked like a movie star—without the peroxide hair.

They took the refurbished Ault across the Atlantic and back, gathering plastic bits and pieces for an unpaid study on a suspected garbage gyre in a remote patch west of the Azores. Then they crossed the Pacific from California to Japan in a borrowed Harbor 29 doing the same thing, arriving days before a typhoon struck that would have sunk them and all their data forever.

Back home, they readied Ault, which cruises at 4 knots and “goes to weather like a well-trimmed refrigerator,” in Rutherford’s assessment, for two summers of research in the Arctic. They charted the bottom in uninhabited Greenland fjords well above the 70th parallel north, and studied currents and temperature variations for NASA. They found evidence of a mysterious, deep warm-water current that’s eating away at glaciers from below. For the second of those missions, having proved their worth, they actually got paid, though barely enough to cover costs.

Scientists believe climate- change research is crucial in the high latitudes, where the effects of man’s addiction to fossil fuels is felt most severely, and Rutherford and Trenholm came back from the Arctic convinced there’s a niche for small, efficient and inexpensive platforms like Ault, and now Marie Tharp, to do that kind of work.

Most Arctic research falls to big, powerful research vessels that carry teams of scientists in comfort and style. Trenholm took part in one last summer, working for three-and-a-half weeks on a chartered Swedish icebreaker that had every convenience, including a sauna and a pingpong table. “We dressed for dinner. It was like a vacation,” she says.

But all that luxury comes at a price. “I was on a $6 million expedition,” Trenholm says, “and it showed me how much more Matt and I are capable of doing at a fraction of the cost.”

Rutherford reckons that the average cost of a big research vessel working in the Arctic is about $25,000 a day. “We can operate for one-tenth that,” he says, “and because the new scientific equipment is smaller and less power-hungry, we can do anything they can do.”

If small is good, Ault was unfortunately a bit too small. While their two summers in the Arctic were fruitful, the little steel boat was big enough only for Rutherford, Trenholm, and a deckhand or two. Rutherford was ruminating one day on his podcast, Singlehanded Sailing, about how much better they could do with a bigger boat, and his thoughts wandered to a vision of a steel Bruce Roberts 65-footer—a design he considered perfect for the job: big enough for a scientific team of four to stay in relative comfort, with berths for himself as captain and a crew of two or three, but still cheap to operate.

Amazingly, a random listener knew where just such a boat lay languishing and put them in touch with the owner, Zan Ricketson, a dreamer who’d spent 18 years building it up from bare hull and rig for a planned grand adventure in the high latitudes but was about ready to give up. The boat was in the water in Delaware.

“It was about 80 percent finished,” said Rutherford, who rushed up to the C&D Canal for a look-see and immediately began badgering Ricketson to donate it to the Ocean Research Project. The deal closed in 2018, and early the next spring, Rutherford got the freshly rebuilt, 212-horsepower Ford diesel fired up, and brought the boat south to Herrington Harbor, where she was hauled and blocked for a refit.

He named her Marie Tharp in honor of a hero of his and other seafarers. Tharp was a scientist in the 1950s who labored in relative obscurity creating three-dimensional images of the seafloor using data from sonar readings that had never been coordinated into a usable format. “She painstakingly took these numbers to create a map showing the ridges and valleys and contours of the seafloor, worldwide,” Rutherford says.

“Her boyfriend got most of the credit. She wasn’t even allowed on a boat in the beginning—they didn’t want women aboard.” Others in his position might have waited to name their flagship for some wealthy sponsor. But don’t even ask Matt Rutherford, champion of the downtrodden, to call his boat Amway Explorer or Jiffy Lube Jet. It just ain’t gonna happen.

About the boat: She’s impressive if you don’t get too close. Massive, of course, with a good 8 feet of freeboard above an expansive, long-keel bottom. It was built by venerated steel-boat builder Howdy Bailey in his yard near Norfolk, Virginia, from steel cut to order from the best quarter-inch-thick Dutch stock. Rust? Well, sure, there’s a bit if you start chipping away, but it all appears repairable with some skillful welding.

The deck is flush, with a big, enclosed center cockpit that Rutherford intends to fortify with more steel bracing and new, shatterproof windows. There are watertight steel bulkheads fore and aft, so smashing into an iceberg or two will not prove fatal. Two anchors are mounted in the bow, with 700 feet of chain led to lockers amidships to keep the weight out of the pointy end.

The shiny, 6-cylinder Ford diesel has just 85 hours since a full rebuild and lives in an airy engine room, alongside a Kubota 24-volt generator that has never been fired up and is capable of powering a watermaker in addition to making electricity. Fuel capacity is 800 gallons, cruising speed is 7.5 knots, and Rutherford expects he’ll burn 3.3 gallons an hour, giving the boat a 1,500-mile range under power. The engine ran well on the 80-mile run from Delaware to the yard.

The rig is stout, with keel-stepped masts. Sails are brand- new, still in the original bags, and he expects to use them a lot. “When we get on-site, it will mostly be motoring as we collect data, but as long as there’s wind, we intend to sail the boat whenever we’re in open water,” Rutherford says.

Inside is a mess, to be blunt. A lot of work has been started, but little is finished. There’s a forecastle big enough for four bunks for crew, a nice head with separate shower just aft of that, a galley amidships on the starboard side (with no cooking equipment installed), a big saloon aft of the main mast, and two cabins beyond that: one for the captain’s quarters and another for a scientific crew of up to four. Forward of the saloon, on the opposite side of the boat from the galley, is a work chamber for scientific equipment.

Everywhere you look, plywood and framing lumber, batteries, tools and gadgets are strewn about. It looks like a third-grade schoolroom if the teacher disappeared for a month or two.

Rutherford reckons it will cost about $100,000 to finish up everything needed. At the end of the day, he’ll have a seaworthy, spartan platform to conduct Arctic research in, but there are no plans for saunas or pingpong rooms. His hope is that the spirit of adventure and the chance to conduct important research at a fraction of the usual cost will lure scientists who are serious about tackling the perils of climate change.

He and Trenholm are passionate about the mission. They believe that understanding climate change in the Arctic is crucial to ­understanding this global phenomenon in its infancy. “We published a pretty important study on the way warm-­water intrusion is eating the glaciers from the bottom up,” Rutherford says. “The next step is to tie warming water and glacial melting to changes in plankton growth, which is the basis of the food chain.”

As for the $100,000 or so they’ll need to get the job done, they’re on the prowl. Rutherford makes some money selling boats as a broker for Eastport Yacht Sales in Annapolis. He’s doing deliveries, having recently taken a big Beneteau across the pond to the Mediterranean. He had a deal this past winter to take paying riders along on voyages to and around the Caribbean on a borrowed boat. Trenholm’s applying for government grants. They’re interviewing potential sugar daddies. If you know any, pass the word via the Ocean Research Project website, or listen to a Singlehanded Sailing podcast for details (see “Help Launch the Dream,” below).

“It’s all about who you know,” Rutherford says. “And it’s not easy. They all say, ‘It’s great, awesome, a wonderful project—but not for us.’’’

If it were anyone but Matt Rutherford, I would probably say the same. We all thought he was off his meds when he was ricocheting around Annapolis nine years ago, muttering about a preposterous scheme to sail around the world the longitudinal way in a battered old North Sea weekender. And again when he shot out the Golden Gate in a borrowed club racer with his girlfriend, in a half-gale, bound for Yokohama.

We shook our heads and clucked our tongues when he left the Chesapeake in a steel tub with unstayed masts and a 30-year-old Perkins 4-108, bound for the Arctic at the pace of a kid’s tricycle. And then we applauded each time he came back, having accomplished what he’d set out to do. He’s got a track record.

The new project with Marie Tharp is daunting, with unfinished business everywhere you look: holes to patch, deckhouse to build, plumbing to finish, electronics to install, furniture to find, watermaker, beds, insulation, stove, fridge, sinks and headliners. Where to even begin?

Fortitudine Vincimus was the family credo of Ernest Shackleton, Rutherford’s idol, who brought his men safely home from the wreck of his flagship in the Antarctic a century ago, after luring them there by advertising: “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of compete darkness. Constant Danger. Safe return doubtful.”

“By Endurance We Conquer” is the translation. Those are words to live by for a fellow who has seen the remotest corners of the world from the decks of boats nobody else wanted. “I guess it would have been nice to be born a rich kid,” Rutherford says. “But then I never would have done any of these things. I’d just be a lazy rich kid.”

Angus Phillips is a longtime Chesapeake Bay-based racing and cruising sailor, former outdoor columnist for The Washington Post, and frequent contributor to CW.

Help Launch The Dream

Matt Rutherford is and always has been a driven sailor, and has financed many of his adventures through yacht deliveries and contributions to his nonprofit dedicated to Arctic exploration and research. To learn more about Matt, and Nicole’s backgrounds, accomplishments and future endeavors, or to make a donation to the cause, visit his website.

The post Matt Rutherford’s Arctic Research Dreams appeared first on Cruising World.

Aboard the 64-foot cutter Ocean Watch, en route to the Northwest Passage, we’d put the Bering Strait astern and were just miles away from crossing the Arctic Circle. First, we had a mission of sorts, to retrieve a ­weather buoy for a scientist at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Lab that had beached itself on a remote barrier ­island; the drift buoy was now high and dry, but its satellite responder was working fine. We knew precisely where it was.

But just a few hours before we got there, we had an encounter that, a decade later, still makes my tummy flutter and my palms clammy. For that was the night we briefly ran aground off the tiny Alaskan village of Shishmaref, on its own flat ­barrier island flanking the Seward Peninsula. Earlier that very week, a BBC reporter described the place thusly: “It is thought to be the most extreme example of global warming on the planet.”

This we had to see for ourselves. It proved to be an iffy decision—you never want to kiss a sandy spit in the dead of night on a lee shore—but thankfully, not a tragic one. However, we hadn’t been drawn to Shishmaref because it’s a boomtown. Quite the opposite. It was a town going boom.

Shishmaref was in the news at the time for all the wrong reasons. Totally open to the north, it got sucker-punched by each successive winter storm. Warmer weather and water in the Arctic—not to mention melting permafrost—meant less protective ice, which translated to a shoreline exposed to wind and waves, which in turn eroded the tenuous beaches and cliffs. Everything along the foreshore was sliding into the sea, including the main road and a whole bunch of houses, which we could see on our approach.

It was just after midnight, the sea and sky a uniform slate of gray, but still fairly light outside in the high latitudes. There was activity along the beachfront, and after transmitting an open-ended call on the VHF inquiring about local ­knowledge, one of the villagers arrived on a skiff offering to guide us in. However, with our 9-plus-foot draft, it wasn’t to be. Suddenly we ground to a halt. There were some agonizing moments—what a sad way it would’ve been to dash our dreams—but eventually we powered off and carried on. The disappearing village vanished astern.

I was reminded of Shishmaref just before the new year after reading the results of the annual “Arctic report card,” a yearly assessment produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that, according to The New York Times, “takes a broad look at the effects of climate change in the region and compares current findings with the historical record.”

“If I had gotten a report card like this as a kid, I would’ve been grounded,” noted one professor. “It’s not showing much improvement at all. Things are getting worse.”

Where to begin? Rising temperatures. Thawing sea ice. Earlier-than-usual seasonal melts. Growing concerns over sea-level rises. Somehow, this very exact science has become politicized by many in the social media set, and elsewhere, but it’s quite real to the people living in the Arctic who have been dealing with the repercussions for decades now. Later fall freezes leave communities isolated; warmer waters mean you can’t travel over the ice; wildlife movements and patterns, the main source of sustenance through hunting and fishing for, like, eons, are disrupted. The distant tit-and-tat over the changing climate is kind of secondary when your stomach is growling. Young people raised in the Arctic are bailing in droves. Who could blame them?

Oh, about that melting permafrost, which sure has changed the real estate market in Shishmaref? It releases the carbon dioxide it traps into the atmosphere, spinning the cycle ever more rapidly. It’s all interconnected—a circle, a loop—and it’s not slowing down.

Back in Shishmaref, today, the 500 or so remaining residents are stuck between sticking it out or relocating to the mainland. It’s clear they’ll eventually need to leave, but tell that to a people with a history spanning, oh, 2,000 years or so. Talk about roots.

I never did set foot on Shishmaref; hours later, I was off on fresh adventures. That nice guy in the skiff who tried to help us out that night? In my rearview mirror, mate—not my problem. He’ll figure it out. Right?

Herb McCormick is CW’s executive editor.

The post Off Watch: A Disappearing Town Along the Northwest Passage appeared first on Cruising World.

The sun peeked over the gentle rolling ocean swell, smearing the underside of the clouds with Crayola colors. Janna Esarey sat on a creatively fashioned dock box-turned-cockpit seat as DogBark galloped across the Pacific at 10 knots, under a reefed main and full genoa. She was sailing almost due south, 900 nautical miles north of Hawaii, with 25 knots of breeze over the port beam. DogBark was in her element, with the strong trades fueling her drive to sail fast. Janna’s confidence in her boat’s aptitude permitted her to sip coffee casually while admiring the stunning sunrise. She contemplated the winding path that led to this moment, charging across the Pacific on a 60-foot boat she had learned to love and call home. This is the story of a family, a quest and a yacht called DogBark.

Like a complex puzzle, revealed one piece at a time, the tale begins decades earlier with a unique distance-racing sailboat built halfway around the world. It meanders across a coincidental meeting between two equally passionate (read: crazy) racing sailors, and a compelling conversation with an Arctic explorer. And finally, in its third act (thus far), it lurches through an intense year of boat renovations before ice conditions wrench the storyline from a wintry 71 degrees north to a tropical 20 degrees north.

The first puzzle piece materialized in 1989 when Australian Kanga Birtles, owner of Jarkan Yacht Builders, splashed his newly designed, custom racing sailboat, designed by John King and built in accordance with the relatively new Open 60 (now called IMOCA 60) box rules. The boat, christened Jarkan Yacht Builders, came in at just under 60 feet, with a 9.5-foot draft and enough positive stability to right itself from a deep knockdown. At the time, at least in the Open 60 realm, it was a conventional design, with a fixed bulb keel, a single rudder, 30,000-pound displacement, and about 10,000 pounds of water ballast in tanks extending 18 feet along each side of the hull. Birtles had the 1990 BOC Challenge in mind, a solo around-the-world race, and being on a restrictive budget without major sponsorship, wanted a “bulletproof” boat to limit costly and potentially dangerous breakages midrace.

The BOC Challenge (renamed the Around Alone race in the 1990s) was, at the time, the world’s premier singlehanded event. Of the 25 vessels that left Newport, Rhode Island, in fall 1990, with dreams of returning half a year later both intact and ahead of their competition, seven withdrew due to damage, injury or both. Completing the race was a testament to the strength and fortitude of man and vessel. In May 1991, Jarkan crossed the finish line fifth in its class.

An offhand comment from Birtles after the race underscored his vessel’s fortitude. Despite a chilling knockdown in the Southern Ocean during the race’s third leg, the only damage Jarkan sustained in 136 days of racing were a few bent stanchions. Birtles had built a fast, robust vessel capable of withstanding the toughest ocean conditions on the planet under the guidance of a lone crew.

Twelve years later, that sleek, sturdy Open 60 called to Al Hughes from the docks in Seattle. Al wasn’t looking for a new boat, but Primetime America, its name at the time, was looking for a new owner. Al already owned a boat; he lived aboard a custom 39-foot sailboat with his wife, but was drawn to Primetime’s sexy lines and long-distance ocean-racing credentials. She was going through a rough patch, owned by a bank looking to recoup its losses, and desperately needed an infusion of new energy.

Much to the chagrin of his usually loving and supportive wife, Al’s absurdly low offer was accepted, and he became a two-boat owner in January 2004. The renowned Open 60 was rechristened DogBark, a tribute to his pup, Gus, and a tongue-in-cheek reference to “dog-bark navigation,” in which sailors in Scotland’s fog-shrouded waterways listened for the sound of barking to know when they were too close to shore and needed to tack away into deeper waters.

Al’s friends told him he was crazy, but his ambitions crystalized with his admiration of DogBark. He’d hustle to the start line of the Singlehanded Transpacific Yacht Race in San Francisco, five short months away, to see what she could do. Al assured his wife he’d do one singlehanded race before selling the boat. Short on time and money, he changed little about DogBark, adding only the required safety equipment and replacing spent batteries and a few fraying lines. After one qualifying sail, he headed to the start line in June, with a perilously low number of hours spent sailing the boat.

But DogBark took care of him. Twelve days later, he took line honors in Kauai, Hawaii (a mere 45 minutes ahead of the second-place finisher), and sealed his love for the boat that carried him there. While 60 feet is a lot of boat to handle alone, and challenging weather conditions kept Al on his toes, DogBark made his job as easy as she could, barreling across the ocean without complaint. He hit a top speed of 24 knots, a wild sleigh ride down a particularly steep wave that had him holding on and shouting with glee. Despite his wife’s urging, Al couldn’t part with the boat. He returned to take line honors in the 2006 and 2008 editions of the singlehanded Transpac. So much for his one-and-done promise.

While Al was galloping across the Pacific on DogBark, a newly married couple untied the lines of their Hallberg-Rassy Rasmus 35, Dragonfly, for an extended honeymoon cruise. On their two-year voyage across the Pacific, Graeme and Janna Cawrse Esarey fortified their loyalty to each other and to the sea. When they returned to Seattle to start a family, it was with the knowledge that the ocean would call them back to cruise as a family one day.

In the following years, their daughters, Talia and Savai, grew into precocious individuals and confident sailors, and Graeme fostered a dedicated and competitive race crew for his Farr 1220, Kotuku. In the way that happenstance interactions can inadvertently alter the narrative of those interacting, another puzzle piece dropped into place when Al found himself racing with Graeme…and Graeme in turn found himself admiring Al’s immense knowledge and skill.

Graeme soon learned Al had a fast boat of his own. And, in the way that seemingly inanimate objects can wiggle their way into the heart of an unsuspecting observer, Graeme fell in love with DogBark the first time he saw her standing proudly in a boatyard near Seattle. As a long-distance-racing enthusiast, he fantasized about the adventures he could have with a boat designed to sail with a small crew anywhere in the world. But practicality kept him grounded; he already owned a wonderful boat for racing in the Northwest and, anyway, DogBark’s utter lack of interior comforts would not sit well with his family.

It was not until Graeme talked to polar explorer Eric Larsen that the puzzle’s outline came into focus. He and Janna wanted to take their daughters, now 10 and 12 years old, cruising before high school commitments took precedence but were struggling to find enthusiasm for the tropical route they took on their honeymoon cruise. Janna had learned she preferred cold-weather sailing, and with the world so big, taking the same path through the tropics felt uninspiring. Eric, recently returned from an unsupported expedition to the North Pole by foot, mentioned the Northwest Passage’s growing water-to-ice ratio. Walking across the ice wasn’t on Graeme’s radar, but exciting cold-weather cruising grounds were. Furthermore, that sturdy, oceangoing racing machine sitting in the boatyard had been calling to Graeme for years.

The rest of the family was—OK, tentatively at first—on board with the harebrained idea to buy DogBark, refit her in less than 12 months, and leave Seattle to sail through the Northwest Passage before continuing to the Mediterranean. Dreaming became planning, and planning soon became doing. Al, understanding the drive to pursue wild sailing dreams better than most, handed over the keys to DogBark, along with a seemingly limitless stream of advice and knowledge.

Shortly after ownership passed hands, my husband, John, and I were incorporated into the wild scheme. We had raced with Graeme and Al aboard Kotuku until, inspired by their knowledge and passion for sailing, we had purchased our own boat and left Seattle to go cruising. When Graeme called us in Nicaragua with the news of their “new” boat and their related Arctic plans, it took us less than a breath to commit to join them for the Northwest Passage. As a writer/photographer team, we would be able to document the journey while contributing as crew, and stand-in aunt and uncle to Talia and Savai.

As friends had with Al, Graeme and Janna’s pals regularly informed them they were crazy. The Northwest Passage, while a significantly more feasible route than a decade earlier, was still far from a sure thing. DogBark’s fiberglass hull and deep draft were concerns in a region dominated by perilous ice and shallow bays. But for Graeme and his crew, those concerns were offset by her watertight crash bulkheads and a thick, sturdy hull. DogBark was designed with high-latitude sailing in mind.

When Al had prepared to do his second and third Transpac, he’d touched up the bottom paint on DogBark, changed the oil, tested a few systems, and took off for the start line. The list of requirements and comforts for a two-week solo passage in temperate waters was concise. That list grew immeasurably longer as the Esareys considered a multiyear cruise for four people, starting with two extra crewmembers and a month or more of voyaging above the Arctic Circle. DogBark had a strong hull and an engine with low hours but lacked creature comforts—such as beds or a bathroom door—that would make living aboard suitable for the whole family.

So they all got to work. They crafted a “Master Project List,” a shared Excel document pages long with notes, dimensions, priorities and dates. Step one required several power washers and elbow grease to clear the deck’s flourishing farm of moss and mold. Step two was…everything else.

From the very first day, it was clear there was not enough time to do it all. Many boat owners spend three or seven or 15 years preparing themselves and their boat to go cruising. The Esareys had less than one. Other boat owners dream of it all their lives but are never quite able to untie the lines. Graeme and Janna were well-aware of the traps of shore life, so once the plan was hatched, they were determined to untie the lines the following summer, even if it meant sailing north before the water tanks were plumbed or heaters installed. With a long list and a short timeline, Graeme and Janna divided tasks and dug in.

Graeme focused on ensuring DogBark was as safe (and fast) as possible. He worked with Port Townsend Rigging to replace all of the rod and wire rigging, including fabricating new spreader ends and replacing all of the turnbuckles. Under Al’s guidance, he added a bowsprit to make flying and jibing the asymmetrical kites easier, and to extend the anchor away from DogBark’s plumb bow. Ballard Sails issued a new suite of working sails: a main, a genoa and a jib, and recut two spinnakers. Graeme added all new B&G electronics, an autopilot, and an electric winch to assist the new mainsail up the 85 feet of mast. He expanded fuel, fresh water and waste capacity. He purchased a new life raft, two solar panels and an engine-driven heater, but he didn’t have time to install them before departure.

One of DogBark’s qualities that enticed Graeme was her shorthanded sailing prowess. Built for singlehanding, the sail controls were designed for one person to make sail changes and adjustments, despite the loads of a 60-foot boat with a nine-story spar. Almost without exception, whenever Graeme changed the way a line was led, he soon re-led it the way it was originally. He updated the banks of clutches and replaced worn lines, but otherwise found that the leads, winch placements and reefing systems worked most effectively unaltered. DogBark was well-sorted.

Janna focused on the interior renovation. While safety and speed were tantamount, cruising with a family required converting the interior from a simple layout, one designed for a single, low-maintenance racer, into a practical and comfortable home with storage and sleeping space. She knew her husband would happily sail in a bucket (as long as it was a fast bucket), but the rest of the family wanted some level of comfort and amenities. DogBark had only one real “bed” (which had morphed into space for storing sails), so the biggest challenge was converting the aft spaces on either side of the companionway from water ballast tanks into cabins. In the end, they ground out 9 linear feet of ballast tank on either side, pulled out the large aft-facing nav station, and custom-built single bunks that converted into doubles. To make it homey, Janna’s father added shelving to cover the ballast tank and a pocket desk controlled by a line that allowed it to “gimbal” when the boat heeled. Doors would give the sisters some form of privacy but, without time to custom-make them, decorative shower curtains sufficed.

Once Talia and Savai saw their rooms taking shape and realized their parents were truly committed to this adventure, the dream felt real and they started to get excited. Having grown up on and around boats, they knew the demands—and the potential fun—of boat work. While their friends spent lazy afternoons at the park or playing video games, Talia and Savai were on the boat with their parents, getting dirty and working hard. They helped paint every exposed inch of the interior, cover the audacious yellow Formica countertops with a more pleasing slate gray, and re-cover the bright red saloon cushions with easy-to-clean faux leather. They ran wires through the engine room, scrubbed the bilge, installed wood paneling, and went up the mast to run new halyards. They brought energy and silliness to the boatyard, alongside their hard work and creative solutions.

Many projects that started out with a prominent place on the master list soon dropped off the back, due to a shortage of time or a change in perspective. DogBark came with a funky space-pod-looking hard dodger with crazed plexiglass windows that wouldn’t offer much visibility or protection from the cold bitter elements of the Arctic. The family agreed the dodger needed to be replaced. But designing something better within their time and budget restraints proved impossible. They made what felt like a compromise by simply replacing the plexiglass, and adding a frame-and-canvas cockpit enclosure to the back of the dodger, and marked the project done. Soon, though, they all agreed it was the right decision. DogBark maintained her sleek, sexy lines without the addition of a bigger, boxier dodger, and the canvas enclosure expanded the living space while maintaining visibility and flexibility for any weather condition.

Time is unbiased. It does not care how busy we are or how long our project list still is. Soon it was spring and nearly time to go. John and I entered the mayhem a few weeks before untying the lines, and jumped straight into final preparations. We installed hardware, tested systems, bought parts, stowed gear and went provisioning. In a blink, our departure date arrived. When we left the dock in Port Townsend, Washington, in spring 2018, most of the gear was still in boxes. Solar panels leaned against the stern rail, wrapped in foam and cardboard. Only half of the water tanks were plumbed. Tools were scattered across the new saloon table. But the bilge was full of canned goods, the aft lazarette was full of topped-off diesel tanks, and the new cruisers were full of excitement and appreciation. The puzzle was complete. The Esareys had made a commitment to each other, to DogBark and to themselves, and they were not shying away from that. It was time to go cruising.

Graeme knew he would cherish DogBark’s speed, but Janna, who had never called herself a racer, had never considered performance as a boat’s most important feature. But this boat won Janna over from their first sail, and in the following months, DogBark demonstrated her confidence and grace again and again. She ghosted across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, effortlessly reaching 8 knots in a wispy 9 knots of true wind; she powered through strong choppy seas in the Gulf of Alaska and easily legged out ahead of a low-pressure system bearing down on her in the Bering Sea. When a strong headwind contradicted a swift current in the shallow waters of Hecate Strait, the spiteful seas opened the forward hatch, filling the bow locker with seawater and effectively testing the strength of the soon-to-be-revered forwardmost watertight bulkhead. Despite an extra few thousand pounds of weight, DogBark sailed on, a bit sluggish but mostly unperturbed, until her crew discovered the intrusion and pumped the water back outside the boat, where it belonged.

Unfortunately, despite DogBark’s ­preparation and enthusiasm, ice conditions barred almost every boat from transiting the Northwest Passage that summer. Of the 25 boats to attempt the passage, only two made it through. Many more were damaged by ice, and one sank after colliding with an iceberg. The rest turned back to try their chances another year, DogBark among them. Having sailed past 71 degrees north and east along the north slope of Alaska, DogBark tucked her tail and sprinted nearly 4,000 miles in three weeks to thaw out her crew in the lush green paradise of Hawaii.

It is a testament to DogBark and her new caretakers’ renovations that she was just as comfortable tiptoeing past icebergs in the Chukchi Sea as she was galloping across the Pacific under a big colorful spinnaker. It is a testament to her crew that when one door closed, they were able to realign their aspirations and expectations, turn south, and take off for new Hawaiian cruising grounds.

And so, we end this chapter of DogBark’s ongoing story by picking up where we began:

As the sun climbed higher, pushing new heat into the already warm tropical morning, Janna relished in her quiet moment with DogBark, again thanking the old girl for taking such good care of her family. It had been a wild ride so far—the decisions, the boat projects, the learning, the Arctic rejection, the ocean miles—yet she knew the adventures with this marvelous boat had only just begun.

After leaving DogBark in Hawaii, Becca Guillote and her husband John completed an ocean crossing on their Valiant 40, Halcyon, sailing 4,000 miles from Panama to French Polynesia. Read more on their travels on their blog. Meanwhile, the Esarey family continued onward from Hawaii to the Marquesas and Tuamotus before returning home to Seattle.

The post Ocean Racer Turned Family Cruiser appeared first on Cruising World.

A day to remember: August 16, 2015. The crew of Barba had been sailing north from Stavanger, Norway, for a full seven weeks, making our way along nearly the country’s entire coastline before heading offshore to Svalbard, and then beyond.

The cloud cover was low and as heavy as a duvet, and off in the distance, a polar bear stalked the sea ice before disappearing from view. As far as the eye could see, we were surrounded by ice. And Barba‘s fiberglass hull let us know it too by its creaking and groaning as we maneuvered slowly through the floes, using every skill we’d trained for, on this day.

We had reached the journey’s ultimate goal: to sail as far north as the ocean allowed us in the best boat we had. And our next goal was just as important: to get ourselves and Barba safely back home.

Barba is a 37-foot Jeanneau, intended for sailing in warmer climes. Perhaps it’s not one’s first choice for journeying in polar regions. But the best boat, as the saying goes, is the one you have. That said, gear, crew, preparation and the implementation of all those moving parts are as important as the boat itself. And we had prepared as best we could for the adventure.

Prior to our trip, a number of upgrades were made to Barba to give us the best odds possible in the north. Radar, AIS and forward-looking sonar were among the upgrades to the old navigation equipment. The mast was reinforced with a cutter stay and running back stays. A new engine was installed to replace the faithful one that had served us well for 10 years. And then, of course, there were all of the other upgrades that might escape the naked eye, including a tailored tarpaulin that we could deploy in case of hull leaks, flexible metal plates for more-permanent repairs, meters of Dyneema anchor rodes, and all manner of first-aid materials meant for patching up both the boat and crew while at sea.

As important as the boat, as any sailor knows, is the crew. Two months earlier, following hectic weeks of preparation, the five of us stood ready at the pier in the south of Norway.

Fresh from the German Alps, Daniel Hug is a mountain climber, outdoorsman, photographer and paraglider pilot with almost every skill in the book except notable sailing experience. Terry Ward, from the United States, is a travel journalist, scuba diver and general adventurer with limited sailing experience from previous (and easier) North Sea cruises with Barba. Ivan Kutasov from Russia had been recruited a couple of weeks earlier when we came across an image on Instagram of him ­sailing in the remote Russian Arctic archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. We got in touch by email and learned that while he worked as a computer programmer, in his heart he was an outdoorsman who had hiked solo for weeks in Siberia, sailed aboard unknown but spectacular Russian sailboats and, most likely, accumulated a few world records for outrunning polar bears and hopping onto rooftops for protection.

To ensure Norwegian sovereignty on board and to maintain the required level of sailing skills too, an old and faithful crewmate from Barba’s Jan Mayen expedition (“Norwegians Would,” April 2016) was enlisted as well. He is Chief Commander Jon Grantangen, a ­weapons-savvy open airman of the highest class, and now an experienced expedition sailor. And then there was me, the skipper, a Norwegian with trips to Iceland and Greenland under my belt, as well as Jan Mayen, the farthest destination north, until now.

As is always the case when Barba sails off on a high-latitude expedition, a common question arises: Why not sail to warmer areas? For us, it’s not about getting a suntan and sipping rum drinks in a pretty anchorage. Rather, it’s about reaching spectacular destinations that are not practically achievable without a sailboat and an adventurous crew.

Svalbard had long been a dream of mine. The archipelago off the northern coast of Norway, high above the Arctic Circle, is known for its unspoiled nature, glaciers and epic wildlife such as polar bears, reindeer, walruses and beluga whales. The distance from mainland Norway is surprisingly doable, with a three-day transit. But despite that fact, an extended sailing trip to reach a place like this comes with many challenges for both boat and crew. And it was precisely this combination of adventure, amazing ­scenery and all-out challenge that became our common inspiration to sail as far north as we possibly could. And what better platform for discovery and adventure is there, after all, than a sailboat?

After a rather pleasant leg up the Norwegian coast, the five of us arrived in Tromsø, as had many a polar adventurer before: giddy to sail away from civilization. On July 15, we saw the mainland disappearing in the proverbial rearview mirror.

With a half-ton of diesel, 40 days’ worth of supplies, paragliders, all manner of scuba diving gear, and weapons for protection from polar bears on board, Barba was riding heavy in the water—but full of hope for distant horizons.

We were still wearing T-shirts when we passed Bjørnøya, or Bear Island, the southernmost island in the Svalbard archipelago. But a day later, the rain came at us sideways. Then, out of nowhere, we saw a bergy bit in the water, a lone piece of ice that was far from titanic but nonetheless felt like a harbinger of what was to come.

The wind was strong and the sea ­frothing as we approached Sørkapp on the southern tip of the island of Svalbard. After our crossing from Tromsø, we finally spotted the snowy mountains on the horizon on day three. And a fresh breeze carried us to Bellsund, the first natural stopover on the archipelago’s northwest coast.

There had been some sacrifices to the sea along the way, but spirits were high as we dropped anchor at a spot specified in the guidebook. We immediately searched the terrain for polar bears but saw little more than bare mountains, snow and herds of reindeer.

A half-hour later, we decided to move on. After studying the map further, we found a new and better anchorage where we spent the night peacefully. Lesson learned. Guidebooks can be useful and have well-meaning recommendations, but sometimes it’s best to go with your instincts and what you find on your own.

Hornsund, where we ended up by using our own intuition, was one of the highlights of the trip, partly because of the good weather we enjoyed there that allowed everything from mountain hikes to paragliding to maneuvering around ice from calving glaciers. The polar bear tracks we saw on the dark sand beach made for plenty of excitement too, as we scanned the terrain with binoculars, sure we’d spotted the animals. But a closer look proved the shapes were just ­polar-bear-shaped boulders.

Soon enough, it was on to Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s population center and a most necessary stop on the journey for both provisioning and obtaining information from local acquaintances. Barba was moored modestly next to a number of steel and aluminum expedition boats. We were not to see any of them again as we pushed north.

Our first port of call out of Longyearbyen was Barentsburg, a small and cozy town inhabited nearly entirely by Russians and Ukrainians, which in many ways was more interesting than Longyearbyen because the contrast in living conditions was so different. The pier wasn’t the best here, but the reception was welcoming, and the local food and home-brewed beer ample. A modern sauna and the chance to walk around a city from a bygone era made it an absolute worthwhile stopover before heading into the truly wild areas of Svalbard.

Our route continued from there, north along the west coast of Spitsbergen, where we fed ourselves on fresh-caught deepwater cod, met our first walrus, and stopped for a few days in the international research settlement at Ny-Ålesund to refill the diesel and party into the ­midnight sun with scientists stationed there for the summer.

For cultural interest, Virgohamna Nordvest in Svalbard was an interesting stopover. A former Dutch whaling station, it’s the place to see the remnants of the equipment used to send off Salomon August Andrée and Walter Wellmans in their attempt to reach the North Pole by hot air balloon (a mission that turned out to be one with a one-way ticket).

The biggest highlight came when several of the crew decided to try spending the night on land in a tiny hunting cabin that was open for overnight stays. Daniel and I were charged with keeping watch on the boat, and when we went to shut the hatches for the night, we saw a polar bear stalking on land. The initial high of our first sighting was quickly replaced by nervousness, as the bear was slowly picking its way toward where the rest of the crew were sheltering for the night. But the majestic King of the Arctic soon headed off on an alternate route around the bay. Daniel and I marveled at the sight of him from the dinghy—I had sprung into action, shotgun in hand, in case of a potential encounter—while our mates were similarly impressed from their quarters ashore.

Svalbard accounts for 19 percent of Norway’s total landmass. The main island of Spitsbergen in the west is flanked by Nordaustlandet in the east and Barentsøya and Edgeøya islands in the south. Even though we had five weeks at our disposal to explore the archipelago, we were limited in what we could discover—there is just so much to see in this part of the world.

One of the many high points while sailing around Spitsbergen was finding a harbor where we could spend happy days as true adventurers under the never-ending midnight sun. Volumes of driftwood made building a fire a natural activity, and we even found waterways to fish that were positively teeming with Arctic char.

The landscapes here have the look of an Arctic desert, yet the contrast underwater is incredible—once you put on a mask, snorkel and drysuit to brave the freezing ocean temperatures. Colorful anemones decorate the sea bottom, along with all kinds of mollusks.

One morning in the northeastern reaches of Spitsbergen, I looked over my shoulder while pulling up anchor on an early watch. A couple of yards behind the boat, something giant was swimming in the flat water. The polar bear alarm was sounded, and it was suddenly all hands on deck.

A young male bear was approaching the boat, with breakfast in mind. We managed to keep him at bay with a large wooden pole intended to move ice away from the boat, slapping the water at times to startle the bear into keeping its distance, and yelling at the animal in Norwegian, English, German and Russian. The bear retreated in the end to a perch on a rock over the water, and seemed to watch us with both dismay and curiosity until we sailed out, bound for farther north still.

After studying ice and weather maps downloaded over satellite phone, we sailed past Sjuøyane, the last piece of land before the North Pole. And at 81 degrees north, Barba was finally halted by pack ice. Surrounded by frozen brine in every direction, we had finally met our limit—and realized our ultimate goal.

We piled out of the boat onto an ice floe the size of a basketball court, and broke out some schnapps from South Tyrol to celebrate. Two members of the crew suited up in their drysuits to go for a scuba dive—one of those things you most likely do just to say you’ve done it. The view below was endless blue, and small jellyfishlike creatures in the freezing cold water was all there was to see.

Later, as we retreated into the open water, we remembered the wise words of our Russian crewmember: It’s hard to sail to the Arctic, but even harder to sail back home again. An uptick in wind had made the ice shut in around us, and the radar showed that we were surrounded. The next couple of hours were spent slowly navigating our way out, pushing with those polar-bear-repelling wooden poles as Barba‘s fiberglass exterior groaned in trepidation.

After 56 days cruising, it was with a great sense of relief that we finally headed back south toward the green-clad mountains and warmer waters of mainland Norway.

But there were other highlights before we left Svalbard, including beluga whale sightings and the chance to sail past the Blåsvell Glacier that covers large parts of Nordustlandet. It is a continuous ice cap of some 8,500 square kilometers; Barba was dwarfed in front of its vertical ice wall looming some 30 meters high.

Moments like those, and many more, go down in the memory books for life. And when we finally made it back to the quay, which we’d last seen some four months earlier, the champagne awaiting us felt well-earned indeed.

The Barba expedition to Svalbard was intended to be an adventure, using the boat as a platform for close interaction with nature. It will never go into any history books of explorations. But in terms of boat and crew, we were pleased to cover some 4,040 nautical miles without damage to either. We had done it. We’d fended off polar bears, flew paragliders from mountain peaks where it had never before been done, and raised our glasses in a toast to adventure on an remote ice floe as far north as we could sail.

And then we’d made it back safely to where it all began.

Andreas Heide is a conservationist and marine biologist from Norway, and is currently preparing his sailboat Barba for an expedition to document whales in the North Atlantic.

Looking for Adventure?

Andreas Heide and Team Barba are planning a return voyage to Svalbard in 2020. They are currently looking for crewmembers, onshore support and partners for the project. If interested, contact Heide at barba.no.

Tips for Sailing to Svalbard

• A good anchor and windlass are high on the priority list. There’s good information online for what type of anchor is recommended in Svalbard. Aboard Barba, I use 100 feet of 8-millimeter chain (I limit it to this length because of weight) and an additional 300 feet of 18-millimeter line. Since that trip to Svalbard, I have upgraded to a Lofrans windlass and a 20-kilogram Spade anchor. I also carry a 3.2-kilogram Fortress anchor that I can attach in series with the spade anchor. And I have acquired an anchor sail to keep the bow to the wind.

• Undoubtedly the best guidebook for the area is The Norwegian Los, which is available for free online.

• The best ports of call not mentioned in the guidebook were found by studying charts and paying close attention to the weather ­forecast for upcoming days.

• To sail to Svalbard, you must apply for a permit with the governor, which is an affordable and straightforward process.

• A satellite phone is an absolute necessity for downloading ­weather files and ice maps.

• Condensation is a classic problem in the high latitudes. Insulate the mast with self-adhesive mats, use insulation under mattresses and along the hull, and be sure to have sufficient diesel on board to keep the boat heated.

• Polar bears inhabit the entire archipelago and are often hungriest during summer. Follow the instructions from the Norwegian Polar Institute on this matter, and there will likely never be a tragic outcome for bear or human should an encounter occur. When traveling outside Longyearbyen limits, it’s imperative to be armed with a powerful rifle in case of an encounter.

• It is recommended that cruisers have experience sailing in polar areas before passing the northernmost point of Spitsbergen. First-time adventurers in these environs should consider sticking to the west coast.

The post Sailing to Svalbard appeared first on Cruising World.

Ten years passes quickly. It’s hard to believe a decade has slipped by since the cold spring in Seattle in 2009 when we were just weeks away from setting out for a west-to-east attempt at the Northwest Passage aboard the 64-foot steel cutter called Ocean Watch. I had never experienced such a conflicting set of emotions, in equal measures anticipation and anxiety. It all seemed so audacious. And kind of, you know, dangerous.

My nervousness stemmed from the fact that, as a lapsed history major, I’d become obsessed with the literature and annals of the storied Arctic waters, particularly the chronicles of disaster. Figuratively speaking, I was the rubbernecked sap on the freeway who can’t avert his gaze from the terrible car crash. Which meant I was particularly infatuated by the awful tale of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition, perhaps the world’s greatest mystery of the mid-1800s. Thanks to a terrific new exhibition called “Death in the Ice” at Connecticut’s Mystic Seaport Museum, all of it — Franklin’s journey, and my own — has recently come rushing back.

It’s been a chilly stroll down icy memory lane. Once you’ve experienced the Northwest Passage, I’ve discovered, it’s like the Hotel California: You can check out, but you can never leave. The “Death in the Ice” traveling exhibit, created by the Canadian Museum of History, is just incredible. Following the showing in Mystic, it will be on display this summer from June through September at the Anchorage Museum in Alaska. If you’ve always wanted to visit Alaska but needed a little extra incentive, head north. It’s that good.

The Franklin Expedition was named after its leader, Sir John Franklin, who in May of 1845 set sail from Britain with two ships and 129 men to find and chart a course through the then theoretical “Northwest Passage” to Asia. Somehow, the notion of sailing vessels called Terror and Erebus (the dark region of Hades in Greek mythology) seemed like a swell idea. In any event, after a final sighting of the boats by some whalers in Baffin Bay at the passage’s eastern entry point in late July, 1845, Franklin’s entire party simply vanished. Gone. Poof.

Two years later, the first of what would become over three dozen search expeditions spanning some three decades was launched. Bit by bit, as fresh pieces of evidence were uncovered — a crewman’s letter left under a cairn, eyewitness accounts by Inuit hunters, abandoned campsites — the story emerged. Franklin’s death, the ships locked in ice, starving survivors, cannibalism; it wasn’t pretty. Then in 2014 and 2016, the sunken ships were discovered, and the mystery was fully solved once and for all.

Truth, as always, was stranger than fiction.

When we left Seattle in late May of 2009, headed north for the Arctic Circle and the legendary waters beyond, our fate was still unknown. The Northwest Passage was just the first stage of a planned trip “around the Americas,” from Seattle to Seattle, via Cape Horn, to promote awareness of ocean-health issues and climate change. The most daunting leg was the initial one. Would the ice permit us to pass Or would we become beset in it, like Franklin? It was all yet to unfold.

Nearly every day aboard Ocean Watch brought new adventures. By mid-July we’d made it through the surprisingly placid Bering Strait and reached Barrow, Alaska, at 70° N, having survived our initial harrowing encounter with the ice. The Northwest Passage loomed ahead, and soon enough, we were in it.

The landscape was flat, lunar. Polar bears came and went. On several occasions, we were literally stopped cold by the pack, our patience tested until new leads in the ice opened up. A successful transit was very much a tenuous matter. The pastel twilight was so beautiful it rendered us speechless. The local Inuit, after years of dealing with the consequences of warmer winters, were open and friendly but seemed wary of the future. The voyage itself took on its own all-encompassing life. There was nowhere else on the planet, only the present, the here and the now.

In late August, in a night I’ll never forget, we dodged the last icebergs and sailed down a dramatic corridor of snow-capped peaks lining Navy Board Inlet and into the small village of Pond Inlet at the tip of Baffin Island. Lo and behold, the Northwest Passage was behind us. It was, and remains, difficult to comprehend.

Unlike Franklin and his doomed mates, we’d made it. We were the lucky ones.

Herb McCormick is CW’s executive editor. For more on the voyage of Ocean Watch, visit its website.

The post Off Watch: Confronting Terror appeared first on Cruising World.

The ice is in charge up there in the arctic. It’s what we’d said from the very beginning. As we researched routes and talked to friends about the journey, our plans and dreams were based on a declared contingency: “we’ll sail to the Mediterranean, assuming we make it through the Northwest Passage”; “if we get through the ice, we might winter over in Iceland”. It was an outward reminder that underlying each assumption of what we wanted to do was the truth: the ice is in charge up there.

But in February, when a record warm front pushed across the Northwest and melted over 50% of the sea ice in the Bering Sea, and when the scientific graphs continued to state boldly that every decade we are losing 13% of the ice in the arctic, and when there was a clear route from Barrow to Cambridge Bay at the end of June (five or six weeks earlier than usual), it was hard to believe we wouldn’t be able to get through. I continued to include the contingency with my statements, but I will admit I didn’t really believe it.

I knew sailing through the Northwest Passage would be hard and cold and sometimes frustrating. But I also knew we had a rockstar crew, a stout boat and knowledgeable resources to help us. I felt confident we would persevere through the hard stuff and celebrate it all when we arrived in Greenland. This confidence was bolstered by the early predictions of warm temperatures and an “easy” ice year.

I didn’t linger on the “what ifs” of not achieving our goals. Instead I imagined watching polar bears ply the shoreline (from a safe distance). I imagined sailing past towering icebergs bigger than houses. I imagined standing on the bow, laughing in amazement at beluga whales feeding and frolicking nearby. I imagined the sweet taste of success after overcoming immense challenges and discomfort.

But reality was something quite different.

The reality was that despite record melting early in the year, the summer season found sections of the passage choked with ice driven south and stubbornly unmoving. It seems logical that the warmer temperatures and melting sea ice would reveal an easier passage, but it turns out the opposite can also be true. Instead of a single solid ice sheet that backs away from the northern shore during the summer, the warmer temperatures break up the ice sheet, spreading defiant chunks of ice across the water that range in size from a teacup to a city bus. These chunks act on the whims of invisible currents, but rarely in a predictable manner. Instead of a narrow band of navigable water between an ice sheet and the shore of northern Alaska, this year there was an unpredictable mass of swirling ice in every direction. The reality is we still don’t understand the changes that the arctic is undergoing.

We encountered these floating chunks of ice immediately upon rounding Point Barrow and entered the northwest passage. Sometimes we sailed easily among sporadic chunks dotting mostly clear water and sometimes we had to pick our way through a thick stew of churning ice. For a month, we paced from anchorage to anchorage, occasionally spending sleepless nights defending our anchor chain from ice slabs. Bundled from head to toe against the biting winds, we wandered along one sandy spit after the other, skipping rocks and watching for polar bears under heavy grey skies. We started running out of time in the season, and the ice stew in front of us refused to budge. Along with our daily ice reports, harrowing stories rolled in from other boats attempting the passage. One got caught in unexpectedly thick ice and anchored to an iceberg that broke free in 50 knots of wind. One was nearly driven up onto the rocks when a fast-moving ice slab ensnared their anchor chain, forcing them to cut away their ground tackle. Nobody was making much progress.

Finally, we made the torturous decision. We bowed in deference to the ice in front of us, tucked our tail, and rain west. It was devastating, but it was the prudent decision for us. As we retreated, the ice repots didn’t get any better and updates from other boats didn’t hold any new optimism. Just two days into our retreat, the truly terrifying news filtered in that a boat had sunk on the east side of the passage, its side hove in by ice. The crew spent 11 hours huddled on an iceberg before being rescued by a helicopter. The news sent shudders through our crew and reinforced what I had been working hard to convince myself: we made the right choice to turn back.

This was not the year for DogBark! to transit the Northwest Passage. In fact, it was not the year for most boats to transit the Northwest Passage. In the end, of the 21 boats that attempted the passage from either side, only two were able to complete the passage, and both spent weeks trapped in thick unforgiving ice.

Substantiating our weak conviction in the contingencies we had stated aloud for so long, our plans did not include options for ending the summer season on the west coast of the US. So, we had to improvise. One night, when retreat was starting to feel inevitable, we unfurled a chart across the table and focused our attention on the west side of the continent. With all of the initial options off the table (Greenland, Iceland, Nova Scotia, Portugal), we discussed new possibilities, weather and timing. After pondering a winter in Alaska or a passage strait to Hawaii or a marathon run to Mexico, there was a unanimous vote for Hawaii.

Once our decision was made, we moved fast to get out of the arctic. In three days, we had sailed south of the arctic circle, leaving the endless cold grey days and aggravating swirling ice and uncharted sandy spits behind. In those three sad days, we backtracked across four weeks of waiting and worrying and watching, past the long hours of intense navigating, through the baited anticipation and the dashed hopes. Just like that, we were out of the arctic and on our way south.

As we sailed out of Alaska and around the Pacific High, the decision felt righter and righter every day. The crew relaxed and shed layers of jackets and disappointment. Watches got immeasurably easier with the warm breezes, deep water and obvious lack of ice. Dreams of lush green hillsides and fresh coconuts soon supplanted fears of icebergs and polar bears.

The ice is in charge up there, and we know that now better than ever. Sailing in the arctic is humbling and intense and beautiful and scary and frigid and inspiring. We learned new things about each other, our own fortitude, and our planet, and it probably won’t be our last arctic adventure. It seems likely that another year will find us bundling up and sailing north to transit the northwest passage…if the ice allows it, of course.

The post Journey Through the Northwest Passage: The Ice is in Charge appeared first on Cruising World.