Greetings everyone!
My original goal was to send daily blog updates.
Our days have been very busy, and there has been an overload of information. Sipping water from a bathroom sink is fairly easy, but try the same thing with a fire hose and it gets trickier. We’ve been traveling at an intense pace, moving far faster than I can write.
As I am typing this, we have completed the passage and are southbound in what I consider to be the Northern Atlantic Ocean (but is actually the Baffin Sea). Greenland is just east of us and we have a long way to go to reach the United States.
So, with that said, I’m going to turn back the calendar, all the way to Sept 2nd, and pick up our story from shortly after departing Cambridge Bay.
NINE THOUSAND MILES
We left Seattle in mid May, and it is now mid September. Interestingly, the fastest part of the trip, in terms of how we felt about time, was the Northwest Passage itself. It seems to have gone by in the blink of an eye, whereas the return to civilization is grinding on one long mile after another, endlessly stretching forever
Speaking of time….
We have spanned seven timezones on this trip! In an era of digital devices, getting an answer to the simple question of “What time is it?”, is more complicated than you might think. Some of our devices are manual, whereas others will self-adjust. At the extreme northern ends of our trip the timezones become quite close to each other. To keep us all in sync we tried establishing “boat time” and based the time on our next major destination. It was not a perfect solution. For example, my computer and iPhone wanted to self-adjust to our local timezone, regardless of what convention we had agreed to on the boat. Some mariners get around this by agreeing to just use Greenwich (UTC-0) time to minimize confusion. There is no easy answer…
AURORA BOREALIS
Before I do anything I want to share these pictures. When we started the trip we had a list of sights we wanted to see, and the Aurora Borealis was high on the list.
A bucket list item for the trip — to see the Aurora Borealis – Click here to see more shots
Sept 2, 2026: CONINGHAM BAY
Our plan after Cambridge Bay was to work our way north to Beechey Island, stopping to anchor at Coningham Bay, and then taking the Bellot strait
North Star in the Northwest Passage – Whales and Bears at Coningham Bay
I published a video update showing the whales and bears. I have some good pictures below, but they don’t compare to the video. I encourage you to watch the short video above. It includes some wild drone footage from crew member Lydia.
Believe it or not, this is where we anchored. Nice protected anchorages are rare, if they exist, in the Northwest Passage. We weren’t able to anchor very often, and when we did it was deep and with little protection from the wind
We jumped in the tender, eager to search for bears and whales. Any trip in the tender meant putting on many layers of clothes, hat(s), gloves, long johns, PFDs, etc. Despite thick gloves and the little chemical hand warmers, my hands were freezing. [L to R: Roberta Williams, Lydia Pleasants, Clive Shute (ice pilot) Dani Dibattista (chef), David Reid (Expedition Leader) ]
We had to anchor a couple miles from an inner bay where we hoped to find bears and whales.
The tender ride hunting for bears was a bigger challenge than it sounds, taking over half an hour. The water was transparent and very shallow. We had to move at a snails pace looking for water deep enough to get through, occasionally touching the bottom.
Roberta and I were particularly sensitive to this issue, in that we had a similar experience during our run to Japan in 2009. We were in Geographic Harbor, near Kodiak Alaska, in a tender successfully looking for bears. With a grizzly bear on shore, we started tendering back to the boat, only to discover that the tide had dropped and we bottomed out the tender. We were stuck, with a grizzly nearby on the beach. Along with us in the tender was Bill Harrington, an Alaska commercial fisherman who was carrying a rifle. All of us jumped from the tender and carefully lugged the tender across the shoal to deeper water while Bill kept the rifle ready. The bear ignored us, which saved wrecking his day, or ours.
Polar Bears are not quite the cuddly plush toys we remember as children. They can run at 25 miles/hour and swim at 6 miles/hour.
The popular safety rhyme for bear encounters is:
“If it’s brown, lay down; if it’s black, fight back; if it’s white, goodnight.”
For brown or grizzly bears, lying flat on your stomach with your hands protecting your neck minimizes the threat. For black bears, you should make noise, appear large, and fight back if attacked. For polar bears, which may view humans as prey, survival requires aggressive deterrence.
We have two dogs, Keeley (14 years old) and Pixie (4 years old). Keeley has been through many thousands of miles of cruising, in many countries, but she gets cold easily and is happy on the boat, whereas Pixie is a young dog and badly wanted off the boat. She’s a Klee Kai, which many people think of as a mini-Husky. She was excited about getting into the tender and exploring. We’ve never seen her cold before, but we under-estimated the arctic. Pixie spent most of the exploration time shivering and wanting back on the boat.
Our quest for polar bears was VERY rewarded. We saw at least five active bears. It was a bit of a balancing act in that we wanted to be close enough that we could see and photograph them, but we also didn’t want them to see us. We stayed a healthy distance away from shore
We knew there were whales close to shore and that the bears were hanging out close to the water hoping to snag one. We patrolled the shore slowly, perhaps longer than my cold fingers wanted, but the whales must have our presences and stayed away from us (and the bears)
Although we struck out at finding whales from in the tender (which I considered a good thing), they were easily spotted from above.
We made it a point to only photograph wildlife from a long ways away which, thanks to the magic of zoom lenses, was not a problem at all
A polar bear waiting for lunch to swim by
BELLOT STRAIT (or not)
Our movements on this entire trip have been controlled by weather. We use a weather router ( a live person who helps us avoid getting blasted by bad weather). Specifically, we use Rich Courtney of WeatherWX.com. Rich also guided us on our Great Siberian Sushi Run trip across the Aleutian Islands in 2009.
It seems counter intuitive, but we need to sit still in bad weather and be on the move in good weather. In other words, if we get somewhere nice, and it’s a nice day, too bad. We have to move on. We’ve actually been very lucky on this trip. We have only had one truly disastrous weather day, which I’ll talk about in some future blog entry.
To reach our next destination, we planned to go through Bellot Strait, a historic eighteen-mile long passage that would require careful planning to navigate safely. Currents run up to 8 knots, which could be dangerous for a boat like ours. Making it worse, there are no accurate tide and current charts for the region. Information does exist, and is oft-times accurate, but there are few guarantees in the Northwest Passage. We are at the whims of mother nature.
We decided to position at a bay near the strait and wait overnight to hit the timing “just right” for the strait.
At 1pm when the time arrived to head for the nearby Bellot Strait we realized there was a small cruise ship about twenty miles north of us. We greeted them by radio and heard they had found Narwhal in a bay north of us, Willis Bay.
A decision was quickly made, head east into the potentially high currents in Bellot Strait, or continue North potentially seeing Narwhals.
WILLIS BAY
Narwhals are the unicorn of the whale species and native to the arctic. One of our goals for the trip was to see a Narwhat in its native environment. Despite our best efforts we failed at finding Narwhals in Willis Bay. This particular picture was not taken by us. SPOILER! — we did later find Narwhals and have some very cool Narwhal pictures AND MORE, but I’m saving those for a later blog entry.
One reason there are no trees in the arctic is that it’s a “hostile environment.” The wind can quickly reach 40 or 50 knots, and with the low terrain, finding a place to hide, whether you are a tree, or a boat, is often not possible.
We thought about anchoring in Willis Bay but ducked our head in, were disappointed not to find Narwhals, and continued north seeking a place to hide from a coming storm
PRESCOTT BAY
We dropped anchor farther north, in a large bay, Prescott Bay. We had been promised a storm and indeed received one.
Roberta and I have traveled 60,000+ miles with much of that sitting at anchor. There have been nights when we have had to stand anchor watch and miss sleep, but it has only been a small fraction of nights. Generally, we set the hook and go to sleep. I usually set an alarm to wake me if the wind gets past 15 or 20 kts, so I can verify all is well and then head back to sleep.
I’d call anchoring in the Northwest Passage more of a pro-active experience. In the Northwest Passage, about the only difference between running and anchoring, from a watch stander’s perspective, is that the engines aren’t running. And even that is not always true. Sometimes, you need to push against the wind to avoid dragging an anchor. There is a lot of information that comes in handy when dropping an anchor, including “the type of bottom”, the “depth of the water”, “whether or not there are lots of rocks”, “the height of the surrounding terrain”, etc. All of these little details pair up with the skill of the crew, and the ground tackle, to provide a restful night of sleep in most conditions. Other than the skilled crew and excellent ground tackle, we typically have none of the above while cruising in the arctic. And, the anchorage seem to come in two flavors: too shallow, or too deep. Several of the best anchorages could not accommodate our 8′ draft. Much of the time we’ve anchored in water 80 to 100′ deep.
We knew a storm was coming and did what we can, but as the wind roared past 45kts overnight, our anchor dragged a couple of times. Life is never dull on North Star.
AND LASTLY….
A constant source of enjoyment is a large Samsung FrameTV that we installed in the main salon. It allows us to put trip pictures up immediately after they are taken. We did a sneaky thing by putting it inside a physical matted frame, making it look like an actual framed picture — and not at all like a TV Screen.
Here’s a link to a little 29 second video that is just a teaser for blog entries to come. Pictures can never show the beauty of the world around us. The arctic may be a challenging environment, but it is incredible to see. Watch this tiny video and you’ll see why…
Saglek Fjord – Labrador
And, here is a link to a video which is largely redundant to the video earlier in this blog, but is in 4k. It makes a difference in quality, and I thought you might enjoy having a closer look at this amazing footage.
North Star in the Northwest Passage – Belugas in 4k
The next issue of the newsletter is one you DO NOT want to miss. A centerpiece of the Northwest Passage is Beechey Island. I am working now with David Reid, a true explorer, who is onboard North Star and has spent twenty years of his life living in and exploring the arctic, to put together a video explaining the history of where we are.
Anyway… that’s it for this issue of the blog.
Thank you! Ken and Roberta Williams — and Pixie and Keeley
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CHECK OUT OUR LATEST VIDEO GAME: COLOSSAL CAVE 3D!
Roberta and I are video game developers when we aren’t on a boat, having published literally hundreds of games during our long career. Our most recent game is a re-imagining of a fifty-year-old classic game called “Adventure (aka Colossal Cave).”
KEN’S MARINE RADAR TRAINING SIMULATOR!
II combined my tens of thousands of sea miles with my long record of building software to create a Radar Simulator. I believe there is no better way to learn than by experiencing it yourself. Check out my radar training course, which is built around a very realistic simulator. https://navsimacademy.com/
