And if I haven’t had time to update this blog lately, dear Reader: be comforted! It’s because I’ve been so busy doing things to blog about now. You remember the fairing that was going on in the last blog post; you’ll be glad to hear that by now it’s mostly done, by dint of chipping …
For the enthusiastic boater, that last little bit of autumn when the daytime temperature still gets above fifty degrees is always a rush. As long as paint, resin, varnish, or fairing compound will cure, it’s a great time to get a head start on things so that next spring the launch can be earlier, or …
I wondered, as Polar Sun rolled downwind across the Beaufort Sea along the cold, cold northern coast of Alaska, whether integrating back into normal life after the Northwest Passage would be easy. I could see it both ways: perhaps just to arrive, unpack, fire up the truck and head off to the boatyard to rustle …
It was as if the world had run out of interesting, that week or two after we got out of the ice at Pasley Bay, and tied Polar Sun up inside the harbor of Gjoa Haven, a little sandy inlet in the greater sandbar that is King William Island. We now had to do some …
We weren’t expecting to get out of Pasley Bay on our last day there, and we very nearly didn’t. The wind had died in the night, and the small bits of open sea between the floes were skinned over with ice. The air was warm though, with strong sunshine. By a stroke of luck we …
“Well,” we thought. “Here we are again!” I’m talking, of course, about the south arm of Pasley Bay, where the pack ice closing up in the last blog post had herded us as neatly as if it had been planned. There was nothing to worry about, really; the pack was busy filling up the northwest …
It was cold as Polar Sun motored at length into the spacious bay behind Beechey Island, and we were grateful there was no wind to further chill the person who ventured out of the enclosure to drop anchor a couple hundred yards from shore. The coolness was no wonder: we were above 74 degrees of …
The tricky thing about expectations is that no matter how well you lay them out with the best information at hand, they rarely resemble the reality you’re ultimately confronted with. We had arrived in Ilulissat fully expecting the Baffin Bay ice pack to dissipate by early August so we could casually sail over to the …
We didn’t spend a whole lot of time in Aasiaat. To begin with, it wasn’t nearly as charming as Sisimiut, and we had a few stops to make in Disko Bay before settling the boat into Ilulissat for a two-week stopover. Then of course Rudy and Renan, the camera guys, were keen on getting some …
Nothing I had ever read or heard had led me to believe that the weather in Nuuk, Greenland, would be pleasant. Yet even with lowered expectations, the decided harshness of the weather was astonishing. During the entire week of our stay, it was seaboots and foulies nearly any time we were outdoors, and if you …