Story and Photos By Rebecca Hayter
Me. The Northwest Passage. You’re kidding, right?
People say that sailing around the world is the Everest of sailing; well the North West Passage is the K2 of sailing – even worse. If I pant too hard in freezing conditions, the pilot book told me, I might get frostbite on my lungs. If our boat hits the wrong kind of ice, it could rip apart the yacht’s hull. Some kinds of ice are ok to hit, but the differences are visually subtle and need to recognised within a second or two. And, if there is an unfortunate misunderstanding, I could up in a polar bear’s picnic.
The trouble is I am friends with Ross Field: two-time winner of the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race – once as crew on Steinlager with Peter Blake and once as skipper on Yamaha. He has adult ADHD, which means that what would normally be a crazy but harmless idea can suddenly become reality. Hence, I got a text: “Do you want to do the North West Passage with me?”
“No,” I texted back.
After 40 years of ocean racing and a crash off an ocean wave that broke his back in two places, Ross had given up professional sailing to take up something easy like expedition cruising. Officially a pensioner, he was adamant that he wouldn’t be sailing upwind or heeling over at more than 15 degrees.
No upwind sailing, huh? Hey, I’m in.
Twelve-hundred miles after leaving UK, we were off the coast of Greenland. The pilot book had said to clear its lowest point, Kap Farvel (Cape Farewell) by 120 miles because within that zone is where icebergs, strong currents and huge waves meet to sort out their differences. Thanks for the tip, but staying clear had put us onto a horrible sideways angle to other huge waves. When I saw Ross’s eyes go wide as he looked over his shoulder and yelled: “Hang on!” I clung to the cockpit table and swung onto the best fairground ride I’ve ever had.
Over 12 hours and in winds up to 40 knots, we had several more, wild rides in which a great mass lumbered up behind us, picked up Rosemary’s hard chine bum and pushed her forward like a sled on a ski slope, chasing valleys, sliding across hills. I’m pretty sure we broke the 15-degree rule. ‘How’s this going to end?’ I’d wonder. It was always the same: a sway back to equilibrium, a steady course as Rosemary prepared for the next wave.
The autopilot couldn’t keep up with the strong forces required of the rudder so Nick and Ross shared the helm through the night. I tried to balance my time between making them hot drinks and food, and sleeping so that when calm weather came, I could take over and let them rest.
The noise… the screaming whirr of the windvane, the wind that roared against the tiny bit of staysail and double-reefed main. I’ve heard people liken monster waves to freight trains and now I heard the Midnight Express roaring past my station – or not. Occasionally the brakes failed and it smashed against the hull beside me in my port aft berth, rolling me into the bulkhead: boomph. It sounded worse than it was; the aluminium hull was a drum. Once there was a mighty deluge from above and yelps of indignation from Ross and Nick as the cockpit filled and drained.
The other noise was a history lesson on the Battle of Britain. Ross was reading a tome about it and had become an expert. I was trying to sleep but I couldn’t help straining my ear muscles as he and Nick wandered about in history… “Hitler got it wrong, didn’t he?” “Chamberlain was an idiot, eh?” I squirmed my memory muscles back to Stage 2 History at university.
The Battle of Britain finally called a ceasefire when Ross went to bed. Nick was helming when we caught another wild ride, on and on through swathes of sound. Now there was a new noise. Quiet. Regular. Swish-a-donk.
Almost quiet enough that I could stay in my warm bunk. Almost pretend the noise wasn’t there. Swish-a-donk.
Sod it. I pushed myself up from the sway of the boat and scrambled into my seaboots as I heard Nick call that a jerry can had fallen over the side, still tied on. Ross rolled out of his bassinette – my name for this pilot berth amidships – and took the helm as Nick kitted up and unzipped the clears to the storm outside. I watched him, keeping Ross up with progress.
If all this sounds awfully calm for someone who was over-anxious about polar bears just paragraphs ago, calmness was my standout impression of this passage. When I sailed across the Pacific 20 years ago, I was constantly anxious. If it was bad weather, I was scared it would get worse. If it was good weather, I just knew it would get worse.
Part of my new-found calm is simply how I’ve evolved in those 20 years but it was also testament to Rosemary’s 25 tonnes, 55ft of solid aluminium hull, and Ross’s thorough refit. In 5000 ocean miles, we never heard that dreaded “Bang!” followed by: shitwhatwasthat? Many times, I would return to Rosemary at the dock to find someone standing there, wistfully: “You could go anywhere in that boat.” It was a good feeling.
But our force eight storm – as they call them in the Northern Hemisphere – was behind us and all we had to do was trot a mere 500 miles up the coast of Greenland to its capital, Nuuk. I once wrote that in Croatia they do weird things with consonants; in Greenland they do weird stuff with vowels.
Greenland is the largest island in the world and has never been circumnavigated, although global warming may change that, so 500 miles is not far, relative to the coastline. We stayed well out to sea to avoid icebergs known to be drifting off the coast, on the advice of the Danish Meteorological Institute.
To the east, we could see the tops of mountains jagged against the sky that fired to burnt orange and purple hues as midnight approached. A few degrees to the east, the jags drifted in the softer reds and cool pinks of dawn. It was though as the sun were dipping and rising in different places at the same time, a phenomenon of a two-hour night.
Rosemary’s wheel turned and aimed us straight for those jagged silhouettes. “What the hell are you doing?” That was Ross.
“I didn’t do anything.” That was me.
He pushed the autopilot to standby, brought it back on course: due North, 000. He put it back to autopilot. Within seconds, the wheel spun hard to port.
As the manual for the autopilot would patiently explain, in high latitudes the magnetic dip of the Earth’s surface comes in at a shallower angle and can affect compasses. Yes, we knew that. This can affect autopilots, especially if heading due north. We didn’t know that.
I hand steered as Ross and Nick tried different theories to convince the autopilot that north was the way to go. In the bright light of day, I spied our first iceberg, a mighty ship of crystalline perfection. The blunt black bow of a pilot whale rose to split the water of smooth-satin blue. So this was Arctic sailing.
Downwind of the icebergs floated growlers that had broken away like errant children. They sparkled like Christmas as our wake licked their curves. “What are growlers? Baby polar bears?” a friend emailed from New Zealand after one of my reports.
Cute, but these growlers had potentially even bigger bites than polar bears. Maybe enough to chomp through Rosemary’s 20mm hull or nibble at her propeller blades. No probs though, they were easy to miss. Then we met the fog.
I knelt for hours on aching knees leaning forward in the pilothouse, peering into the grey air as waves built in the shallower waters over the Danas Bank. If I saw white water breaking, I looked again. If it was still breaking, it was a growler.
“Icebergs go away at night,” Ross said, a Whitbread witticism, but there was no night. Ross didn’t seem worried enough, so I had to worry for both of us. He sent me below. I made him promise to keep a lookout and fell exhausted onto the saloon settee.
I woke to a scream so terrible that icebergs shattered. It was me.
The world had crashed on to my head. From the bookcase above me, the huge Atlas in its cardboard sheath had come down to punch my face as we came off a wave. I picked up the effing Atlas and threw it across the effing saloon. Ross leaned down from the helm to chide me but realised he had a tired growler onboard and he better be careful she didn’t turn into a polar bear. An hour later, I dragged myself up to the pilothouse. Our worthy skipper was snoring at the helm. Growlers all around.
Greenland excels at fog around its coastline. For two days, Rosemary motored through a world of monotony, mapped only by the chartplotter. We obediently followed its black lines between the menace of islands shapeless in the fog and aimed the brown course line from our tiny boat icon on the chartplotter screen down the narrow confines of the shipping channel to Nuuk.
Rosemary emerged like a magician walking through a curtain. The sky was striking blue; the mountains were a drama of black and white. It was as though the sea had risen thousands of metres to float us up to the shoulders of monoliths. We were on a yacht, but we were among the mountains of Greenland.
In Ireland, Rosemary’s bare aluminium hull had been a rebel among the fibreglass hulls of recreational sailing; in Nuuk Harbour she was a fully patched member of the gang. In the following days more bare-aluminium expedition yachts arrived wearing their wind vanes and jerry cans like boy scout badges. One was badly wounded – she had cut the corner at Kap Farvel.
I loved the solid scruffiness of Nuuk’s fishing fleet. Fishing boats the world over are stolid and dependable but Greenland’s carvel planked fishing boats are sturdier than most and munch growlers for breakfast. Some of the fishing boats were small ships and, naïve soul that I am, I didn’t realise these included whaling ships. Until I figured that out, I loved them. I was brought up on fishing boats: fish guts and diesel smell like love and integrity to me.
The mountains were pristine, but litter straddled everywhere and black ravens ravaged rubbish sacks like extras in an Agatha Christie movie. Within a week, the rustic charm would wear thin but for now it was wonderfully intrepid to tie up to a Polish yacht which was tied up to an Italian ketch which was tied up to a rusty, oily crane barge.
“Six fat men and three pretty girls,” the Pole boomed, accurately describing himself in his tracksuit. He gulped his beer.
He told us that checking in would be a two-hour process between Customs, Police… Customs, Police. I climbed up to the barge, tried to avoid the puddles on its deck that shimmered with diesel and, from its stern, stretched out my foot to hook into the ladder to the wharf. The water a metre beneath my feet was 4.5 degrees Celsius – an effective health and safety regime. When you know that you’ll be a human ice block if you fall in, you don’t.
Nuuk’s population is 16,500 of the 70,000 country’s population. We walked into town: sparse, gravelled. A dismal cemetery of crooked white crosses. How do they bury their dead in winter? I wondered. Wait for summer?
Random flights of steps climbed rocks on the hillsides, ready to get people home during the dark of winter’s snows. It was mid-summer but there were few blades of grass: more than half of Greenland is green, but only when it is written down.
Perhaps the dearth of colour is why they paint their wooden houses bold block colours: forest green, ruby red, deep sea blue and solid gold. In a country without a single tree, the houses are built in timber.
Large, Inuit-style sculptures of igloo people and polar bears hulked at wide plazas where modern buildings sat among neglected blocks of accommodation. Entrances to shop fronts featured the metal grids of ski lodges and even the babies’ prams were like all-terrain vehicles. The people of Inuit descent walked bow-legged like hunters; the Greenlanders, descended from Vikings, had lighter skin and softer features but were mostly dark haired. I had expected more blonds, reflecting the guardianship of Denmark.
The policeman was tall, blond and film-star handsome. He flicked casually through our passports, thumped a stamp on each and handed them back.
“Do we have to see Customs?” Ross asked.
“Do you have anything to declare? Weapons?”
“No.” The policeman shrugged. It takes two hours to clear Poles; five minutes to clear New Zealanders. Local knowledge, he said, was that the North West Passage would not open this year.
We didn’t know that either.
© Rebecca Hayter
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