Greetings everyone from deep in the Northwest Passage!
It is now a little over two weeks since we left Nome. That said, it feels like two months rather than two weeks. Sometimes it has been quite intense!
I am typing this message from a small town called Cambridge Bay, which is roughly a third of the way into the North West Passage from our departure at Nome. It will be our only stop at a major town of the trip. And, I should say that, although it is the biggest town we’ll see, it is not huge by most definitions, having only 2,000 inhabitants.
The rest of our expedition will be quite different than the first part of the trip. We have been pushing hard to reach Cambridge Bay, often running around the clock, while navigating seemingly endless ice fields. Looking forward, we may see some ice, but most of the ice is now behind us. We have 3,000 miles to cover over the next month, but will move at a somewhat slower pace, stopping often to explore.
NORTH STAR IN THE ICE
For the moment, rather than focus on where we are going, I’ll recap where we’ve been, starting with a quick look at the boat zigzagging through the ice. We have an ice pilot onboard, an expert who has made many trips through the ice. He mentioned that in all of his trips through the Northwest Passage he had never seen as much ice. I don’t know if that makes us lucky or unlucky, but it did make for some amazing pictures and experiences!
North Star Mellow Days
A quick recap of what it has been like moving through the ice – Incredible would be an understatement!
Ken (me) and Captain Garrett celebrating that we left Alaska and are entering Canada. It seems impossible, but since leaving Seattle we have essentially circumnavigated the entire coast of Alaska, a state more than double the size of Texas!
HERSCHEL ISLAND
Herschel Island, or Qikiqtaruk, is a remote territorial park in Yukon, about 5 km off Canada’s Arctic coast in the Beaufort Sea. Today it is known for its Inuvialuit heritage, Arctic wildlife, and historic whaling-era buildings.
We anchored directly in front of Herschel Island, which is a Canada National Park in the middle of the Yukon.
There aren’t many people on Herschel Island, perhaps ten in total. We were surprised to be invited ashore and to receive such a warm reception. The Park Ranger gave us a tour of the few buildings on the island. He had been watching our livestream on the internet and knew we were coming!
There is no permanent population on the island, and even the park ranger is only there seasonally. There are a few buildings which are used by researchers. There were about 10 young scientists there during our visit, who were just packing up to leave after having been there for months. We invited them out to the boat for a tour.
Our first view of the village. It’s not large, consisting only of a few buildings
We weren’t sure that our doggies would be “legal” to go ashore. At first we were almost turned away, but when the ranger saw how small and innocent they were, he warmed to them. Keeley and Pixie, suffice it to say, were eager to be off of the boat!
This building dates back to the 1800s and is still in use, although it is now boarded up as their season is ending.
We watched as they reeled in several carp. The ranger said that they fish through the season then package them to take back to their villages at home. The next day, while touring our boat, they gifted us a carp!
Roberta checking out various artifacts collected around the island
No indoor plumbing on Herschel Island, and hopefully you’ll forgive me for this non-politically correct comment, but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the young lady scientists who spent months trudging through the cold to this restroom whenever nature called.
On an island with only ten or so buildings, two of them were these structures prominently placed on the beach. Roberta asked about them, but was told only that they were ‘old’ structures, falling apart.
Someone guessed that these were wind protection for beach camping with a tent. That’s as good a guess as I would have
This was my favorite feature on the island. Given that the island is unoccupied most of the time, they leave this building open for free access by anyone who wanders by. It is loaded up with fire wood and provides shelter from the cold.
An amazingly nice thing to do and I’m sure travelers are delighted to discover this refuge from the elements
In addition to the building above which is for use by wandering travelers, there is a SAUNA, always with fresh firewood. Our entire crew availed themselves of it, along with a polar plunge, while Roberta and I, alone on the boat, luxuriated in North Star’s hot tub.
Something sad… The rising water level is a problem. The ranger mentioned that when he first started coming to Herschel Island this was a field in which they’d play baseball. Now it is a swamp. The buildings have been raised and are resting on large blocks, trying to prevent flooding
We have discovered, while in the Northwest Passage, that storms come quick and with little warning. After a beautiful day at Herschel we spent a night in hell. When the wind came up we quickly realized we needed to re-anchor. If you’ve ever pulled anchor in 50 knots of wind you know what I wonderful unforgettable experience it isn’t.
Plane flyover – Herschel Island
I was sitting quietly at my computer, looking out the window, when I saw a plane coming straight at me. I quickly shouted (I don’t remember what, but it probably isn’t repeatable), alerting everyone to look.
It was our scientist friends departing Herschel for the season. They made a couple of passes of our boat, saying goodbye. Very cool!
Smoking Hills
Our next stop, a hill that is perpetually on “fire”! Check out the quick one-minute video. It’s a mind blower!
While Lydia was doing this amazing video footage, I took the helm to experiment with close quarters driving of the boat. This is a new boat to me and it is our first large boat without a stern thruster.
Yes, I know that I should not be dependent on thrusters for mooring a boat. However, I must confess that I’ve been spoiled. I’ve run a boat 60,000+ miles and entered many marinas. That said, North Star has only a bow thruster. I could probably wrestle it to a dock without bumping into too many other boats, but the best would be to avoid hitting any of them. Captain Garrett is masterful at close quarters handling, so I asked him to give me a lesson. I must confess that it did not go well, although I did evade the surrounding icebergs. I can tell that I’ll need a few more practice sessions before I’d try docking the boat in a crowded marina.
MECHANICAL PROBLEMS
Prior to this trip North Star underwent an extensive refit. It could almost be called a gutting and reassembly. We spent an irrational amount of money to make North Star a new boat inside and out.
After any extensive work on a boat it is best to be cautious. Even the best mechanics on earth don’t always get everything right on the first try. I was very hesitant to do this trip thinking that we should stay close to home for the first year of cruising, but then decided that with a good engineer onboard, we’d be fine.
To my complete surprise this has been a mostly trouble-free trip. We’ve had a few challenges, but nothing that has slowed us down. For those of you who enjoy technical tidbits, here’s what we’ve dealt with…
We have a couple ways to heat the boat: Each of the rooms around the boat has an air handler with a heat strip. I don’t want to bore anyone with too much detail, but an air handler is a fairly simple device that works like an old fashioned radiator. Hot or cold water runs through its coils, and a fan blows across the coils, blowing hot or cold air into the room. On North Star, as a backup, each of our air handlers also has a heat strip, which is a little electric heater. I had assumed on this trip we’d always have hot water directed to the air handlers and would never need the heat strips. It has actually been the opposite. We have had need for constant air conditioning in some parts of the boat, and have continually had cold water flowing to all of the air handlers, with most of the boat using the heat strips for heating.
So, why, in the arctic of all places, have we needed any cooling? Well… the pilot house has a large amount of electrical and electronic gear and all of it throws out heat. Without cooling, the pilot house becomes an oven. And, I’m not sure why this is, but the crew’s quarters also tend to be warm regardless of the temperature outside. Without air conditioning the crew quarters can be miserable.
Unfortunately, the air conditioning units have been overheating and shutting themselves off. Hudson, our engineer, has spent endless hours trying to debug the problem. We now have a workaround, which has solved the issue. The air conditioning units cycle on and off according to the cooling needed. We had the system set to only use cooling water when the air conditioners were running. For some reason, when cycling on and off, the cooling water intake for the air conditioners was sucking in air, eventually losing flow, resulting in a system shutdown. The workaround has been to simply leave the raw water (cooling) pump running continually. There is certainly a bigger fix somewhere in our future, but the issue is solved for now.
Our only other “issue” has been that we blew up an inverter. For those who don’t know what an inverter is: We generate our own electricity on North Star using a diesel fired generator. In the absence of a generator, the boat can run off of batteries. Many boats will run a generator a couple hours a day, to charge batteries, and then run the boat from the batteries for the rest of the day.
An inverter is a device which switches the DC current produced by the batteries into the three-phase alternating current needed for the boat. On North Star, we have three inverters, which work together, to service the boat, with each inverter producing one leg of the three phase AC Current. With one dead, our only option is to run 100% of the time off of the generators.
To be fair, the inverter didn’t die, we killed it. We have 15kw of inverter capacity and happened to be using 18kw at the time, which is a very bad idea. Our excuse, is that we didn’t realize we were using the inverter at all. We had the generator going at the time to power the boat. Only a subset of the boats circuits flow through the inverters at all. Most, especially the heavier equipment, such as the washers and dryers, are powered ONLY by the generator (or shore power when at a dock). During the refit we designated which circuits (devices) around the boat can be run by batteries and which demand more power and can require a generator.
There are things we have on the inverter which, with 20/20 hindsight, should never have been put on the inverter. And there are things that are on the inverter that we had no idea were on the inverter. We’ve gotten a lot smarter now, and this won’t be an issue in the future, but on our list for the next shipyard will be to move some of the circuits on this boat OFF of the inverter.
Anyway, Capt. Garrett has spent a lot of time trying to find an inverter in the wilderness and get it shipped to Cambridge Bay. We don’t need to run on batteries and are running just fine with no inverters. Garrett was able to work a miracle and get an inverter shipped to Cambridge, plus find a local electrician to install it. The inverter missed a flight, but will hopefully arrive tomorrow. And if it doesn’t, we will move on without it. We’re big on redundancy here on North Star!
This is a fun picture. It shows that even though we had already consumed around 1,500 gallons of fuel, we still had 10,278 miles of range to go. I took it when we were running through the ice at only 7kts. Had we been moving at 9kts the range would have shown closer to 5,000 miles — which is still pretty amazing for a boat this size!
CAPE PARRY / BOOTH ISLAND
With a storm coming, we needed a place to hang out before our next long passage to Cambridge Bay.
We found a giant bay to anchor in at Cape Parry. It was the only good protected anchorage within hundreds of miles. We encountered four sailboats who were running the Northwest Passage east to west, as well as a tug pulling three giant barges.
Our time at Cape Parry was “eventful.” On our first night we went into emergency mode when a block of ice the size of a soccer field decided to float our direction.
When you have a large amount of anchor chain down it is not quick and easy to pull anchor and move to a new location. It can easily take half an hour to retrieve the anchor and move.
Icebergs don’t move fast, but they do move, and we had an immense one coming straight at us. Worse yet, it had moved over our anchor. Even if we wanted to retrieve the anchor, we couldn’t. Instead we were forced to use the engines to maneuver away from the oncoming ice until it had safely passed.
A hitchhiker on some floating ice that passed by our boat — NOT the big ‘soccer field-sized one!’
When we had the drone up, we saw these markers. I wasn’t sure what they were and asked ChatGPT. Its best guess: “Those probably ARE navigation/alignment markers —very likely there because of the Cape Parry DEW Line installation, guiding supply ships or landing craft toward its landing/beach area.” That of course caused me to say, “What is a DEW line?” The answer: “Built in 1957 as part of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line, an electronic radar fence across the Arctic designed to detect incoming Soviet bombers over the North Pole.”
Our time at Cape Parry was not particularly restful. The predicted storm did arrive and we had about eight hours of steady winds from 30 to 50 knots. We were well anchored, and in communication with the other boats that were hunkered down hiding from the storm. You can never completely rest when the winds are that high, and we had to be ready to jump into action at any moment should the anchor not hold. But it did, and as soon as the wind started dropping, we began the 36-hour run to our present location, Cambridge Bay. It was a miserable run with constant 15 to 25 knot wind directly in our face. It was never unsafe, and it 15 knots it wasn’t bad, but as the wind would edge 25 knots the boat would pitch uncomfortably. To make a long story short, we arrived safely to a beautiful day in Cambridge Bay where we were refueled, and are looking forward to some sightseeing!
AS A LAST THOUGHT
This blog is getting a bit long, so I’ll save some of where we’ve been for my next newsletter.
Thank you! Ken and Roberta Williams — and Pixie and Keeley
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