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Bagan resting at the docks in Newport, RI. Two months prior to this picture we had lost all our funding for the trip. We’d hoped that the sponsor stickers would act as “Sponsor Flypaper.” While the sticker names did help, the idea was to attract cash-filled sponsors. It didn’t work. With that fact in mind, I set off on our five-month 8,500 miles trek already in debt.
After making our way past Newfoundland and Greenland we moved farther north into Disko Bay. Here we encountered our first icebergs. The grounded bergs pictured are framed by humpbacks. At the time, it was hard to keep in mind that the beauty of the icebergs was every bit as equal to their danger.
Crossing Baffin Bay and heading towards the entrance to the Northwest Passage we encountered a berg that seemed to stand as a sentinel to all who chose to enter. The inner rumblings and muted explosions that came from deep within this berg echoed what the “face” on the right hand side of it suggested. We were about to leave everything familiar behind and enter a landscape as foreign to us as the backside of the moon.
Once in the Passage proper, our first anchorage was Blaney Bay. Here we witnessed one of Mother Nature’s more harrowing sights: a polar bear stalking a herd of walrus.
Beechy Island. This is the place that, for me, was Ground Zero in the Passage. In the 1850s, the Franklin Expedition left England to find the Passage. This was one of their last known stopping areas. The expedition was frozen in the ice for two years.This grave marker cites where one of the crew was buried. Once Franklin’s two 100′ ships and 120 men left Beechey they simple vanished off the face of the earth. It’s assumed that they were caught by the ice—a fate we would soon encounter—and ground into the bottom.
Once we left Beechey Island things took a turn for the worse. Inaccurate ice charts were downloaded from the internet, leading us into a sheet-ice “squeeze play.” Heading south into Peele Sound, we encountered thick-pack ice blocking our way. Turning back toward the north, we saw that our escape route was slowly becoming impassable as well.
We continued north, trying to avoid the encroaching pack-ice, which was filling in form the south. Here we ran into thick and heavy sheets of old ice coming down from the north. We had no exit from this ship-crushing ice and were destined to be trapped.
For 18-hours we attempted to navigate our way through the unforgiving ice. During this time we only progressed five miles, mostly in circles. At this point, we realized we couldn’t move forward another inch. We were trapped. Surrounded by an Arctic fog, we dropped anchor on the ice at 2:00 a.m. The entire crew was mentally, physically and emotionally exhausted.
When morning came and the fog lifted, we saw that we weren’t the first victims of Mother Nature’s power.
Standing on the bow, I tried to find an answer. From where we’d finally come to rest in the ice, a quarter of a mile away was a rock-bound shoreline. Here the pressures of the currents below were forcing the sheets of ice up onto the rocks. We could see sheets of ice being crushed and thereby exploding onto the rocks. As things were looking, we were soon to be next.
After three long days of using Bagan as an icebreaker, we finally cleared the ice and made our way to Barrow, the northern most point in the continental United States. As the picture shows we couldn’t rest for long. Early Siberian winter storms were slowly beginning to form.
We traveled from Barrow south and down through the Bering Sea. From there we continued through the Aleutian Islands as seen here. By now winter storms were rolling over us more frequently. Days of 45+ knots and six foot, sharp seas were commonplace.
We thought that by crossing the Gulf of Alaska and tucking into Alaska’s Inside Passage we would find some protection for the remaining 1200 miles. But there was no break found “inside.” Low pressure systems, powerful mountain winds, williwaws, and damaging wind shears kept us fighting for every mile.
At 7:30 in the evening on November 5th, 2009, Sefton Theobald, Dominique Tanton, Chauncey Tanton and I did what few in history have managed to do: we found and transited the Arctic’s infamous Northwest Passage. We were later told that Bagan was the first production powerboat in history to complete the Passage. More information can be found on this site and theothersideoftheice.com