North Solo

SAILING ALONE ACROSS A CHANGING ARCTIC

adventures in A small boat across THE ARCTIC wilderness

Act 1 - Arctic Dreams

I’ve always been a lucky guy. Pretty much my whole life I got paid to take pictures. I married late in life to a better woman than I ever deserved, and have settled into a routine of dog walks and cocktail hour and domestic contentment.

Some nights, though, the old itch returned

After dinner, cocktail in hand, I climbed the stairs to my office, sat down at the computer, and began my search again. This longing has haunted me for years; quest to change my life into something more grand, more dangerous, more adventurous.

I logged onto the website, typed in my preferences from memory, and began to scroll through the offerings. Most were the same old story, out of my class, or beneath even my tattered dignity. But then, I saw her. A little rough around the edges, and some hard miles on her, but still. Maybe, just maybe, there’d be some connection there. A spark.

The rest is a bit of a blur. A perfunctory response, but signs of interest. Pictures sent. More questions. Short notes flew back and forth, twice, sometimes three times a day.

My heart quickened. Could she be the one?

Suddenly there was talk of buying a ticket, getting on a plane, a personal meet-up. But first, my bank account information. I knew love like this wasn’t free, but the cost seemed just a little too cheap; the bargain reached a little too easily.

I wanted to know she was real, so I grabbed my phone and went for a walk around the block. “Just heading down to the store, honey. I think we’re out of milk,” I hollered upstairs to my wife. Then I stepped outside to dial an unfamiliar, foreign area code. I chatted with her “broker,” amicable and reassuring, but with a sense of newfound urgency. “You’re making the right decision, but you better move quick. I’m not supposed to tell you, but there is another guy ready to fly out next weekend; I know he’s interested. Heck if you don’t take her, I just might.”

And with that, the hook was set. I had just received a not-inconsiderable windfall. Not a fortune, but by some cosmic coincidence almost the exact amount needed to consummate the deal.

I did sleep on it, knowing that, for good or ill, I would be changing my life inalterably. In the morning, I showered and dressed, then walked through the bank lobby’s doors and sent $18,000 winging off into the ether.

And even before I pulled the trigger, I regretted it. But the money was gone, and she was mine.

The “she” in question was a twenty-year-old, 43-foot long steel-hulled sailboat named Ocean View. Located more than three thousand miles away from my home in Seattle, she sat in another country, on a different ocean, along the shores of distant Nova Scotia in Canada’s Maritime provinces. She sounded more like a down at the heels beach rental than a vessel for battering ice and crossing oceans.

For years, I dreamed of buying a proper expedition yacht to explore arctic waters on my own. And now, for my sins, I owned one.

Act 2 - Welcome to Boat World

After flying across the continent, my turn came at Canadian immigration. I strode up, handed over my worn blue passport, and made a conscious effort to turn my eyes into perfectly blameless blanks.

“What brings you to Canada?”

“I bought a boat up here.”

“But your passport says you live in Seattle. Why’d you buy a boat all the way out here?”

“Funny. My wife asks that same question.”

Evidence to the contrary, I’m not a complete idiot. I asked a friend of a friend, a sailor of some note in Nova Scotia, to give the boat a once over. He pointed out some issues, ripples in the hull’s steel, a bit of rust, common problems with a home-built boat. Nothing a weekend with a steel brush and a can of paint couldn’t take care of.

Sailors are, by their nature, optimists. My friend was no exception.

I stepped off the plane in Halifax, stopped off at the hardware store for the prescribed steel brush and quart of paint, before finally setting eyes on the boat of my dreams.

My heart did not sing with joy.

I started out gamely enough. attacking patches of rust, and painting them over. But I already sensed this was only the first of many, many coats of lipstick that I would be applying to this particular pig.

If I started out knowing nothing about sailboats, Ocean View would be my school. I started with low hanging fruit. Grinding off rust and slapping on a new coat. When new rust bled through, I took her down to bare metal and started over.

The electrical system, a random rat’s nest of random wires held together with electrical tape and wishful thinking, I tore out miles of the stuff, replacing it with my own tangle of overpriced, marine-grade wiring.

I got to know the strange and terrible beauty of power tools. Showers of sparks flew from my grinder. Clouds of toxic paint, too. I became a fixture in the small town’s hardware store, and a not-unfamiliar familiar patron at the emergency room, too.

But slowly, an expedition yacht began to take shape. New radar on the mast. Powerful electric windlass to haul up my new anchor and chain. Depth sounder and state of the art GPS chart plotters.

I had everything I needed, except the slightest clue of how to sail the damn thing.

Act 3 - Steep Learning Curve

Though I’d banged around on small power boats for years, I knew nothing of sailboats that I hadn’t picked up by osmosis. I’d read dozens of books describing grand yachting adventures, arctic, antarctic, and every latitude in between.

I’d idly watched charter skippers hauling lines, cranking winches, performing all manner of inscrutable manual labor with a drink in one hand and curse on their lips, all in the service of expedition boats.

On no planet in the known universe did this mean I was prepared or even remotely qualified to single-hand a 20-ton floating death trap across arctic waters.

And yet, one sunny summer day, the lift truck rolled up, and they dragged all 43-feet of steel and wishful thinking down to the water line, stuck around just long enough to be sure the boat floated, then cast me adrift.

It went about as well as you’d expect. I scraped the dock. I scraped bottom. I headed toward shore and scraped some rocks for good measure. Setting out on a sunset cruise, I climbed down steps to the swim platform and fell overboard. With one hand on the ladder, I scrambled soaked and cold and just a little surprised at how close I’d come to death.

It slowed me down…not at all. I stripped off my soaking clothes, toweled down, waved to the folks on shore, and kept right on going.

In my spare time I continued to slap on paint, wire in electronics, bolt on gear, until all the money was gone. I guessed that meant it was time to go. I set sail, steering north and east out of the protected bay that had served as our home waters for the first time. I rounded a low cape and sailed into unsheltered North Atlantic, and deep ocean waves rolled into greet me.

It turns out I posses at least one superpower. I’m not a puker. Throw the gnarliest seas you want at me and I’ll grumble, I’ll whimper, I’ll wave my arms and scream like a little girl, but I won’t get seasick. If you plan on haplessly bobbing around the North Atlantic for months at a time, that turns out to be a very useful skill.

Ocean View rolled and wallowed in brisk onshore winds. I raised the mainsail without too much drama. Then hanked on my small jib. Upside down. I had some learning to do.

Every day brought new lessons. Storm handling. Anchor handling. But foremost in mind was the care and feeding of my enfeebled Perkins diesel engine. Bolted directly to the steel boat frame, every vibration rumbled through the boat, up my spine, and bounced around my skull. It proved deafening, and exhausting.

Act 4 - SIGNS AND PORTENTS

I traveled well ahead of the summer tourist and yacht traffic. Already cold, the weather turned blustery as well. On my VHF I heard yelling on the marine radio down below. I expected it was kids pulling a prank, and I went down below to listen in as the Coast Guard gave them hell.

Instead, I heard a woman’s repeated calls of “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” over the radio, her voice pitched high and fast with panic. Her husband had been washed overboard and was injured in the surf. Through the static, I pieced together the story. They’d run aground, their boat now trapped on the rocks and pounded by waves, her situation sounded dire. That I could hear the calls at all meant I was close, within a few miles. But I was unfamiliar with the nearby islands’ names, and couldn’t make out her location over the garbled transmission.

The Coast Guard radio operator was little help, relaying a GPS position quickly, too fast for me to get the numbers down. She was going to jump off the boat and into the 40-degree water to join her husband. All I could think was, “Oh God, please don’t…”

I could hear cross chatter from nearby lobster boats near Port Clyde and an auxiliary patrol boat who’d spotted the yacht on the rocks, and then the couple on shore. The owners were cold and badly shaken, but safe. One of the boats soon managed to pick them up and ferry them to town. I finally heard the location clearly; Mosquito Island, just a few miles off. It was on my route, and as I rounded Marshall Point I could see a yacht clearly on the horizon.

That was her, caught up on the rocks. She was flying full sails, but it didn’t take long to see she wasn’t going anywhere soon. I drew closer, then motored into the island’s lee, away from the 20 knot winds that had blown her ashore. I didn’t need to risk joining her on the rocks. Instead, I sent the drone up to try and see what had happened. S/V An had come out of Manchester, Massachusetts. She wasn’t some daysailer come to grief, but a proper cruising yacht, built for crossing oceans. On my screen, I could see one of her lines had been washed over, then wrapped around her propeller. I would know, soon enough, how that story goes.The owners had raised sail and tried to fight their way offshore. Clearly it had been too late, but by God she went down fighting.

She lay on her side, the relentless Atlantic waves crashing down upon her. Slamming down on the rocks, her keel was already splintering. I was watching someone’s dreams die out there, and I felt utterly sick.

If I wasn’t scared before…

Act 5 - MISTAKES WERE MADE

It’s funny. I used to think of myself as a lucky guy. Now, I’m not so sure. With this trip, I’m beginning to wonder. Every time a triumph draws near, some milestone or exceptional day to celebrate, the boat reminds me…not so fast.

I spent a night and a day crossing Cabot Strait from Quebec’s Bird Islands across to Newfoundland, then pushed north along the length of Port-aux-Port’s 20-mile long peninsula. I saw lobster pot buoys, but these had weighted lines and posed little threat compared to the floating nightmare of Nova Scotia. I dodged and weaved through, but kept myself pointed up toward the Bay of Islands’ entrance and the small yacht club there.

Toward evening, I saw the bay’s great rocky headlands, dark blue and forbidding in the distance. Darkness was falling, sunset lost to glowering clouds, as I rounded Bear Head and began to turn east, rounding the entrance. I stayed a mile or so offshore, wary of what winds might come crashing down off those peaks. By 7:30pm, I reckoned we’d done 140 miles in the last 24 hours.

I stood at the helm outside, steering us south into Lark Harbour, a narrow cove closest to the sea’s entrance. Rain spat out of the hills, random drops hurled by some distant howling gale. Out of nowhere, a horrible grind and scream and bucking noise filled the pilothouse. It sounded like the engine itself was coming apart.

I leapt at the controls and idled the engine, took her out of gear. What the absolute fuck?

I ran up to the bow. We were already being blown out of the bay. I said it out loud, get the anchor down. It was my first reflex. Stop the boat from blowing onto the rocks. It was dark, and I only later saw we were in 95’ of water. Far deeper than I’d normally anchor with 300’ of chain. Not a lot of scope for a windy night.

Once the anchor was down and seemed to set, I grabbed a plumber’s wrench, opened the hatch, and dropped into the engine room. I could turn the shaft, but it caught irregularly. Something was wrapped around my propeller.

I grabbed the hand spotlight and pointed it into the black water. Nothing. Looking around though, I saw I had blundered into a field of lobster pots. Half a dozen buoys danced on the wind and lapping waves.

I was one mile…one fucking mile the night’s anchorage in Lark Harbour. And now, I was stuck out here in the dark, with building winds, bobbing on an uncertain anchor in a very deep, very dark corner of Newfoundland.

I didn’t feel so lucky any more. Cursed and abandoned by God, on the other hand, that felt a little closer to the mark.

Throughout the night, a southwest wind built in the darkness. Ocean View hobby-horsed on the waves, then raced back and forth on her chain like an angry junkyard dog.

As soon as there was light, I sent down my GoPro to survey the damage. I was hoping it’s something simple. But whatever it was, I didn’t see any way out that doesn’t include me getting wet.

I was going to need to work up my nerve a little bit. I was in no particular hurry to swim in 42° sea water, with 30 knot winds whipping the boat. Just because I had to do it, didn’t mean I had to do it this very second. So I had coffee. Then a second cup.

Then I went through the steps again, just like half a dozen times before further south. Dig out those homicidal swim steps and bolt them onto my aft dive platform. Unearth all my scuba gear. Lower to dinghy into the choppy water, keeping it close enough to grab once I’m in the water, but allowing enough space for me to drop in.

Boots. Hood. Flotation vest, air tank, and regulator. Mask. Gloves. Fins.

Pull on my wetsuit and scuba kit, don’t forget the knife, and then get to work. I sure wish I hadn’t lost my good serrated steel blade overboard in a moment of carelessness. Speaking of signs and omens. And curses.

I finally sat down on the swim step, dangled my feet in the water, then slipped in. I took one involuntary gasp as the cold water hit my forehead, felt the familiar icy trickle down my back. Then I got to work.

I hacked away at the float line, and let it drift. Then I started to cut. The line had wrapped around the propeller and shaft, but not so tight I couldn’t eventually just unspool the damn thing. Ten or fifteen times around, and the prop was free.

I surfaced quickly, but in truth I hadn’t been down long enough to feel chilled. As I undressed, I gave a spontaneous “Fuck yeah” fist pump to no one. It just felt so damn good to be done with that.

My celebratory mood lasted precisely as long as it took to start the engine and put it into gear. Any hopes this latest mishap hadn’t caused serious damage went out the window. As soon as I pushed her into gear, it sounded as if the engine exploded. Horrible banging noises, reverberating through the hull. No no no…

I knew what that meant, and I didn’t like it one bit. Once again, out came the swim ladder, the dive tank, the still-wet and now cold wetsuit, and all my scuba gear. No dawdling or over thinking it. Just go and fix this.

In we go, then I swam down to the propeller’s protective steel cage.

As I suspected, bent.

I floated up and grabbed a length of stainless steel pipe. Sometimes the simplest tool is are the best tool.

I wedged one fin against the rudder, levered the pipe against a lower spoke, then pulled on the bent arm. It gave easily, pulling back half an inch or so.

I’ll be damned. I spun the prop and it just cleared. Pulled again, to give a bit more space, just to be sure. And…boom. Problem solved.

That is the most amazing feeling. Have an totally unnecessary but seemingly insoluble problem, then somehow fix it.

I came out of the water feeling exceedingly pleased with myself. I mean, really, who needs an AR-15 to get their ‘man ticket’ punched when you can do something like this instead?

Act 6 - Into the Great Alone

There’s two quotes that capture the paradox of my obsession. Lao Tzu in The Art of War ; “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” When I thought the journey ahead of me, it felt like both a warning and a curse. I was looking for the edge of the earth. God help me if I ever found it

Still, I kept coming back to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; “I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.”

When I reached Newfoundland and tied up to the dock, there was no more staring dreamily off to the misty horizon I’d been on the water three weeks and now I was all business. On this boat, theirs is always, always, ALWAYS work to be done.

I am forever fighting a losing battle against rust. It should come as no great surprise that soaking twenty tons of steel in salt water breeds corrosion. Like the man said, rust never sleeps. So every waking moment I scrape, I sand, I prime, I paint. It makes no difference. I used to want this boat looking perfect. Now, on a good day, I’m an 80% man. Four fifths done is good enough for me. Mostly, I’m happy if she doesn’t look any worse than when I started. I know now that, no matter how many times I try, the rust will soon return. Like original sin, it’s always there, lurking just beneath the surface.

It dawns on me, sadly, that I’ve spent far more time paying attention to this boat’s decks and hull than I have to my wife’s body. As we enter our second decade of marriage, neither of us would appreciate such minute inspection of our respective imperfections. With Ocean View, on the other hand, I know each one of her many flaws, strange bumps, odd curves. I’ve spent endless hours on hand and knee tending to them, trying to grind away and paint over the indignities of poor workmanship and the ravages of time.

My short nights are haunted by dreams of old friends and former lovers. I wake, stare out blearily at the morning sun, then spend another day getting ready to depart.

The forecast looked snotty and windy and rain-soaked, but next morning arrived lovely and sun-dappled all the same. By midday, the breeze dropped off to nothing. I could sit at the dock for half a summer and never be fully ready. Or I could put on my big boy pants and get this show on the fucking road.

The yacht club here asks its members to fill out a simple sailing plan before setting out, whether a day trip or weekend cruise. The clubhouse was empty when I walked across the parking lot, and filled in my details:

S/V Ocean View.

One soul aboard.

Bound for Greenland west coast.

Due back in 18 months.

I tacked it up to the bulletin board, then walked slowly across the parking lot back to the dock. I’d left the note in the spirit of a small joke, with perhaps a bit of self-dramatizing. But now, faced with the reality of setting foot on deck, casting off, and sailing toward the edge of the earth, I felt crushed under the weight of it. Tears welled in my eyes, and I’m relieved nobody was around to see me off.

I struggled to compose myself. Fired up the engine, untied from the dock, gave a mighty push with my boat hook against the crumbling bulkhead to point my bow clear, and motored slowly away.

Eventually my eyes dried, and my lower lip very nearly stopped quivering. I steered a course toward the setting sun. It was the loveliest of evenings, calm and warm, tropical by Newfoundland standards.

Act 7 - waters cold and deep

During the last few weeks of preparation, in the rare moments of stillness at day’s end, I had read and re-read familiar stories of men and boats and ice. All of the sudden, it’s stopped feeling abstract, and begun to feel altogether personal and real. I had begun reading the books not out of historical curiosity or the idle pleasures of schadenfreude, but for some scrap of useful instruction. How do you face down the relentless crushing ice, with no sleep, no crew, nothing but your wits and the boat? And there are so many ways to lose the boat, for my bottomless well of good luck to finally run dry. So many ways for things to go very, very wrong.

Lately, I’ve been scouring North by East, Rockwell Kent’s story of his own doomed small boat journey to Greenland more than a century ago. He spoke with one of the Newfoundland skippers of the era, Captain Moses Bartlett, who advised “The thing to look for, now, is the ice. When you leave you go up the coast as far as Round Hill Island. Then steer your great circle course over to Greenland.”

I intended to follow his advice. Run up the Newfoundland coast. Cross the Strait of Belle Isle to Labrador. Go north to my jumping off point, wait for a weather window, and then run like hell.