VANCOUVER—For sailors drawn to the edge, the seas of
Canada’s Northwest Passage pull like no other waters can.
The fabled Arctic voyage grabbed hold of Philipp Cottier’s imagination when
he was a boy in Switzerland reading the logs of legendary explorers such as Sir
John Franklin and Roald Amundsen.
It never let go.
As the climate warmed, and vast stretches of sea ice melted this summer,
Cottier, 46, joined a growing number of yachtsmen trying to conquer a passage
that has killed hundreds who sailed before them.
The Swiss hedge fund investor and philanthropist consulted naval engineers
and toughened up the fibreglass hull of Libellule, a 14-metre catamaran, to give
her a fighting chance against the Arctic.
He added Kevlar to the bows and sides, and reinforced the rudder
shafts.
Then, in mid-July, Cottier, his wife Marielle and their three daughters,
Naima, 14, Line, 12, and Anissa, 8, cast off for the Canadian Arctic by way of
Nuuk, Greenland.
With two experienced French skippers to take the wheel, they set sail for
history, determined to make Libellulethe first cruising catamaran to
navigate the Northwest Passage, which joins the Atlantic to the Pacific across
the top of the world.
Weeks later, Cottier is almost there. A lifelong dream is now riding on a
hard Arctic reality: ice.
It’s back with a vengeance after retreating to record lows in recent years,
almost disappearing completely over the past two summers.
Cottier and his crew are among dozens of mariners scattered across the
Northwest Passage, searching for some way out as hull-crushing ice clogs up the
exits and a bitter winter closes in.
“Life is too short to live it in a boring way,” he emails from aboard
Libellule, heading northwest of Cambridge Bay, on Victoria Island.
“I prefer to live a full life, including some adventures from time to time
(such as mountaineering or sailing expeditions). And, fortunately, I have a
family who is willing to share some of these adventures.”
Word that the Arctic has been warming faster than anywhere else on the planet
— and images of calm, ice-free waters, even of sunbathers on deck — has made the
Northwest Passage a new magnet for marine adventurers.
Luxury cruise ships full of tourists are almost as common as polar bears in
Canada’s Arctic. So being in the Northwest Passage is losing the buzz it had
when only grizzled explorers dared venture. The race now is to transit by the
most treacherous routes or in the smallest craft afloat.
At least three rowboats and a tandem kayak launched attempts this year. And a
team of four Americans on jet skis set out on a voyage through the passage in
search of reality TV glory.
Douglas Pohl, an American sea captain who keeps a close watch on traffic in
the Northwest Passage after some 30 years navigating the world’s oceans, calls
paddling rowers insane for launching such attempts.
“It serves no real purpose and places people at extreme risk,” he says from
his 16.7-metre steel motor yacht Grey Goose, where he is cruising, and blogging
about the Northwest Passage, among the Caribbean islands of Bocas del Toro
Panama.
Mount Everest, another destination once reserved for major expeditions, is
now inundated with climbers, many with more money than alpine experience. Fatal
accidents keep rising with the crowds.
Canada’s overstretched Coast Guard fears the same will happen in the
Northwest Passage, where the agency says emergency rescues are still rare
despite a steady increase in inexperienced, poorly prepared boaters.
“So far, we’ve been lucky that we haven’t really had any major incidents
involving any of those type of navigators or vessels to date,” says Jean-Pierre
Sharp, regional supervisor, maritime search and rescue, from his base in
Trenton, Ont.
Pohl says he tried to talk the rowboaters out of making the trip. Two have
abandoned their attempts in recent days after only making it about half
way.
The final rowboat and the tandem kayak won’t last much longer, Pohl
predicts.
Since 2010, Ottawa has required all Arctic-bound ships over 300 tonnes, or
carrying dangerous goods, to register. That remains voluntary for smaller
vessels, which make up the majority of traffic through the Northwest
Passage.
Although Canada claims the route as territorial waters, it doesn’t require
vessels to get permission to enter the way Russia does in the much busier waters
along its Arctic coast.
So even though Prime Minister Stephen Harper declares Arctic sovereignty one
of his top priorities, the Coast Guard can only estimate how many vessels are
passing through.
It knows even less about who is on board or what they are up to. Harper
closed the only Coast Guard station in the western Arctic last year.
Shifts of three Coast Guard staff in Iqaluit are left to monitor sea traffic,
and field calls for weather and hazard information, across Canada’s vast
north.
They keep watch over a dangerous wilderness from Greenland west to Alaska,
from the northern tip of Ellesmere Island south to James Bay, and along the busy
Mackenzie River.
Some of their information comes from listening to radios, or monitoring GPS
satellite locations. They also search the Internet for clues about vessels that
haven’t declared their intentions.
If you run into trouble in the Northwest Passage and radio “Mayday,” and the
Coast Guard can’t raise another ship nearby, you’ll likely have a long wait for
help. Rescue operations in Canada’s Arctic are run out of Trenton, 170
kilometres east of Toronto.
The Coast Guard doesn’t have the authority to tell boaters to stay out — even
if they look like they’d be in over their heads in Arctic waters.
“We just hope, and try to tell them to be prepared,” says Sharp. “Hopefully,
they may have groups with them, or monitoring them, or have a good support team
in that sense.
“But we really can’t persuade people not to go. The Coast Guard has no ‘legal
side’ to us, if you will. It’s not just the North. I can’t refuse people from
venturing out on the Great Lakes or anything else.”
By late August, the Coast Guard knew of 24 vessels either in the Northwest
Passage or planning to go there, and only three of those were large ships
required to file notice, says Iqaluit spokesman Louis Robert.
Pohl has counted around 35 vessels in the passage this season, several of
which contacted him for free guidance.
Russia is much more strict in regulating its Arctic sea passages, called the
Northern Sea Route. At least 270 ships, mostly large commercial vessels,
received permits to sail at least part of the way between Asia and Europe this
year.
All vessels must apply for a permit to transit the Russian route. Getting one
requires, among other things, proof of experience navigating in sea ice,
adequate preparations and insurance.
Russia also charges Arctic mariners hefty fees to pay for mandatory
icebreaker escorts.
Canada’s much smaller fleet of Coast Guard icebreakers only help vessels in
the Northwest Passage if a call for help goes out.
The Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker CCGS Sir Wilfrid Laurier had to rescue
the American jet skiers and drop them off at Gjoa Haven, the only settlement on
King William Island.
Rachelle Smith, a spokesperson for the department of fisheries and oceans,
declined to say specifically whether the jet skiers or the producers of the
Dangerous Waters TV show have to pay for the costly rescue.
Coast Guard “operations are funded on a yearly/seasonal basis not on a
service basis,” she says in an email. “Therefore, the department does not
calculate cost estimates or assess cost recovery for individual search and
rescue cases.”
To Pohl, it’s obvious the jet skiers, and small self-propelled craft like
rowboats, shouldn’t be trying to voyage across the Arctic in the first
place.
“I knew it was sheer madness from the start and it has got to be
gut-wrenching to know that Mother Nature once again showed her power and kicked
their butts,” Pohl says. “Their failure was their poor preparation for the
legendary Arctic ice and weather. They just didn’t do their homework.”
By the end of last year, 185 vessels had navigated the Northwest Passage
since 1903, when Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was the first to sail through
aboard Gjoa, according to Robert Headland, a polar historian at Cambridge
University.
Amundsen and his crew took three years to succeed.
By far the majority of the voyages through the passage — 109 of them — have
been completed since 2000. Most of those vessels were sailboats or motor yachts,
Headland’s research shows.
The Northwest Passage is made up of seven possible routes, and ice
choke-points have blocked several of the main ones this summer, Pohl
says.
That “puts extreme pressure on vessel skippers to make a decision — to wait
or to attempt to find a way through the ice,” Pohl adds. “Good decisions are
never made under duress — you only get one chance in the Arctic.
“A poor decision usually means someone is going to suffer. Ice pressure
against a ship’s hull usually means you lose and Mother Nature wins — imagine
the forces from thousands of tons of ice being moved by winds coming to rest
against a ship’s hull.”
As ice closes in, skippers close enough to a hamlet that is equipped to haul
them out can surrender, put the boat on blocks so she stays in one piece, and be
ready to try again next summer. Mariners call it “going on the hard.”
But the facilities to do that are few and far between in the Canadian
Arctic.
And mariners who want bragging rights for transiting the Northwest Passage
crave the phrase “in a single season.” Winter breaks don’t have quite the same
cache.
“I think Roald Amundsen had sage advise: ‘Adventure is just bad planning,’”
Pohl says.
Even in a good year, the Arctic’s patience for mariners is short and the
window for transiting the Northwest Passage shuts fast.
Pohl has some advice for the seamen still there: “Get out of the Arctic
before Sept. 15 or else make plans to winter over near a hamlet with
services.”
Despite the risks, Cottier has had enough magic moments, such as watching his
daughters’ eyes light up as they floated past polar bears on an ice floe, and
met enough friendly people on his voyage to ask: “What can you wish
more?”
But it’s easy to be romantic about the Arctic, until her icy breath hits you
in the face in a howling gale.
Cottier felt it on Sept. 1 when winds gusting to 45 knots dragged Libellule
on her anchor for some 200 metres. With snow blowing horizontally, two-metre
waves hammered the boat while shoals and rocks waited to tear a hole in the
hull.
But the storm passed and she sailed on.
So far, ice has been the biggest headache and the most stunning sight.
Judging from Amundsen’s account of his voyage, Cottier thinks he’s come up
against more of it than the Norwegian did in 1903.
“Generally, being in the ice is very, very beautiful, but very extreme at the
same time because you never know how to get out,” Cottier says. “It is very
scary.
“As our youngest daughter nicely summarized it, being in the pack ice is
‘like a labyrinth, except that it is for real, and the labyrinth is constantly
changing, and you don’t even know if there is an exit!’”
That held up Libellule so long that Cottier’s wife and daughters had to go
ashore at Cambridge Bay.
It was time for the girls to fly back to school, leaving their father and
crew to see what was stronger, a boyhood dream or the ice.
Cottier completed his transit of the Northwest Passage Tuesday, when Libellule
crossed the Arctic Circle in the morning and then headed into the Bering Strait
that evening.
“The sun was shining, for the first time since Herschel Island, Canada, and
we could clearly see Siberia on our starboard side and Alaska on our port side,”
the triumphant yachtsman writes.
He and his crew celebrated with the last beer on board and a bottle of rum as
they set sail for port in Nome, Alaska.
“Life is beautiful . . .”
“We have just spotted a walrus colony on nearby Fairway Rock,” Cottier says,
signing off on a 7,500-kilometre voyage “across the Arctic waters and ice of
Greenland, Canada and Alaska.”
Originally published by: Paul Watson Toronto
Star, Fri Sep 13 2013
