Friday, August 10, 2012

Ice blocks our path coming out of Johan Petersen fjord

 Teddy at anchor off "Skull Island" - later a berg will sit on our anchor, trapping us, and a wind shift will push all these icebergs our way until miraculously they run aground in the low tide before they can crush us against the rocks, encasing us in an ice wall.
 View across the fjord from Skull Island.
 This is how it got its name. The island had several above-ground tombs like the one below.
 The Inuit tomb, here from above, looked very benign but contained a surprise.
 Trapped with an iceberg on our anchor, we had to do 24-hour watches to make sure the ice didn't move. As the tide dropped, huge chunks of the bergs would fall all around us, the sky resounding with explosive booms like artillery and the sea churning with waves. Here Nick fends off a piece.
 This is the offending iceberg that sat on our anchor, looking beautiful in the rising sunlight.

 The next day the anchor came up at high tide and Nick and Sam bashed our way out, and we left the fjord.
 Somebody call PETA.
 Huskies gotta eat; women need fuzzy slippers.

 This crazy lady kept sabotaging our foosball game by shaking the table; she just couldn't play nice. Quite a turnout at the local bar.
 Our final scrimmage with Greenland ice on our way back to Ireland leaves us with a pang of nostalgia and a dent the size of a watermelon in Teddy's steel hull.
 These dolphins swam with us for days. If you climbed beneath the pulpit you could pet them as they came up for air, which broke the monotony pretty well.
The only fish we ate on the way home came out of a can.

No comments:

Post a Comment