Conquering the Northwest Passage

The Reverend Bob Shepton braved freezing gales and ice floes to sail 6,059 miles through the Northwest Passage with his crew of four South African climbers

The Atlantic passage had been strange. The crossing from Scotland to the west coast of Greenland, or vice versa, is usually ‘the meanest Atlantic crossing of them all’, fraught with gales halfway across due to the depressions regularly spinning up from Newfoundland to the Faroes and Iceland.

I have previously termed the mid-point ‘gale alley’. But that year it was strangely calm all the way across. After six days of gentle breezes, one of the South African climbers turned to me and said, ‘Is this your gale alley, Bob?’ Cheeky monkey!

The crew, Steve Bradshaw, David Glass, Clinton Martinengo and Andy Porter, were hard climbers from South Africa who had written to me and asked, ‘We are looking for an adventure this summer, have you any suggestions?’ ‘Well’, I replied, ‘I was thinking of doing the Northwest Passage. Will that do?’

They thought it would and duly arrived at Barcaldine on the west coast of Scotland for the off. We made general preparations, stocked up with food and diesel and sailed pleasantly across the Atlantic and round to Paamiut on the west coast of Greenland in 18 days.

We called at various places and settlements up the west coast, but somehow this was the first time I was struck with what a very long coastline that west coast of Greenland is – some 1,500 miles. I had been there several times before so perhaps it was losing its charm or excitement.

There was one notable incident. Crossing Disko Bay about halfway up the west coast, the crew suddenly stripped down and took the dinghy across to an iceberg and climbed it, in the nude, with one ice axe each, and no crampons, to display the South African flag on top. Tell me if you know why!

We reached Upernavik, and the South Africans went climbing, this time up a proper sheer big wall rock climb of some 850 metres. Again, as I had done with my Wild Bunch climbers two years before in these steep fjords, we moored the boat with climbing chocks in cracks up against the wall itself so they could step directly off the boat onto their climb.

It took them six days to complete this quality route, sleeping on portaledges supported by chocks in the wall on the way up. We returned to Upernavik to ‘chill out’ and dry the gear after their stupendous climb. I made the crew wait so I could meet up with a friend, Cristina, on her superyacht Billy Budd, which I had worked on the year before.

No time to lose

After a couple of days, we crossed Baffin Bay to Pond Inlet. First though, we went 40 miles further on southwest, so the climbers could again put up a new route on some cliffs in that vicinity, though the cliffs turned out to be rather loose. We returned to Pond Inlet and there we were stuck. The ice was filling up Navy Board Inlet to the west and an ice promontory sticking out east from Bylot Island meant we could not start the Northwest Passage.

At last, after five days of waiting, the ice showed signs of clearing. We rushed down to the dinghy, boarded the boat in haste and made our way through Navy Board Inlet, dodging ice floes in the sunlit night to reach Lancaster Sound and the start of the true Northwest Passage.

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Here we visited Beechey Island and viewed the three graves from Franklin’s expedition which ended in such an infamous disaster. Three of his crew had died when they were wintering here in 1845. More recent exhumations have shown large amounts of lead in the bodies, possibly from the early days of soldering tins, which may have been a contributory cause for the failure of the expedition.

In Resolute Bay we enjoyed seeing white beluga whales for the first time. After an interesting interlude re-stocking the boat – the fuel lorry came down to the beach and we carried fuel across in the dinghy, container by container to the boat – we made our way south down Peel Sound, which for once was open, just, and so on to Bellot Strait and the Tasmanian Islands.

We had gone past the Tasmanian Islands when we were stopped by ice. We returned by the Shotland Channel and came across Nordwind anchored in the first bay. Nordwind was a yacht built in Germany in 1938-9 as part of their officers’ training programme and was bought and raced by Lord Hugh Astor in England after the War. By the time we met her here she was back under German ownership again, and at some stage the hull had been cold moulded, making a fine classic yacht indeed.

We put our anchor down quite close in on the east side of the same bay, fixed a strop on the anchor chain and conversed with Nordwind by VHF. All was well. But in the night it blew a gale. We were fine, but Nordwind’s anchor chain flew off the winch, and the chain and anchor plummeted to the bottom.

The professional skipper, perhaps deceived by the huge size of the boat’s anchor winch, had failed to put a strop on the chain, and was in big trouble with the owner. However, the owner himself then took over and proceeded to charge around the anchorage with the engine at maximum revs. By the time everything had settled down in the morning, this had pulled the gearbox out of the back of the engine. They were in trouble.

Hunting the anchor

How could we help? We spent the next few days dragging our kedge anchor over the seabed where it was thought Nordwind’s anchor and chain might be. At some stage a friend, Rich, skippering a large motor cruiser through the Passage with its owner on board, arrived and volunteered to make a dive to search. He surfaced again speedily – his regulator was not the right type for arctic sea temperatures.

Quite large ice floes continued to circle round the bay whilst we continued the search. We managed to push these away with our tuks or ice poles. But finally, after some two and a half days Nordwind decided enough was enough and decided to abandon the search. They had managed to get the gearbox attached to the back of the engine, at least after a fashion, and reckoned they could run the engine at some 1,000 revs if necessary. We both put out to sea again.

We were fortunate. Further south we met a boat coming the other way who told us that Victoria Strait was clearing of ice, and we didn’t have to go the extra 100 miles round by Gjoahaven. We were able instead to take the passage through Victoria Strait, and Nordwind even went through the well-named Iceberg Alley, though with difficulty.

So, we both duly made our way to Cambridge Bay, in many ways the central hub of the settlements around the Northwest Passage. Most things can be found, procured, or even repaired here. Nordwind could do a proper job on her gearbox; we could stock up with food, diesel and cooking gas, ready to continue the Passage.

Range anxiety

Although we had now completed the extremely tricky eastern section of the Northwest Passage, we still had more than halfway to go to complete our route. An interesting logistic was beginning to raise its head. The Northwest Passage can be very stormy, but it can also have long periods of calm weather.

One has to be able therefore to motor all the way between settlements should there be no wind. Dodo’s Delight, at 10 metres length overall, only has a diesel tank of 150 litres and it could be 600-700 miles from one settlement to another. We began the habit of buying two more 20-litre fuel containers at each settlement we visited. By the end of the trip, we had 6 x 20-litre containers along each of the sidedecks!

We continued. Off Lady Franklin Point we hit or scraped a rock. The helmsman admitted later he had not been watching the echosounder. We put into Bernard Bay with its disused DEW station and while the crew went ashore looking for polar bears, I set to in order to thoroughly mop out and inspect the bilges. Fortunately, there was no water ingress. This, miles from anywhere, would have been serious. We proceeded.

Things got decidedly frisky rounding Cape Bathurst and we did not take the short cut of Snowgoose Passage in those seas. We made our way through the buoyed channel into Tuktoyaktuk, dredged and buoyed because of all the silt brought down over the centuries from the Mackenzie river.

There was something of an international air at the jetty with an Italian, a French and now a British boat tied alongside. And we were stuck there by the weather. At Tuktoyaktuk, the community has created an intriguing deep freeze, digging 10 metres down into the permafrost where they have hacked out galleries where produce could be stored for the winter months. Though with the Canadian government now bringing electricity to the town it seems more of a tourist attraction than a communal necessity nowadays.

Hiding from the weather

At last the weather allowed us out to sail again, or motor, for a somewhat difficult passage. First there was all that shallow water to negotiate and then light winds, and stronger winds against us. We finally put in to Barrow Point for a rest, where we again hid from the weather in the shallow laguna. The Chukchi Sea can be a fearful place with strong winds and short sharp seas with nowhere to hide along the coast.

Sure enough, when we did put out we were soon gale bound but at least it was from the north, so we bowled along southwards at a tremendous pace in big seas with little or no sail raised for a day and a night. There was some relief in the conditions before the next evening, when the wind blew up again with confused cross seas.

The helmsman allowed the boom to gybe, ripping the mainsail almost right across – I didn’t blame him, though why did the preventer not stop it? Fortunately, it was just below the second reef line, so we could, after clearing the Bering Strait in a strangely benign mood, raise most of the mainsail for a final pleasant day’s sail to the old gold rush town of Nome in Alaska, where we lifted the boat out for the winter.

I returned next summer to sail back through the Northwest Passage to Greenland, Dodo’s Delight being the only GRP boat to have done that. But that is another story…

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