Sailing can be a very cruel sport. Just when a long-anticipated landfall, or, anchorage, is within reach it can be wrenched from your grasp by events totally out of your control. So it was with our landfall in Canada.
The last 1/2 of our passage from Greenland remained shrouded in fog, some days more dense than others. The mountainous coast, glaciers and ice capped coast of Baffin and Bylot Islands are reputed to have the best scenery of the North West Passage. We saw absolutely none of it other than a few hours of Baffin and a five minute view of Bylot, very disappointing. We had mentioned that we'd try to land at Pond Inlet and if not there, further north in Lancaster Sound. We ruled out Pond Inlet before even getting there as the anchorage is an open roadstead with ice floes going by at the rate of two knots. A constant ice/anchor watch must be maintained as you may have to move at a moment's notice. We couldn't see how this could possibly work with just two of us aboard as neither of us would be able to go to shore, so, decided to give it a miss. We found out later that it wouldn't have been possible to get in anyway as it was still fast with ice.
As we couldn't go through Pond Inlet to Navy Board Inlet and up to Lancaster Sound we went around the outside of Bylot Island, heading for Tay Bay. Tay Bay is where Alvah Simon overwintered on his boat and then wrote a book, 'North to the Night', about his experience. We enjoyed the book very much and the Bay sounded like an ideal anchorage. The latest ice chart showed the north entrance to be clear, so, we headed there. There are tides in Lancaster Sound and it was hard going. We kept waiting for the tide to change in our favour, but, it didn't. Hmmm...must be a current? Reading our Arctic Pilot confirmed the worst, there was a 2+ knot east-going current running along the south side of Lancaster Sound. It also casually mentioned that there was a possibility of a tidal rip across the entrance of Navy Board Inlet. The newest ice chart now showed a large tongue of 1-3/10 ice curving north around the entrance constraining the way in. Tide and current going in opposite directions conspired to give us a boiling cauldron of sea, the dense fog meant we couldn't see any land to orient ourselves to deal with a tidal rip and our speed was a painful 0-1.5 knots. We were going nowhere fast, so, in spite of being only fifteen miles to the entrance we had to turn away and decided to sail right across Lancaster Sound to Dundas Harbour, the only other ice-free harbour in the area and our last chance to gain shelter before a 40+ knot gale kicked in the next evening.
Lancaster Sound was about fifty miles away. There was still absolutely no wind. Could we get there motoring at 3 knots and beat the gale? We headed across, got out of the current and the east wind that had been promised for a few days finally filled in and we were sailing at 5+ knots. It was enough to get us 1/2 way across before the wind died and we got in after a 17 hour crossing. It's a very beautiful bay with a glacier at one end and a grounded iceberg right behind us. Just about the whole NWP 2014 fleet is here as it's the only ice-free harbour around right now and we are anchored with seven other boats. The wind is just picking up and will go to 40+ after midnight. As long as our anchor holds, we'll be safe and there's no better feeling than enjoying a gale in a safe anchorage. The gale will pass by the weekend and we're hoping Arctic Bay will be ice-free by then so we can cross back south over Lancaster Sound and get fuel there. After that it's a waiting game before any of us can move west. A couple of the boats with large, young crews are testing some of harbours further west and have found them all still plugged with ice. The key is to be patient, easy to say, hard to do.
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Dundas Harbour 6/8/2014 12:00 74°31.9'N 082°25.0'W
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