August 26th 2013

Zigzagging Through Ice Fields

Our next encounter with ice took place in the Nordenskjöld Archipelago. I

was taking a nap as the weather was good and there was open water ahead of

us. After about an hour, Pekka woke me up and told that he was unable to

find a passage through the ice field we had entered while I was asleep.

 

And true enough, there was ice all around us, all the way to the horizon

whichever way we looked. The good thing was that the sun was still shining

and there was not much wind which would have made our situation much more

serious. We proceeded gingerly amidst the ice, and after about three hours

of careful manoeuvring and numerous trials and errors, we finally managed

to find a passage to more open water.

As we were approaching the Oscar Peninsula, we found ourselves again in a

field of ice and this time the field continued for the next 30 miles. We

spent about six hours zigzagging between floe and drift ice and when we

got tired of the whole thing, we parked our good boat Sarema against a

floe of ice and had a lunch break. 
 

Then we continued zigzagging and finally managed to

find a more open passage again near the shore. After

this, we kept as close to the shoreline as possible but a few times we

were forced to turn out to the sea because our passage was blocked by pack

ice that stretched from a nearby island uninterrupted to the shore.

Since Saturday morning, we have had less than six hours of sleep but

fortunately we are now nearing Cape Chelyuskin, the northernmost point of

the Eurasian Continent, where we intent to anchor and rest for a while.