Greenland has paid the tab for some of our meals... Nick shot a couple of duck, we have caught fish, gathered mussels and even found a bottle of maple syrup at an abandoned Inuit settlement!
I would like to share these random memories from my passage as I don't have the time to write a story around each of these moments. They may not be in chronological order but they are in some sort of order, at least in my mind . Excited and wide-eyed, we had little idea what we were in for, not even that Nick was born deaf until we stepped off the bus. He mentioned in emails that he preferred to communicate via writing because he's deaf but we both assumed that he's hard-of-hearing; people tend to throw the term 'I'm deaf' around too casually and don't literally mean it. We both agreed on the bus that it'll be a great adventure, no matter what happens, even more so when we met Nick face-to-face. I don't like to look up photos of places I'll be going to nor people I'll be meeting because I don't want to be clouded by what I've seen or to have any preconceived bias. Nick sent me links to previous blogs but I intent...
Greenland was mindblowing - overwhelming & exhausting at times. Some moments - First sight of Greenland, from Davis Strait. A vastness of 6000 ft thunderously jagged peaks receding 60 miles away to our left, and 60 miles to our right, white with snow & glaciers, lit up by the sun under the blue skies. Anchored on the north side of an island 10 km offshore, facing 10 miles of unbroken glacier frontage on the sea, this glacier receding far far inland to the icecap between jagged peaks dominating the skyline. First thing we did on landing at Greenland. Anchored opposite an abandoned Eskimo summer camp, rowed to it, to the sandy beach at its foot littered with stranded bergs, stripped down and leaped into the sea. We have arrived! Finding fragments of a polar bear skeleton, long long dead, on a barren stony island. Taking arctic char, eating it raw by a fire by a clear Arctic lake, or cooked - divine. Exploring a US WW2 military airfield & base on a vast open slope ...
We got to Grindavik, SW Iceland yesterday. Took 4 days from Tassilaq. No drama. It was very cold as we crossed the East Greenland current the first night. Motored half the time. Saw a sperm whale asleep as we sailed past. Passed many shoals of pink shrimp,the seas red with them. No storis (Danish term for the vast ice fields flowing SW off the East Greenland coast from the polar basin). Just a lot of individual bergs scattered around. The storis is rapidly becoming a casualty of anthropogenic global warming. Josh left this afternoon to catch his flight out of Keflavik International to Boston to begin the next phase of his global tour, a sail from Woods Hole to Cape Breton. Today is a national holiday - nearly everything is closed. Tomorrow we top up with food, diesel & water, then we head off from here straight for Ireland. Around 750 NM - should take 7-8 days. May stop in at Inishkea North to visit my old friend, Brian Sweeney, who lives there,the solitary resident of the is...
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