Nuuk, Greenland Arrival

Finally, at long last, we arrived last night at Nuuk, Greenland. We are tied up in the harbour enjoying brilliant sunshine and warm(er) temperatures. We sailed 2457 miles across the North Atlantic, in 25 days, to make 1800 good. The motor was on for 205 hours (8-1/2 days). Unlike the Perkins on our previous boat, Gjoa's Bukh motor just sips fuel and there is still fuel left in the tanks. There are a handful of foreign boats here, one US and the rest UK. Most, like us, are preparing for the North West passage. We'll be busy the next few days with boat maintenance and plan to head north again early next week.

The fog remained with us all the way up the west coast and it got considerably colder, about 1.8C at night. It did lift, briefly, on Monday, which afforded us a glimpse of the spectacular coast that had been hidden away. The last night at sea we could only see about 30 metres around the boat. The radar was picking up the icebergs and we were 'seeing' the couple of fishing boats out there on AIS, so, the only thing we really had to worry about was small ice and as we hadn't seen any at all, it really wasn't an issue. Luckily, we didn't have to worry about shipping. We only saw one ship in the entire passage. The fog lifted again about ten miles from Nuuk which was good because the navigation got a bit tricky in the approaches. We were swept along one narrow passage between islands at eight knots. Wouldn't want to do that in thick fog!

On Tuesday, we had a really close encounter with a whale just meters from the boat which was exciting. Generally, there was very little wildlife, we only saw dolphins twice, a few seals, a few birds and that was it. Icebergs were interesting. We'd seen a few in Svalbard, but, they were miniatures compared to the first few we saw here. Beautiful, massive, behemoths enjoyed from a distance. Then, we had one come across our bow and we realized what a danger they can be. It was the size and shape of an aircraft carrier, travelling as fast as we were and even generating waves. It was very difficult to determine its speed and direction of travel as there is no reference point. A wall of ice was approaching fast and we had to alter course to avoid it, lesson learned.

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Nuuk 17/7/2014 12:00 64°10.2'N 051°43.5'W