My blog has now been going since 2004. That’s twenty-two years of blogging!
1st Post – Ken circa 2004!
https://www.kensblog.com/day-1-fort-lauderdale/
Over the years I have said many times, and I am repeating it now, but there is always this feeling that I am in competition with my blog readers (or YouTube watchers). There are plenty of days when things are going well, the sun is shining, the engines are humming, there’s hot water in the hot tub and we have nothing but relaxation on our hands. We love those days, but it makes for boring blog entries.
However there are also days when the wind is blowing, when I’m wondering if we’ll be blown into shore, if we’ll be struck by another boat that dragged anchor, an engine won’t start, and a myriad of other possible problems. Those days make for great blog entries.
Well …. it’s your turn to NOT be bored!
PORT ENGINE DOWN
Rather than make you wait all the way to the end of the blog to see what I am referring to, here is what happened earlier today.
We departed the town of Cambridge Bay yesterday afternoon and have run approximately 150 miles.
At 5:30 this morning, my usual wake-up time, Roberta took the dogs to the back deck for their morning potty-break (they use a tray with a pee pad and fake grass). Roberta intended to go back to bed, but instead interrupted me in the shower and said, “Something seems wrong. When I was in the cockpit I could see that we were moving very slow and our wake seemed weak.”
I quickly got dressed and went up to the pilothouse where I was greeted by some sad looking faces. We were bringing the boat to a halt and about to drop anchor in 200 feet of water.
To back up the story a bit, while we were in Cambridge Bay, we had taken apart the raw water pump on the port engine to repair an oil leak. Once the pump was taken apart we discovered that the damage was worse than expected and that we would need to replace the shaft seal. Hudson, our engineer, put in a long day, grabbing parts from a replacement pump we have on hand, and considered the mission complete.
On our Caterpillar engine, the raw water pump, which provides cooling water to the engine, is actually divided into two distinct parts. One part of the pump uses water to cool the engine, and the other part, within the same housing, uses oil to keep the pump itself lubricated. Hudson had fixed the oil leak, but did not realize that the water side of the pump was also failing, probably as a result of the damaged shaft seal.
So, we set out on a 36-hour run north. We departed at 4pm on Monday, all seemed well…which brings us to this Tuesday morning at 5:30am when Roberta took the dogs out to the cockpit.
When the port engine failed, it was quickly determined that the raw water pump was the culprit, and that additional surgery would be needed.
We dropped anchor immediately (it’s a good thing that we carry 650 feet of chain) and sat to wait for a couple hours while Hudson worked to rebuild the water side of the pump.
Our spare pump was not an ideal source of parts. Rather than a new pump we had a pump that was rebuilt in 2014. We are carrying an enormous number of spares, but Murphy’s Law clearly dictates that when something fails, it will be something you don’t have with you.
We discussed our options. North Star has two engines, so there was no need for panic mode, but … we’d certainly prefer to have both.
It would require a 100-mile journey to return to Cambridge Bay, and once there, “Now what?” There is no chance there would be a suitable raw water pump in Cambridge Bay. After a bit of hand-wringing it was decided that whether Hudson would be able to repair the pump or not, we would continue on our way to a particular town — approximately 500 miles onward — where we can fly in a replacement pump.
And actually, it was not all bad news. The failure occurred in daylight hours, in calm seas, and with the bottom close enough to drop anchor. Murphy’s Law may have worked against us, but the sea gods were in a good mood.
Our luck was to get even better when an exhausted Hudson — and Kim — appeared from the engine room to say, “It’s fixed!”
Raw water pump for Cat 3196 engine
North Star engineer, Hudson, saving the day!
Hudson’s description of the failure: “We have a gear-driven raw water pump, the water side of the pump burst its seal early morning around 0500. We believe the housing for the water side was damaged from the gear-driven end we replaced. The gear-driven end had a bearing go out and that caused there to be play in the shaft, I believe that caused the seal seat to be out of tolerance and to wear out the seal very prematurely. So sequential failure We swapped the water side of the pump housing and replaced all internals so we are monitoring closely but so far we are cruising along smoothly.”
Our current status is that we are underway, and everyone is happy to be moving again. We are ordering a new replacement pump (possibly two of them) and are crossing our fingers that they will be in a town called Arctic Bay, 500 miles north of us when we arrive.
I will report back when I know more.
CAMBRIDGE BAY
Cambridge Bay represents a major transition point for us. The first third of our trip across the Northwest Passage has consisted of weaving our way through a huge amount of ice, mostly across the top of Alaska. This was an unusual year for the Northwest Passage with much higher-than-usual ice in the western regions, and less ice than usual in the eastern regions. Looking forward, we don’t expect to see any significant amount of ice until we are near Greenland.
We added an “Expedition Leader”, David Reid, in Cambridge Bay to the boat. David lived in this part of the world for over two decades and has led and organized more than 300 Arctic {and Antarctic} expeditions, projects and trips, including 21 through the Northwest Passage. David will help us know where to go and what to see. We still have a lot of distance to cover, roughly 3,000 miles over the next 30 days, but we’re going to travel at night when possible and go ashore during the day.
Cambridge Bay, a community of about 1,800 people, known in Inuinnaqtun as Iqaluktuuttiaq — “place of many fish” — sits on the southeast coast of Victoria Island and has been an important gathering, hunting and fishing area for Inuit for thousands of years. Its sheltered harbor also gave it an outsized role in the history of Arctic exploration. John Rae came through while searching for the lost Franklin expedition, Richard Collinson wintered here aboard HMS Enterprise in 1852–53, and Roald Amundsen visited during his historic first navigation of the Northwest Passage. Cambridge Bay later became the final resting place of Amundsen’s famous polar ship Maud, which sank here in 1930 and remained visible in the harbor for more than 80 years before being raised and returned to Norway. Today Cambridge Bay is one of the principal communities of Canada’s western Arctic—a place where ancient Inuit history, the great age of polar exploration, and modern Arctic life all come together.
———
Priority one in Cambridge Bay was to take on fuel. Cambridge Bay is the only place in the passage where we’ll take on fuel, and I’m proud to say that we could have lived without it. We took only 2,000 gallons and have traveled roughly 1,700 miles since Nome, Alaska. North Star is shockingly efficient. Our ship’s computer said that we could have gone another 10,000 miles by slowing to 7 knots, or 4,000 miles at the 8.5kts we’ve mostly been running at.
That said, I am compulsive about not running out of fuel and like to top off whenever given the chance.
There are a lot of unusual features to the homes in Cambridge Bay, with the environment dictating the home designs.
Here’s a brief explanation (taken from ChatGPT) of Permafrost:
“Permafrost is ground—soil, rock, or sediment—that stays frozen for at least two consecutive years. In the Arctic, it can extend hundreds of feet below the surface and may have been frozen for thousands of years.
The very top layer, called the active layer, thaws each summer and freezes again in winter. Below that, the permafrost remains frozen. It often contains a lot of buried ice, so when the climate warms and that ice melts, the ground can sink, buckle, or collapse. This can damage roads and buildings, alter lakes and coastlines, and release previously frozen organic material that can produce carbon dioxide and methane as it decomposes.
Around places such as Cambridge Bay, permafrost is a major part of the landscape and strongly influences how buildings, roads, pipelines, and other infrastructure have to be constructed.”
—-
The permafrost makes it very difficult to put anything underground. There is no underground facilities that go to any of the homes, and they are all lifted off the ground, suspended by pilings.
Because of the lack of underground utilities, each structure must have its own fresh water tank, heating fuel tank, and waste water tank. Water trucks and pump out trucks regularly patrol the neighborhoods and are available on demand. The water tanks are inside the homes in order to protect them from the elements, with the waste water tanks beneath the floors. Paved roads are non-existent.
Despite what must be a horrendous cost of living, the homes were quite nice and the streets muddy, but clean. It was impossible not to compare the town to Nome, Alaska and whereas Nome had the feeling of a struggling community, Cambridge felt vibrant and growing.
We took fuel from a truck while at this dock. We were on it only long enough to get fuel delivered and then went to anchor
A view of Cambridge Bay town
The furs to the right are real artic fox. I assume the blue is dyed. On the left is traditional Inuit attire.
Cambridge Bay high school. For college the kids head to the big city (20,000 population) of Yellowknife, 500 miles away. I would imagine it is tough to return to Cambridge Bay after experiencing life in a larger town
High on the tundra overlooking Cambridge Bay sits one of the most visible reminders of the Cold War in the Arctic. This is CAM-MAIN, originally constructed in the 1950s as part of the Distant Early Warning, or DEW, Line — a chain of radar stations built across Alaska, Canada and Greenland to detect Soviet aircraft approaching North America over the North Pole. The large white spheres are radomes, weatherproof shells protecting the radar antennas inside from the brutal Arctic environment. The original DEW Line was replaced by the more modern North Warning System beginning in the 1980s, and the Cambridge Bay site remains part of that system today.
Nearly everything coming to Cambridge Bay comes by freighter, even the homes. Because Cambridge has no port the containers have to be offloaded to a barge where they are taken to shore.
I’m not sure what this says, but included it just to show an example of the local written language. It’s Inuktitut, written in the Inuktitut syllabics script commonly used in Nunavut.
This weathered painting in Cambridge Bay depicts the RCMP schooner St. Roch, one of the legendary ships of the Northwest Passage. Under the command of Henry Larsen, St. Roch spent many years patrolling Canada’s western Arctic and operated out of Cambridge Bay during the 1930s. In 1940 she began an extraordinary voyage through the Northwest Passage, eventually reaching Halifax in 1942 and becoming the first ship to complete the passage from west to east. Two years later Larsen brought her back to Vancouver by a more northerly route, making St. Roch the first vessel ever to navigate the Northwest Passage in both directions. Her strong connection with Cambridge Bay makes her an important part of the community’s maritime history.
PROVISIONING AT CAMBRIDGE BAY
Chef Dani will not be happy I am telling this story, but it has a happy ending, and brought everyone on the boat a lot of smiles, and even some laughs.
As background, we are expecting that we will not have an opportunity to buy fresh veggies again for over a month. There is a good local grocery in Cambridge Bay, but a boat like North Star, buying a month of food for nine hungry people, could easily empty the shelves.
Instead of buying locally we ordered food flown in by plane. Chef Dani was given a spreadsheet of foods to pick from.
Here’s where things went wrong, and I’ll use avocados as an example. When Dani specified how many avocados she wanted, she thought the count represented individual avocados. Nope. If she put a “1” she was ordering one case, not one avocado.
I bet you can guess where this story is going.
Chef Dani went to the airport expecting to bring back a shopping cart of food, but instead discovered they were offloading ONE HUNDRED AND ONE boxes, weighing FOURTEEN HUNDRED pounds of food
Panic set in as Chef Dani realized what had happen. Would the truck hold all of the food?
Chef Dani posing with her grocery order.
Kim went to shore in the tender to pick up Dani and the groceries from the dock. They guessed it would take five loads with the tender to get everything back to the boat
Capt. Garett was called and he came to me with a suggestion. “Can we ask Dani to look through the food, decide what we want and donate the rest to the community?” Fresh veggies are a rare treat in Cambridge and not easily obtained. Quickly, a trailer was organized and the bulk of the food loaded for donation
Shuttling food from shore to North Star
OMG – Where are we going to put all of this????
The story does have a happy ending. Roberta and I were happy to give back to a community that greeted us so warmly. It was a win-win for everyone
AS A LAST THOUGHT
Last night when we were watching TV, David, our Expedition Leader, mentioned that he followed a travel blog called “Itchy Boots”. It’s the blog of a young lady who is traveling the world alone by motorcycle. We watched an episode of her cruising through China, and then another episode where she was traveling across Afghanistan, and was intercepted by the Taliban.
As we were watching Roberta made the comment that it felt bizarre that we were deep into the arctic, near the top of the world watching the blog of a brave lady who was exploring a very different part of the world.
And, with all that said… See you next time,
Thank you! Ken and Roberta Williams — and Pixie and Keeley
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