Leg 7: Baffin Island

August 4:

We fueled up at a tiny dock about 10 feet square purposely built with no cleats to tie to so one person had to hold onto the boat, a design that I suppose was to discourage loitering.  We moved to the commercial dock which because of the low tide towered 10 feet above us.  Water was delivered in 5 gallon cans by a friend of the woman who offered us showers and we lowered them to the boat with a rope.  Hoping  to take advantage of a fair breeze we left Qeqertarsuaq  (Godhavn) by 10 in the morning bound for Baffin Island.  The wind did not last however and by afternoon we were under power again.  On the positive side, the light wind gave Marina the opportunity to create a great spaghetti dinner with chocolate mousse for dessert.  Then came the rain, not a downpour, but a light drizzle that lasted all night so by morning it had thoroughly soaked through my tired Gortex gear that was starting to grow mold from being wet for 2 months.  For the next day and a half whenever the rain let up and hopes rose that we could dry off, the fog settled in to keep the moisture content at the saturation point.

I was collecting water samples on this two and a half day transect from Disko to Cape Dyer and was monitoring the continually decreasing water temperature.  As we approached Baffin Is, it dropped to 3 degrees C.   No wonder the air was getting colder.

The sky cleared in the evening and we could see Cape Dyer on Baffin island while still 55 miles out.  We sailed through the night and next day along the coast of Baffin Island.

We were all on deck all day watching the barren rocky coast of Baffin Island go by.  We anchored for the night in a cove on the south side of Exeter Sound.  Position 66 degrees 1.7 minutes North, 62 degrees 1.8 minutes West.   In the morning I went for a hike, stopping every few paces to check for polar bears.  Marina had instilled a healthy fear of them with her tales of people being eaten on Spitsbergen.  I had only a flare gun for protection which I did not have much faith in so I tried to stay on the ridges so I could see a long way in all directions.  It works fine except for getting up to the first ridge when my imagination created images of a bear waiting just out of sight on the other side. 

We left there for Hoar Bay taking a route inside the outer islands.  We got used to sailing in water where there were no soundings on the chart.  The GPS was also only good for a general outline of the area since the charting has not been updated to match GPS data.  According to the plotter we often plowed through the middle of a mile wide island (praises for steel boats).  It is truly a land of ice and rocks.  Only a rare clump of grass or moss survives the winter.  Lichens rule.  We anchored in a cove on Ilikok island lat. 65d 16.5mN lon. 63d 13.2mW, an even more barren island than our last stop.

The next day we headed south again along the coast until we ran into sea ice at Cape Mercy.  We skirted the denser pack, dodging and waving through the outer fringe looking for polar bears.  We did not find any but did find 3 adult walrus and two calves on the ice.  They did not let us get very close, but it was a treat to see them.  The ice was in the vicinity of a number of poorly charted reefs and there was a large swell running, moving the ice about and breaking on the reefs, all of which made it an exciting morning. 

We cleared the ice and headed for Loks Land where we expected to encounter ice again before crossing Frobisher Bay.  A minor low pressure system came through bringing wind from the north and we ran wing-and-wing through the night of drizzle and shifty winds.  Nothing in our past experience came close to the variability of the winds.  For the next 2 days the wind speed would vary from less than 10 knots to over 30 knots with direction changes up to 45 degrees.  These were not just gusts, but increases in speed that would last for between 20 minutes and a few hours. 

We encountered ice again at the point before Frobisher bay but it seemed less than the ice charts showed so we thought the ice might have been moved by the strong winds of the night.  It was just a teaser and in the end we had to divert to the east to get around the pack.  This time we saw no walrus or bears.  After several hours of slowly motoring through the ice we set a course for Resolution Island and Labrador, sailing close hauled on starboard tack with the wind building in its variable way to peak at 35 knots.  A bouncy and uncomfortable night.  As we approached Resolution Island, the wind shifted allowing us to head straight for a lone navigation light on the island.  We were all fed up with going to windward and thought it would be a good rest stop.  When we got to within 5 miles, however, we we could see a white band along the black horizon.  I persisted in sailing closer to see if there were any breaks in the pack even though Marina was convinced even from a distance that we could not get through.  In the end she was right and we had to turn east and follow along the edge of the pack hoping to find a break or an end to the ice.  The ice forecast predicted a plume of ice coming from Baffin Island and arcing most of the way across the 90 mile strait between Baffin Island and Labrador, but leaving open water to the east. As we got to a thin section just at the first light of dawn, I was looking for a way through and saw a large fishing trawler coming in the opposite direction.  I jibed and headed through the path the trawler had just opened.  This was easy I thought, but as I was approaching clear water on the other side of the flow I had to thread between two small icebergs that were gradually closing the path.  At that moment the wind chose to do one of its instant shut downs and we slowly drifted in between the two bergs and were hit from both sides at once with a resounding crunch that brought the off-watch on deck to see what we hit (and who was the inept driver).  Two hits at once, that was a record for the trip.  Hopefully there was no more damage than some missing paint.  Free again we set a course for Labrador another 60 miles to the south.