A harrowing firsthand recollection of sailing from Maine to Alaska on a boat meant for the Caribbean.
There are certain things in life for which no amount of research can prepare you — ventures of such breathtaking vastness, that when compared to any previous experience, the spirit would quail knowing what the mind can’t fathom.
For me the biggest of these was the transit of the Northwest Passage, from Maine to Alaska in an ’80s vintage fiberglass cruising boat, Polar Sun. It had no insulation, paltry tankage, and a threadbare canvas enclosure barely clinging to its frame, limiting access to winches and visibility.
After I returned, people would ask, “Well, how was it?,” as if a 6,000-mile voyage from one ocean to another across the frozen top of the world could be described in a sentence or two.
Finally I settled on answering, “It was long.” After all, by the time we wearily tied Polar Sun to a dock in Nome, Alaska, we’d been away for 112 days.
Even “long” falls short of description. We did a late-season mad dash along the north coast of Alaska, around Point Barrow, and south toward the Bering Sea. And even though the greatest danger — pack ice — was never closer than 20 miles offshore, a wind shift to the northwest could have easily fetched it down to close off the inhospitable coast.
We’d seen enough ice to avoid messing around near it in darkness. For the previous months, as we sailed from Maine to Greenland to the Arctic Archipelago, our ice encounters had happened in daylight. The first bergs we saw were at the far end of the Straits of Belle Isle near the Labrador coast.
Iceberg charts give the number of bergs in each square degree, and if the number is, say, two or four, the chances of meeting one as you pass through that degree are slim. Further up the Labrador coast, there were numbers like 25. That made it an easy choice to head straight across the Labrador Sea for Greenland.
There were surprisingly few bergs as we crossed the Davis Strait toward Nuuk, Greenland: one as Labrador fell off astern, and one as we neared land on the other side. At Aasiaat, on the south edge of Disko Bay, iceberg frequency increased, and the bay itself was a wonderland of ice.
There had been some question about whether the Northwest Passage should be attempted without a metal boat. Having built, repaired, and cruised plenty of fiberglass boats, I had no concerns about a solid laminate in ice. In the end it didn’t matter — Polar Sun was our boat for the trip.
It’s inevitable to shoulder aside small “bergy bits” and brash ice as you wind through the ice barrier on the approach to Ilulissat, situated next to the “Icefjord” from which most of Greenland’s icebergs proceed. In anticipation of that I had made some ice poles for the trip: 10-foot laminated Doug fir handles with a spike cut from some leftover bronze plate stock. They came in handy when a man on the bow shoved aside bigger bits of ice that couldn’t be avoided.
Icebergs are relatively easy to deal with: they usually paint a good radar target and are visible from afar. The debris they slough off can be counted on to drift away to leeward. The pack ice we encountered on the crossing from Ilulisaat to Baffin Island is far more sinister. For a few weeks before the crossing we’d been watching the daily NASA satellite photos and the ice charts published by the Canadian ice service. The latter express ice coverage and density by means of shapeless colored blobs, with a lettered code to a key giving more details. Even as we left Greenland behind there was still a red blob, signifying 9/10ths coverage, extending as far as 73 ½° North. Skirting the edge of it as close as possible, we had our first look at this new danger.
The ice pack appears as a loose jumble of floes, the newer bits cleaner and flatter, the older bits eroded into humps and scoops. The ice charts code the density in tenths, with anything up to 5/10ths passable by a cruising boat. Anything from there to 9/10ths effectivley halts progress.
We were surprised to find the ice pack so far north in early August. Historically the “Whaler’s Route,” much further north into Melville Bay, then west into Lancaster Sound, was the only possible way across, but the trend of the last decade or so has been for the ice to clear further south a little earlier. We had hoped for a fast and ice-free crossing of Baffin Bay but our projected four-day crossing turned into seven when we had to go far north. A headwind sprang up just as Polar Sun rounded the icepack, forcing us to fall off to the southwest, and fetch the Baffin coast, a day’s sail south of Pond Inlet.
There was more pack ice blocking the coast, sparse enough to motor through without resorting to poles, dense enough to dampen the heavy swell that was running from the north. Pack ice can sneak up on a boat quickly. It gives no significant radar return and forward-looking sonar (FLS) can’t detect it. We were among the first floes, doing 8 knots while we thought we still had plenty of time to strike sail and get the engine on.
Ice aside, there were also navigational difficulties. Things aren’t thoroughly charted and many potential anchorages and shortcuts are inaccessible. Even with the FLS, approaching a rock-bound coast to anchor was ticklish. Then the compass, sluggish already since crossing the Arctic Circle, becomes useless near the Baffin Coast, and only gradually returns to duty in the Beaufort Sea. Finally, the perpetual daylight precludes star and planet shots with the sextant.
I kept a decent running fix during most of the trip, using sextant shots and bearings. When the magnetic compass became unreliable, had a chance to practice with a pelorus. I wanted to use it to find True North. This involved reducing a sextant shot of the sun, extracting the azimuth, and sighting the sun with the pelorus set to the azimuth.
We wound up trapped in pack ice for nine days inside of Pasley Bay. When we finally managed to battle out of the bay, we nearly got trapped again by a narrow, dense tongue of ice drifting out from the Victoria Strait toward the Boothia Peninsula.
That nine days in Pasley Bay made the season late. Even if we pushed nonstop and conditions were perfect, we still had 2,000 miles to cover. Several crew had to leave and we were down to two aboard for the 600 miles from Cambridge Bay to Tuktoyaktuk, where a relief crew arrived.
We got around Point Barrow, Alaska’s north-most point, with a lucky east wind in just the nick of time; a week after we rounded, it froze solid. After sheltering in the lee of Point Hope while Typhoon Merbok’s remains wreaked havoc just south of us, we got clobbered approaching the Bering Strait.
If it wasn’t for Nome, Alaska, we’d have had nowhere to go. The Bering Sea is notorious for bad weather all year, and more so as autumn advances. After being thoroughly scrubbed by the typhoon, we had one day of calm before a southerly gale piped up to slam the coast again.
There probably isn’t a good time to cross the Bering Sea, but there are worse times, and this would have been one of them. Grateful that we could leave the boat in Nome, we flaked the sails, moused out the halyards, and headed home.
People ask, “Are you glad you did it?,” after I struggle to briefly describe the most dangerous voyage I’ve ever been on. And I can honestly answer that I am glad — the Northwest Passage was worth it — but I don’t ever need to do it again. ν