Month: July 2023

Qassiisaq, Nunarsuit, near Kap Thorvaldsen, 8th July 2023

Anchored in an all but landlocked bay near Kap Thorvaldsen, our magical dwelling place for the past days, I sit on the foredeck with my breakfast musli bowl, listening to the snow buntings and Lapland longspurs offering their morning greetings to the sun. The tide is out and a strip of ochre-coloured seaweed glistens on the rocks in the intertidal zone — a space in between the low and high water mark, belonging fully neither to the sea nor to the land.

At ebb the seaweed makes a thick, soft carpet to step on when we land with the dinghy. A little attention never goes amiss when clambering onto land, for the shoots of the seaweed can be slick and slithery, sending a leg sliding into the water until the boots fill up.

At flood, we float through an astonishing forest garden of bewildering beauty. The light sparkles in the air globules clinging to the plants, sun beams filter through the canopy and the boundary dividing air and sea, and abounding animal life tend to their many affairs.

A large iceberg with two towers sails serenely past the entrance of our little fjord. Deep rumbling reaches my ear, interrupting the birdsong and the constant roar of the sea lapping the coast outside our bay. The sea’s sound reminds me of a mountain stream more than waves lapping ashore, and that’s with calm seas. I try to imagine the roar of a heaving storm surge hitting the coast.

Large icebergs collapse all around us, invisibly. Hidden by the rocky islands surrounding us, or around the corner in the next bay. Sounds travel far in the Arctic. It bounces and echos off the rock walls that tumble into the sea around us.

Pervading everything is the constant buzz and zzzzzz of the ever-present cloud of mosquitoes. They only ever really leave us alone out at sea — that is, if we haven’t scooped them all up in the boat before — or when sufficient wind picks up to pin them to the ground. When hiking, we often wear head nets to keep them from eating us alive. Having been in the tropics and the rainforest, this still feels a level up! There, the mosquitoes at least seem to stick to some kind of diurnal rhythm, whereas here, they are always awake and ready to sting. No moment is free of them.

I’m shrouded in a cloud of ‘the sons of devil’, as they are called here, and realise just too late that I left a little strip only covered by my sock between the shoes and the trousers available to them. By the time I notice the first sting, I have 10 on my feet and now they itch like mad, leaving me in half a mind to scratch the skin off my bones.

A recent memory surges up to my consciousness. During National Day in Qaqortoq, we joined the music festival, which took place in the local sports hall, which has all amenities one could wish for. We are sat among the locals, taking in the hum and our surroundings after watching the seals being butchered after the seal hunt race not half an hour before. Suddenly, we are stirred to our feet, transfixed by alluring voices. The local rock band has handed the stage to a pair of Inuit throat singers from Canada. The two of them are dressed in splendid traditional clothes rimmed with brilliant colours.

One of their songs tells of the sound of the mozzies circling around our heads. The days being rainy, cold and overcast when we arrived, we hadn’t had the ‘chance’ to experience this lunacy ourselves back then, but now I can fully relate.

The two ladies spin a sublime multilayered tapestry of sounds that enchants me. The unusual sounds of throat singing are so different to what my ears are accustomed to, so mysterious. Their songs capture acute observation and subtle attention to their natural surroundings, picking aspects in turn and transposing them into emblematic melodies. Other tunes tell of the meanderings of a river, and the flight of a Canada goose. In the past, Inuit women would gather when their men were out hunting, and sitting together, they’d spin songs that spring from their environment.

Back in the present, the iceberg has moved past the third of the four passages that lead into our anchorage. The sun is hot in a deep blue sky, but the little breeze that has sprung up is pure bliss. The others are still asleep down below. I’ll brew myself a coffee and jump onto the paddle board for a little exploring.

Angie

On passage to the ice shield to the East of Saattukujooq, 12th July 2023

Shredded veils of fog drift past like dense plumes of smoke easing off the hazy cloak ahead of us. Lifting from the water as if weightless, they rise steadily over craggy basalt outcrops inland. We are motoring through the narrow passage that cuts through the archipelago of thousands of islets, islands, and off-lying rocks inland of Kap Thorvaldsen. Leading us to the northern side of the cape, this branched fjord cuts deep into the landscape and is a protected shortcut to the North.

Only some 20 m wide at its smallest stretch, the tides run fast with up to 4 knots at times and create some interesting swirls in the water that take the bow of the boat around. We are near high water, so we avoid being centrifuged, chewed, and spat out through the narrow channel.

Once through the squeeze, the fjord opens to the west and the mist gets thicker. The air has a definite chill to it now, brought on by the vapour dissolved in the air. Soon, the radar picks up some sizeable bergs in the passage. A huge tilted table disgorges sheets of waterfalls at its lower end, the spray glittering in the rays that oozes through the mist. Soon after, an extraordinarily stunning caldera comes into view. Perfectly rounded, with precipitous cliffs veiled in mist, and a narrow entrance into an alluring pool of turquoise-coloured water. A single gull paddles peacefully about.

On reaching the other side, the wind drops from 25 to 4 knots and we are surrounded by a thick layer of fog in a calm sea. A few skittish guillemots hurriedly flap to get away from us. A slight swell runs, as if we were ‘sat on the chest of a giant softly breathing,’ as our friend Carl once said when being becalmed on the ocean. We feel catapulted back to our recent Atlantic crossing, when we saw not a thing but different shades of fog for over a week. Getting philosophical, we wondered if we were moving at all, and if so, if we were just turning in circles around our own axis. Are the past weeks’ memories of Greenland but dreams?

Sailing through uncharted waters with some soundings sprinkled decoratively on the chart, we thread our way through bergs and islands. Slowly the brume lifts as we are surrounded by more and more land, mountain peaks peek out on top, and the radiating heat burns away the straggling remainders of the vapour. We leave behind the last charted depths and advance with satellite imagery and the depth sounder.

We pass close to an islet with an eagle roost with two chicks. Alex spots the young spreading their wings tentatively in the emerging sun. How long until the fledglings will flee the nest?

In the distance, two long tongues of the tremendous ice shield reach down to meet the sea. This is where we are headed: for the reborn land underneath the glaciers, released by the retreat of the ice. The bedrock and the glacial flood plains crisscrossed by an intricate web of meandering milky streams laden with glacial flour — rocks crushed and ground into fine powder by the passage of the ice.

We are off the charts, without a doubt.

Angie