(written by Nick)

Back at Tasiilaq aka Ammassalik.

Last night we tried to get into Kulusuk harbor, 10 miles to the east. Totally choked with ice. So we came here.

We had a very intense few days in dense ice.

Went up the fjord west of Ammassilak island.

1st night at an abandoned Eskimo village, about 10 houses, most dilapidated. Church - school, graveyard behind, each grave a pile of rock on the granite, marked with painted white cross nothing more.

Moved up into a branching fjord & got within a mile of glaciers. The Greenland ice cap looming over us, a vast heavy striated whiteness spanning the horizon between & behind the nmountain peaks. It seemed crazy to try to anchor in the dense continially moving floes. So we anchored up against a floe in the middle of the fjord. 100 by 75 feet, our own little kingdom. i swam in the morning, then had coffee on the floe in just my boxer shorts until my feet could no longer take it. The sun shining, blue sky, no wind, the barometer stréady, wonderful.

We motored out, several x pushing thru solid blockages of small floes. Sailed across & up the 5 mile wide fjord, a splendid sail with much blue water between giant bergs & no clutter to dodge. Came to a small island a km square, a hunting shack on it. went around to the landward side, anchored, walked ashore. Two stone ruins, about a dozed small hollow cairns containing the bones of the eskimo dead. no crosses so pre Christian (1900), some very old, the cairns collapsed & overlain with slow-growing moss, others with bits of skull, two with nice skulls. One was a child. Such utter remote wilderness - the two stone ruins so well placed to overlook the vastness of the fjord shambolic with bergs, the jagged mts, the ice cap looming over all. Of course to the Eskimo this is his backyard, and the coastline & islands are littered with cairns and the bones of the dead, everywhere.

at this anchorage a wind shift pushed the ice down to us.  A berg moved onto the anchor chain in 30 ft water. Happenmed very fast! We were unable to reterieve the chain, figured this berg wopuld serve as bulwark against any other ice until the next high tide. So it proved, and retrieval on the tide was no problem.

My boat is of steel, a very tough hull. She takes a lot of bashing into the ice, no problem. I am very impressed with her. Splendid to have this, & it makes me so much more comfortable in ice.

tomorrow we set out for ireland. 1100 NM - be about 11 days - 100 miles a day being my average on ocean crossings.

food, fuel, laundry, this blog, then its on a walk I go.

Ben,s photos get better & better - he is really good at this. A discovered talent, I think.