A lot has happened since our last post out at sea, and it will take a little time to digest it all and to write it up.
Today, we moved from a wild anchorage in the archipelago of Tunugdliatsiaup Nuuna west of Bredefjord, where we spent the last two nights, to the glacier front of the Greenland ice cap. The contrast is remarkable. The morning saw us surrounded by low lying rocks and islands, a rusting wreck nearby. An eagle nest with two chicks on a neighbouring island, and caribou visiting for breakfast. Tonight, we are enclosed by an arena of high rocky mountains and three glacier fronts.
Walls of ice, ranging from cobalt to azure, turquoise, pale blue, white, and greys. Some of which reach down to the water surface, licked by tiny waves that splash against their foot. Where the ice retreats, it uncovers smoothly polished rounded humps of pink and ochre granite.
The ice we have seen today underway in the ice-thronged Bredefjord is a stark contrast to the sea ice we navigated through when making our way to Qaqortoq from the open sea. The shapes and colours are remarkable, and we see all manner of erosion patterns and shapes. Fantasy has no bounds in ice.
It’s 19:30 in the evening and the sun is still high in the overcast sky. Appearing orange through the thick stratus, as if it was nearly setting, gives it a bizarre and disorienting appearance. There is a little breeze blowing from the ice cap, barely 3 knots. There is a distinct glacial freshness to it, as if we were at high altitude. It tingles on my cheeks as I sit in the cockpit typing, watching, feeling, listening. All senses attentive, I’m soaking up the impressions, tuning into my environment.
The turquoise water flows past the hull in quiet murmurs, gurgling a little in the nearby brash ice floating past. Chicha, the polar-bear-coloured ship’s cat, also called ‘Ca’tain’, comes by, jumps from the cockpit coaming onto the deck with a thump and walks towards the bow. There, Arnaud, the ship’s captain, is perched with his drone’s remote control, taking remote photos of the ice.
Loud thunder reaches us, followed by the crushing sound of an avalanche, of ice collapsing. The glaciers and the ice are in constant motion, far from being a landscape frozen in time. We saw several ice falls earlier today while drifting along the ice wall, capturing the immensity and intricacy of the ice in photos, videos, and recording the glacier’s heartbeat. Near-constant rumbling, thundering, cracking, booming around us. The ice is never still.
Behind my back, a waterfall makes a nearly constant white noise, down a rock wall above a glacier moraine. Chicha is sitting next to me now, intently looking over the water, before she starts on her playful evening round, racing around the boat, hunting invisible foes. The breeze is creeping down my neck between the skin and the puffy jacket, sending a shiver down my spine. A mosquito lands on my thick black Polartec trousers. Try stinging through 5mm of toasty warm fleecy material! I don’t even bother to shoo it off or kill it, but watch its search for an exposed spot. They are drawn to dark materials and mostly leave bare skin unharmed.
We’re anchored on the sandy spit of a stream delta, momentarily dried up, and I watch the many shades of ice drift past. The water is of a thick intense turquoise that reminds me of our summers spent onboard Twoflower in Sardegna. Only the water here isn’t crystal clear, but milky. It carries the sediment of the glaciers, rock ground into fine flour by the ice flowing downwards to the sea in what appears slow motion to us. Time has another dimension here. But that is not to say that everything is slow. Rather, time seems to have a certain elasticity to it. It seems to stretch and compress as if pulsating in its own rhythm.
When I look up, my eyes meet the glacial face we visited earlier. Its sheer height and dimensions are astonishing and leave me in awe. A truly sublime place. This is not even a large glacier front compared to others of the Greenland ice cap.
The sun is to our port side, lighting the mountain ridge. A gull glides past in silence. Another deep rolling thunderclap booms through the lambda-shaped fjord. We are anchored near the crossing point and our view spans across all three arms of the fjord. Sheer rock faces with diagonal lines, scree cones, rocky outcrops, moraines, sandy deltas. There isn’t much vegetation and it truly feels like being in the high alps, but on a sailing boat!
The receding tide left behind little ice lumps that adorn the beach with frozen sculptures. The water surface is a true mirror, reflecting the underside of the ice and the land behind it. There is a slight haze in the air that gives our surroundings a mystical touch.
Atlas is rolling barely perceptibly and slowly rotating her nose towards the shore, and as she does, the next glacier comes into view. It doesn’t reach the water anymore but has retreated above a cliff. Seracs are overhanging the rock face, crushed fallen bits lie underneath, bearing witness to the sudden changes that happen. Gulls call occasionally and a couple fly past.
My fingers slowly go cold, the skin is dry and cracking in the arid air flowing down from the ice cap. Alex and Arnaud are in the pilot house, backing up and reviewing some of our hundreds of photos of the past week. I look around and see the icebergs nearby, the arena of glaciers around us, and feel an incredible pull to jump onto the paddle-board and go exploring!
A place to celebrate!
Angie
