No dog watch, but bird watch
Tuesday 24-9-2019 55’29N 168’08W COG 160 SOG 8.5 kn Wind West 20kn Fork tailed Storm Petrels, Sooty Petrels, Short tailed...
Back home
We made it. We made it through the North West Passage. We made it from Ilulissat, Greenland to Nome, Alaska....
Marine plastics in the Canadian Arctic waters
When signing up for the NWP trip of Tecla, I decided to conduct some beach observations using the OSPAR beach litter classification scheme as guideline. I did not follow their strict instruction to square off a 100m or 1 km section
With a raging speed we sped out through the Chukchi Sea!
We first have to watch the Northern Light show in peace, watch the full moon set for another hour or so and try and spot the whales we keep hearing around us. Some even as close as 50 meters from the ship. We can not make out what sort they are, we hear their spout and then see a glimpse of their back if we are looking in the right direction.. but can not tell whether something is a dorsal vin or small wave.. it is just too dark for that..
Herschel Island, Yukon, on the Canadian north shore near the Alaskan border by Steven Luitjens
This island of about 100 km2, roughly 10 by 10 km, is the only one along an otherwise relatively straight coastline between the Mackenzie delta to the east and well into Alaska to the west.
Around Point Barrow the North East current rules
We could hear the propeller singing, the ship is humming, it sounds like 7 knots! But the GPS tells us differently.. hmmmm so this North East current we read about, is really happening here... damn.
Closing in on Point Barrow
Nome, Alaska, is via our plotted course line still 632 miles away. Every now and then the TTA (time to arrival) is 5 days.. some times it is only 3 days and 8 hours. It feels a bit like the countdown has started. For our expedition crew this seems to mean gather pictures, recalling the memories
What pingo?
Pingo's. These volcano shaped hills are made by ice and are at close distance to our anchorage.. we just have to pick one of them.
Ice Ice baby! (tudtudtudtudedudedudu)
It is exactly why we do these amazing things and keep pushing our limits. It is almost addictive, you feel alive. Maybe the explorers from the olden day felt the same sort of thing and that is why they kept coming back to places like this, even though their fates were so uncertain and they were in real peril.
Kugluk, or Bloody Falls
The name Bloody Falls, comes from an event long ago where some first nation, or Indian people came into an altercation with Inuit’s that were hunting at the falls and there was a big fight. In some stories it was a massacre of the Inuit, in other stories there was really just one family staying there and the were killed
