Sailing in ICE | Sailing Florence Ep.218

We are Amy and Matt. This year we have sailed our 40 year old 37 foot sailboat 2,400 miles from the south coast of the UK all the way north to the high arctic. Here we are exploring the icy land of Svalbard and having an experience we can barely believe is possible. This is what it's like to sail your own boat and explore in the high arctic. Yesterday we had to abandon our chosen anchorage next to the glacier because it was full of car-sized blocks of ice but today we're going to make our way back over there and see if we can weave our way through the ice to get towards the face of the glacier. And over the last nine years we've been lucky to be able to take pictures of Florence in some really iconic places. Sailing in the lagoon in Bora Bora in French Polynesia, anchored off palm tree studded deserted islands in Indonesia, sailing past the Opera House and under Sydney Harbour Bridge and anchored amidst the desert sand dunes in Namibia. But never somewhere in ice and one of the major items on our bucket list for this trip is to get a photo of Florence amongst the ice for that photo book but it's probably going to be one of if not the most challenging photo to get because there are moving hazards in the form of large chunks of ice so I'm feeling pretty nervous about this. This is a problem we've been having in a lot of anchorages up here in Svalbard. There is often a lot of this kelp seaweed around. It can stop the anchor from setting properly but so far our 20 kilo spade anchor has done a good job of cutting through it and biting into the mud below. It takes a little bit of untangling when we raise the anchor though. As we approach the bay with the glacier the cliffs alongside are surprisingly green. It's the arctic summer and these slopes are well fertilized by the visiting breeding birds. There are hundreds of little orcs and puffins fishing in the water and are sure the reindeer are making the most of the green shoots to eat. Wow look at that one. Yeah so beautiful. We've just come in here and we're going out in exactly the same direction and they're the same little bergs or bergy bits that we've seen on the way in but they just look different. Different colours, different shapes. How have you found your glacier experience? I think my heart rate is just calming down. Parts of it were like absolutely fine. There's kind of big patches where there's no no ice whatsoever. Yeah and then it just is such an enormous base that I can't I can't even describe how big it is and it feels like you're a lot closer than you are. That was crazy but equally not probably as crazy as it looked. The face of the glacier is just so massive that it feels like and looks like we're a lot closer than we were. At one point I mean I was getting nervous a long way before Matt was and I'm kind of saying right that's it last tack we're getting out of here and then a huge amount of ice carved off of the face and it just created this wave and you could see it coming and I was worried for the dinghy, I was worried for Florence and it didn't even reach us. We were so far away from from the actual face of the glacier but yeah it was good to get out of there. I mean it pushed a load of a load more ice out of the way but what an experience. I'm not sure I can manage a glacier a day but I'd like to see a few more whilst we're in Svalbard. It's much nicer experience under sail because you see it's quiet and so you just get all of the sounds of the ice cracking and popping and then the occasional rumble and sometimes like a gunshot sound before any of the ice carve off the glacier. This one's not supposed to carve very often but it certainly has been this afternoon. I reckon that was epic and we survived. I really wanted to get up and see a glacier like that. I didn't think we'd get the chance so soon on our time in Svalbard and just to be able to sail up to it instead of have to motor up to it even though we've only got like five knots of wind that was really special. Yeah every time we hear a like sometimes it's an iceberg flipping over sometimes it's a bit carving off the glacier it's not a static environment it's all mobile and all the icebergs they're not moving very fast but they all are gradually moving and there's shallow spots in the bay that we've got to keep a look on the depth gauge for so you've got to keep on your toes but ah what an experience and to be able to sail up here on such a glorious day ah I honestly didn't think this would happen I thought this was a chance in a million we get this experience so happy but before we leave this glacier behind there is one more thing we need to do. I'm very much looking forward to getting out of here and enjoying a nice glass with some ice. It's difficult to describe the incredible feeling of being up here in the high arctic whilst experiencing these beautiful calm conditions. The air is crisp and clear and the sun provides a surprising amount of warmth when there is no wind chill present. The light winds mean we can only sail at around three knots so it takes a while to get anywhere but the calm waters are perfect for spotting wildlife. The arctic comes alive in summer when the ice melts. The waters become rich in krill and small fish which then attract various whale species including blue, fin, humpback, beluga and minke whales. Occasionally sperm whales and narwhals can also be seen. Unlike most whales these minke whales are not protected in Norwegian waters and are instead hunted for their meat. Whale is often seen on restaurant menus in Norway so we could forgive these minke for not wanting to come closer marble quarry. All this huge cast iron machinery is still here. It's so solid even after over 100 years it's still just solid here. Over a hundred years ago an English guy was visiting the arctic and he came to this bay and struck what he thought at the time was the equivalent of marble gold. He set up a mine here and then actually went through the process of quarrying a load of marble, took it all the way back to the UK to try and get the investment that he needed to really make the marble that was available. Apparently this whole island was covered in marble but he caught it back to the UK and discovered that actually with the difference of temperature and the climate the marble became incredibly brittle and it just shattered and so the quarry was eventually abandoned and all of the machinery that's left has been standing here for over 100 years. This place is known as London after the company that was quarrying the marble and all the equipment here has got stamped on it the engineering companies that made it from London and this one from Leicester and it's solid, it's huge, it's all cast iron so most of it's rusted away but you can see in places where they've got the brass bearings they're still clean. Really an amazing effort to ship all this up from the UK for a completely failed attempt at quarrying marble. The machinery isn't the only thing that you have to be careful with that's old on the island, also the vegetation. This island is covered in tiny flowers which is amazing that they're growing but it takes years for them to grow back so you have to be very careful and also gives us views further up the fjord into Kongsfjorden and I don't know if you can see on camera but it is absolutely chocked full of ice. We were hoping to get further up there because today the forecast was actually for no wind, I don't know if you can tell but it's actually blowing about 20 knots at the moment and from this peak I can see further out to sea it is an absolute flat mirror calm like was forecast. So yeah I think we might have to put off our trip up Kongsfjorden which is a shame because it looks like an amazing glacier at the top of there, put that off for a calmer day. It's apparently very normal for there to be more wind than is forecast in these fjords because the cold dense air falls off the glacier and creates this wind. Normally as sailors we look at the water to gauge how much wind there is and we look for little white horses where the wind is just blowing the peaks off the waves. Don't have white horses here you have ice horses and they're a lot more dangerous to look out for. Coming hiking up here we can see around the other side of the island and look at all that ice there are massive icebergs carving off those glaciers over there. Those things are huge it'll be really exciting to take Florence around there but I think only when we've got a very calm day and we can go very slowly and it's not all going to come towards us. I did not expect to see such big icebergs I don't think and yeah the other side of this island is just yeah packed with ice. The ones we've seen so far have been the size of a car maybe a minibus those ones are definitely the size of a ship or a and a Norwegian scientific research centre. I think there's about 40 people there through the winter and then the population explodes in the summer as all the international research scientists come to do their work here and just coming up to this peak here we found a passive air sampler which must be part of the research they're doing. Hopefully by breathing here we're not upsetting their experiments. Ny-Ålesund does have a harbour which we can go to it's also got a cruise ship dock so the cruise ships will be going in and out there I can see one there at the moment but it has a dock which we can tie up alongside we can get diesel if we need it and also can have a shower so I think we'll be going there tomorrow. One of the other research projects here is something to do with radio frequencies and so there is a radio silence zone I think it's about 20 kilometre circle around the town Ny-Ålesund which means we've been asked not to use wi-fi, bluetooth and that means we can't get a weather forecast from our satellite phone because it's just an iridium go and we communicate between that and our phone to use it using wi-fi but thankfully there is now a telephone signal here so we can actually use our mobile phones to get a weather forecast but that was a surprise when we came around the corner and we picked up a phone signal so a welcome surprise meaning we can get the weather forecast. It's a beautifully calm day today but unfortunately the forecast for the next couple of days is showing that that is not going to be the case we've got up to 40 knots that are forecast to be blowing offshore so we are going to head to Ny-Ålesund and take shelter on the dock there but because it's such a calm and beautiful day we thought it was a perfect opportunity to take a little scenic detour on our way there so the glacier behind the island that we were just anchored on has apparently retreated to the point where you can circumnavigate the island and that's where all of those big blocks of ice that we saw from the top of the hill were all yesterday so we're not 100% sure that we'll make it all the way around there but it's just the perfect conditions for going in and being a bit closer to the ice like that so we were able to sail a little bit this morning but the wind has now completely died so we're just going to motor around there very slowly and we've got the forward scan sonar on and we'll keep a good lookout but it's just amazing how fast this ice is melting the shapes are just continually changing and they're really spectacular just this morning there was a block of ice just outside the anchorage which looked like a whale it had a proper tail shape to it and everything I'm aware that we keep calling these blocks of ice icebergs and technically an iceberg has to be big enough that it's at least 16 feet above the water which is about a third of the way up Florence's mast so there might be a few of these blocks of ice that we've seen in the distance that are technically icebergs but the majority of them are bergy bits which are a minimum of three feet above the water and then less than three feet is known as a growler a third of Florence's mast height is our rough gauge and those ones are way above the spreaders I still like calling all the chunks of ice icebergs though because to me they're all icebergs even though they're growlers or bergy bits they're all icebergs really there's a huge amount of icebergs flowing down from a glacier up here but I'm not sure we're going to be able to get up that way because there's not really any gaps between the ice and Florence only being a fiberglass boat we don't want to use her as an icebreaker but here there are big enough gaps between the icebergs that we can just work our way between and today there is just it's so calm that nothing's really moving yesterday we were sitting in our anchorage watching icebergs just flow across the x outside of the anchorage and they mount really fast I mean it's glorious sunny today but they're mounting surprisingly fast just in the time it was taking them to drift across the bay from our anchorage you could see they were getting smaller as they went across so slightly worrying thought is with all the winds we've been having offshore how much ice there is offshore if we then go sailing down the coast especially if the waves get a bit choppy it's not as calm like this then maybe we won't be able to see the icebergs or the bergy bits floating in the water and then that could be a problem if we hit them at speed but on a day like today what better to do than mounting is strange it sounds like a running babbling brook and when you're anchored amongst them at night and you down below you can actually hear the sound of almost sound of running water from within the boat makes you think you've got a leak somewhere but it's not it's just to be out here in these calm conditions the weather forecast is warning of an approaching gale so we're heading to the harbour at new orleson to seek shelter next time we wait out the gale in new orleson before sailing out and having to dodge all the floating ice blown out from the glaciers by the strong winds there is a lot of ice in the water and we don't want to hit that with florence not having a metal boat for extra updates in between these bi-weekly videos and to find out what we're up to in real time head over to patreon and join the crew continuing our voyage on florence would not be possible without the support of our patrons thank you to all of you and especially to our star patrons