What It’s REALLY Like Sailing the Northwest Passage

We had this kind of unspeakable goal, something we skirted around the edges on of going far north to the arctic, the real ice. Once we got up there and we still we had all these things but we still felt like we should probably not have got up here but at that point we were committed. 7.6 buddy. We don't really know what it's like to have a kid on land at all. We've never done it. We pushed through the hard times and questioned and reassessed quite often what we were doing. Very edgy sailing, there was not a lot of room for error. I usually like to play things a little safer but there just wasn't time to play it safe. The season was too short. We're so excited to share the story of the inspiring family behind this legendary expedition vessel Centane. An incredible journey into the unknown that ultimately led them to their greatest challenge, sailing into the arctic. We met the Penningtons while cruising down from Alaska and quickly became fast friends. We're so grateful they invited us aboard their home to film this interview and dig into what it really takes to prepare for and sail the Northwest Passage. My name is John and my name is Kara. We bought this boat and spent a long time restoring it. Went through the Northwest Passage in 2023 and dropped down from Alaska this summer. All very hard around here to Alert Bay. How long have you been sailing for Dean? Seven years, my whole life. This is my boat Centane. I'm going to give you a tour. Here's the galley. Well that's what you used to call a kitchen on a boat. Here's the salt water, ocean water, and here's the water that we drink. Grew up in California and got a little disenchanted with the crowds and decided to buy a small cheap sailboat, take Kara and disappear into the South Pacific on a search for surf. Here's the stove. Here's in the fridge. We got to New Zealand, Australia and going back to windward sounded like a bad idea so we carried on and finished a circumnavigation. It took us about five years and when we when we arrived back in North America, land life seemed like a really big difficult commitment and we weren't sure we were ready to give up enjoying the world. I'm gonna give you a tour of my room. Here's my room. So between work and having a child we bought this boat and fixed her up in the Netherlands and in the UK and worked our way over to the East Coast and on around the top. It's stretched out on here. It's actually quite small. The Northwest Passage is going over the top of North America and so up there you're in either the Arctic or the High Arctic. There's ice, the ocean is frozen most of the year. Squizzled here because we got in the ice down to Beloit. There's no services, there's no travel lift. If your boat needs to come out of the water you run it aground and hope that tide drops but there's not that much tide. It's going up there should not not be taken lightly. It's only like 10,000 miles but you have to do it in like a few months. A big traverse of a lot of distance and has to be done very quickly due to the due to the ice which doesn't melt for a very long portion only for a month or two at the end of the summer. Pretty much have to go non-stop, not quite, just for a few fuel stops and that's it pretty much. Here's my clothes and stuff. All the beluga teeth necklaces and here's the polar bear claw necklace and although we don't use it for a necklace because it's too sharp like we have a bunch of these which are just beluga vertebrae. We had this kind of unspeakable goal something we skirted around the edges on of going far north to the Arctic not necessarily the Northwest Passage but going to the real ice. Not ready to give up on their sailing journey the Pennington's started on a search for a boat that would bring them closer to their unspeakable goal. Northern Europe is where the well-insulated boats are so we ended up flying over there. Brought Dean with us he was three months. That's when they found Centane, a 50-year-old iconic Dutch sailing vessel built for high latitudes that was now nearly sinking. Because we couldn't afford a new aluminum boat they took a chance and decided to make a go giving her new life. Spent a lot of time in Europe tracing down where's this water coming from and I didn't know anything about welding. Despite their apprehensions this was undoubtedly a vessel that could take them into the real ice. She's a good boat good bones. So the Pennington's set out on a daunting multi-year project of updating every system on board all with a new baby. It's a lot of work to get it up to where it is now. It was hard to take a break. Before he was walking he was climbing up the companionway. Yeah we were always looking for ways to get him to be on his own so our hands could be free and we could be working on something and there was a lot of times where it was easier just to put him in the buggy and go for a walk. But all the other projects we were highly involved in and that's one of the reasons I think Dean is so interested in how the boat works. He was crawling around during everything. It was nice to be doing everything as a family and be able to help John where we could at least get him to eat. Can't just drink beer all day. You can't have quesadillas all day either. There was a lot of work Pop wanted to make her simple and very strong. It took us six years to get her fixed up while we sailed around the Atlantic. This is our loop to test for the northwest passage and then we went. For the first few years aboard we couldn't sail uh even a dozen miles without something breaking a new you know bullet point added to the to-do list. We definitely had to build our trust in Suntane and sail lots of miles and fix all these things and get her ice ready and far north ready. We went like this the Chesapeake to Rhode Island and then we stayed there for three years and then we went. We did a big Atlantic loop just to double check went out to Bermuda down to the Caribbean and then back up the East Coast. Finally over the years we did build up our trust in the boat. I feel comfortable on her. We put her through a lot. We did probably 5,000 miles that summer and the boat was perfect. Nothing failed and we were very pleased with how how the boat did on that trip and so there was no excuses anymore. We had to figure out how to get Dean's seasickness under control. That turned into be a very big part of our shakedown cruise was the crew. Yeah but all that kind of came together in the in the early summer of 2023 where the boat was ready for basically anything and we were ready to go. I finally realized that okay maybe it's not such a wild idea or an unreachable goal to to get her up to the ice and and see how she does from there. You know there was there's years in the making just getting in position to sail north. Pop said that there would be no summer this year. There was a long way to go. The Penningtons made their own film about the journey which you may have already found on YouTube. We wanted to share a few moments of that story here in order to set the stage for the adventure that followed. A glimpse of the voyage through their own lens. The weather looked good so we sailed north for Greenland. Mommy said it would take about a week to get there. It was very foggy so we couldn't see the icebergs. Our radar said there was lots all around us. On the last day the sun came out so we set the spinning cart and zoomed into Nook. The Nook Harbor was very crowded. I feel that most of what you would need to do to do the Northwest Passage is prepare for the Northwest Passage. Once you leave kind of civilization at least on the east coast which ends around you know Maine or St. John's in Nova Scotia there's no chance to make anything right again unless you have the pieces on board so everything that needs to be done you need to do ahead of time. We sailed north again. Pop said there's no time to rest. I hadn't fully appreciated how much we would have to be pushing to cover miles every time there was an opportunity and the opportunities were limited. You had to take into account where the ice was at the time, what the weather's doing. You were getting in hours before the weather changed. The cold, everything that you had to do while you were on watch really drained you and we were quite exhausted to stand out there in the fog, to be watching for ice continuously, to be changing sails continuously because the weather's volatile up there. It's really volatile. It's not trade wind sailing. Right. We've done the majority of our miles in the trade winds. You set the sails. You check every 15 minutes for ships but you really aren't actively changing the sails all the time and this was pretty constant. We hadn't done a lot of lot of beating before and we'd done some offshore but usually it's poking along at a low comfortable pace until the weather changes but this was another level. It's narrow, poorly charted channels, short tacking into 30 or 40 knots in the snow just trying to make a few miles to get to port because the weather systems roll through. That is not something we have a lot of experience doing and I'm glad and I don't want any more experience doing that. We crossed the arctic circle. The sun, it never went down so I didn't have a bedtime anymore. The charts weren't too good. There were lots of rocks, ice and glaciers. I'd say that it was a rude awakening but pretty standard for how you have to sail up there. There's never the perfect opportunity to go do the northwest passage. That's why it's difficult. That's why there's not a lot of boats doing it because you have to make calls like sitting in Greenland looking at 600 mile offshore passage in between weather systems with six or seven tenths of ice across Baffin Bay and and then Lancaster Sound may or may not be full. Pond Inlet may or may not be full. You may not be able to go anywhere once you arrive. It could just be a shore of ice but being on the clock. Always the season. The summer is ending. Fall is coming. You only have a few weeks to get started. The window is narrow. Finally we sailed way out into Baffin Bay. After two days we hit the ice pack. It started off okay but then it got a little scary. It was obviously quite stressful. I would continuously list our bailout options and I didn't want to ever find us in a position where if this doesn't work there's no other option. Like this has to work. I think we did pretty well with that. We always felt like there was another option. I don't think we really prepared for how much standing in the cockpit and staring over the bow into fog looking for you know a ghostly white shadow of imminent impact with ice. How much of that there was going to be? The ice was almost blocking Lancaster Sound. I think often the plan B was was heading back to where we came from and often we fell back to the plan B. We wanted to go to Pond Inlet. It was still too too much ice by the time we were close enough to make the decision and so we chose Lancaster Sound which was plan B. There was a strip of open water but then of course you get the news, the message that there's a big easterly coming. You can't keep going because there's ice. You have to decide where to go so that's when we turned south and had to go 60 miles down the west side of Baffin Island to Arctic Bay which was a huge detour south but that was maybe plan C at that point. Yeah but most of the sailing we've done in the past in the trade winds you kind of always have like plans B, C, D and you know all the way you know all the way to Z usually and you just you have to pick between them. You pick plan A and up there you were lucky to have a plan B. Having a plan C was a real luxury that I'm not sure we experienced very many times. We tried not to get ourselves stuck in and only having one plan but it probably did happen a few times. A hostile stark environment, beautiful but just not somewhere that we felt like we could survive for long with what we had. A tremendous respect for the Inuit who can survive up there year-round. It's unbelievable like it's very very harsh environment. We were out on a limb all summer always on watch always had to be you know ready to jump out of bed or or jump up on deck to to take care of something fend off ice or worry about a anchor dragging or something like this. There were several other boats that were kind of our size range our speed and so because the we're always gated by either ice or weather we ended up clumping together you know just pushing as far and as fast as we could given the conditions but we always had to stop when we hit ice or when we hit a weather system and so both decompressing after each trial and just acknowledging that this is hard but we're making progress was great and then when we decided to leave port and to try to do another leg none of the decisions were easy. It was always you know a compromise between the ice and the visibility and the wind. The storm lasted for seven days it got super windy but the big storm was actually a good thing it moved all the ice away. We finally left Arctic Bay but it was still rough. Finding a way through there's just not not that many good opportunities to make miles up there you really have to make the most of them. And the compass didn't work anymore poor mommy and pop had a hamster. Three two six this one's saying southeast. After three days we arrived at Belmont Strait. We saw some sad hungry polar bears on the beach. We were running the diesel heater but mostly when we arrived in a place where we knew we could get more diesel in between legs we were just a little bit concerned about our diesel supply. The diesel tanks are not massive so we had a few jerry cans and things but we were we were a little concerned with our diesel supply so we were not running the heater very often unless it was it was somebody got cold somebody was was having a hard time warming up or when we were sure we're going to have enough diesel to make it to the next port. So we sailed when we could but there's still quite a bit of motoring just because there's not time to wait for a fair wind. Yeah we estimated about 60% sailing 40% motoring and we wanted to leave the option open of skipping a fuel stop and we did skip a fuel stop it saved us probably over 100 miles so it was fully bundled up up above and down below a couple really warm sleeping bags and trying to do the hot water bottle and everything to stay warm. We were fighting the dampness though was really getting to us for sure. So one thing we would definitely do again is I think we would we would definitely get some closed cell foam and lay it over the floor and then lay carpets on top of that just just to really help with that issue. The rest of the boat was fairly warm but it was coming up from from deep. Ice, weather, provisions, fuel, currents they're all in play and they're all very difficult. One thing that was not as difficult as we thought was the provisioning. We were able to get provisions along the way. Then we arrived at Cato Ridge Bay. We had just enough time to get fuel. We took a few weather forecasts a few more risks than we normally would have done offshore in the tropics where things are a little less contested. We definitely questioned every every step of the way how are we doing should we should we continue on is this too much for our experience. It was some very edgy sailing. There was not a lot of room for error. I usually like to to play things a little safer but there just wasn't time to play it safe. The season was too short. I guess in the end it turned out that okay we can keep going we can keep going you know we don't need to turn around but we feel like luck was on our side and anything one mistake you know one change in the ice forecast and it could have been a different different summer. Did you have imposter syndrome when setting out to take on a journey like this or any moments of thinking wow we're we're really out of our league here? For sure then I think we still are a little bit imposters. We have a lot of technical technological and technical advantages that the you know the guys like Franklin and Amundsen who went up there and struggled so mightily they did not have the advantages that we have reliable diesel engines you know great supplies of diesel along the way great canned food easy access to supplies. GPS is a huge deal because navigation is quite difficult without the compass. Ice forecast. Ice forecasting. Ice charts that are put out every 24 hours by the Canadian, Danish, and U.S. governments. I mean all of these things make it seem like a more approachable goal than it really is. Once we got up there and we still we had all these things but we still felt like we should probably not have gone up here but at that point we were committed. It was some very very edgy sailing there was not a lot of room for error. I usually like to to play things a little safer but there just wasn't time to play it safe the season was too short. When you come from the from the east side you encounter the the choke point for ice very early in the passage which is in some ways a blessing but it's also a bit of a hardship because once you get through that kind of choke point near Bellot Strait Peel Sound around Joy Haven where there is a lot of ice you still have almost 2,000 miles to go but you've had to wait until September just to get through that choke point and so after that the ice is all melted or at least it was for us you had there's there's a nice wide strip 7,500 nautical miles wide over the top of Alaska the top of Canada but the season is really late by the time you get there because you've had to wait so long for the ice to clear back in the kind of the really broken part of the top of Canada. So you you have not much ice but you have also not much time so you have to go and so the the decision we made with the help of some Norwegian friends was we're expecting a lot of foul wind a lot of westerly wind and we thought if we sailed up to the ice cap in the Arctic Sea it would give us enough angle to beat for the next three or four days into you know some nearly a gale and just beat into it and we might clear Point Barrow which is the furthest point in North America and once you clear Barrow you're kind of you get south and you have a lot more options. Yeah and when when that change came so we we've been sailing up kind of northward towards the ice for about 24 hours or so if I remember right and when the change came it was quite strong we hoped to for the rest of the night and luckily it it eased off after that that initial change and we got going in the morning and it the plan worked out we made it to Barrow with the small short a short tack just to get around but it it paid off for sure. Yeah then it was we were into the second week in September there um not quite but yeah the precipitation was all snow um we had a um one of the boats we were sailing near was a center border so their water tanks were up high and they're having trouble because the the fresh water was freezing um so it was they're all a bunch of warning signs that we needed to get out of there. It was already September. Mommy and pop were worried about freeze up. We needed to get down to the Pacific but the wind was against us so we sailed with our friends Tindra way up to the ice cap. Alaska! Alaska! On mama's birthday we turned south to the Pacific. She was so happy. This is the last jerry can on the boat. Adventure in general is worthwhile it's an Amelia Earhart quote um and I agree with that and I I think that a lot of the dangers can be overstated um the internet's a very scary place if you just read everything that's written. The high-risk adventures are they're fine if you're rock climbing free soloing um you pay the consequences for your adventure that's that's well understood um sailing in the arctic for example is not not one of those sailing with a family in the arctic is definitely one of those where you you need to be able to manage the risk be comfortable with it and then always have that plan b we were talking about where you can get out because we don't want to have to have someone come rescue us that's a the arctic is only one or two search and rescues away from being a no-go zone for recreational boaters like us um need to be so careful not not not to fall into that that trap and cause that to happen for everybody else who wants to go up there and challenge themselves and find uh find meaning and find richness in life through through exploration and adventure we heavily relied on the other sailors up there be able to pull into the anchorage and have one or two other boats commiserate the experiences that were shared we really relied on that for sure making the call to go or not go was was difficult they were all hard decisions and having a few other people around who were all excellent sailors with a lot of miles to just bounce ideas off of and a lot of times we ended up coming to a communal decision and everyone in the anchorage would go but just having you know the ability to talk to experts in oceanography meteorology expert sailors in as we went along who we also really respected like having that was was brilliant then we managed to know we had a big part just so happy to meet the other sailors and the local people up there it felt really good to get into trees into you know lots of beautiful and protected places we were with our friends lifelong friends now it felt like we were finally safe to to get out of the you know rejuvenate okay we got this we can do it put our heads down and just focused on getting through absorbing the experience and getting out and doing activities were not always an option because we were too tired i think it'd been very hard without those other sailors up there people who go through really hard times with you know together they become they become close friends when you look back and you're not like seasick and nervous actually seems like great it seems really exciting it actually seems like it should be kind of fun it was unbelievable we got came out of the Bering Sea and a lot of these these arctic seas are windy they're shallow they're very cold because they're you know there's a bunch of ice cubes floating in them and we came through the and out into the pacific and the water got 15 degrees warmer like just when you went through the pass there was all these anchorages um it was it was unbelievable it was so much better than i remember it i felt like just i think because of the contrast like we were already in the south pacific but we were in the Aleutians with perspective to the arctic it was so lush and beautiful and green and warm it was amazing like i was not seasick it was exciting papa always told me that the pacific was his favorite i can see why the water is blue and really friendly mommy and pop weren't worried about the ice anymore we loved and hated the ice it was unique to our experiences in the past it built a lot of confidence in our capabilities in our levels of endurance each particular destination isn't really the point it was about putting yourself out there spending time with the penningtons you start to see their philosophy take shape we enjoy the tangible challenges the ones where you're like we need water we need food we need to stay warm it really grounds you in life yeah we also have realized after doing this for a little while that having some hardship and some difficulty in life really adds to kind of the depth of of your experience out here even the simplest days seem to carry a little more meaning time seems to slow down or at least the moments that you have are so much more packed with memorable events these moments create a depth of experience that's hard to find anywhere else nobody who lives in society and has a nice car and lives in suburbia really remembers bringing home a sack of rice or where they got their water from but those are memories that i find in my mind really stand out i felt like i've spent three quarters of my life in the arctic now we were only up there for a couple months but just every little thing was so hard and so rewarding when it got done or when it when something didn't go wrong or something did go wrong like every day was just filled with these highs and lows that were so nuanced and so fine and like the granularity was just incredible up there whereas i feel like during the pandemic we stayed in a little town we did the same thing every day and those three years went by like it was nothing at its heart their story is about the willingness to step into the unknown and while that path inevitably brings challenges it's often those very trials that give the journey its richness and make the adventure worthwhile would you say that the good things that way the bad things yeah but barely when asked what advice they would give if you want to go up there and not just be exhausted the whole time and it's not like a particular goal to like we're going to do this on our own i think a crew or two would be extremely valuable and and it kind of help you to take in more of the arctic do you think you guys would ever go back to the arctic so i think we would go back to greenland we would go back to the Aleutians we're looking forward to another pacific loop but this time instead of continuing past australia into the indian ocean we would like to turn back north and stay in the pacific and go go up through asia and back to the Aleutians that's the rough plan we like to leave our options open as you've learned but i think we're gonna head south for now if you'd like to follow the pennington's on their journey south around the pacific and all their side quests in between you can follow them over on instagram and also pop wrote a book about a whole trip i haven't read it myself but i think it's gonna be pretty good we read the book cover to cover and cannot recommend it enough so go and grab yourself a copy i didn't really set out to write a book i've written one book before about our circumnavigation we put that one up on on the internet and it it did nothing for a while but during the pandemic uh it it got a little bit of a following um and so when we finished the northwest passage and i had this nice six month period i thought well we've just gone gone through this experience it's all fresh in my mind and kind of one of those once in a lifetime opportunities where you have something to write about and the time to write about it and i passed it around to the other sailors who are with us in the northwest passage and the feedback was generally positive so we decided to to do some cover art and then let it loose into the wild and i think so far it's it's been doing been doing better than we thought it would very happy there's one important question that everyone asks that hasn't been asked yet how many toy boats have been through the northwest passage well maybe this is the only one yeah you could be right about that maybe only one i'll have to start a new list for toy boats yeah yeah the scott polar research institute can start a second list quadran the one you can see there is kind of famous he's the first toy boat the smallest boat to go through the northwest passage look here comes my other boats i found them in but they aren't as seaworthy they like can stand quite a bit of seas icebreaker especially i can't remember the dimensions but somewhere around four inches right i think it was a 13 centimeters 13 centimeters if you'd like to hear the full story of the smallest boat to transit the northwest passage we highly recommend checking out the pennington's video and if you want to experience the journey word for word with a great dose of john's good humor be sure to grab a copy of his book thicker than ice we are incredibly thankful to these guys for sitting down with us for hours to share their stories especially dean who somehow managed to contain at least most of his energy okay we really love these guys and are beyond grateful that our paths at sea brought us together a reminder that the real magic of adventure isn't just the places you reach but the experiences challenges and extraordinary people you meet along the way thanks so much for watching guys and we'll see you all next time like you like your space it's not wrong would you say that northwest passengers brought you closer together there was so much to this conversation that didn't make it to the final cut so if you'd like to hear the full unedited version of the interview you can head on over to our patreon page it's free to enjoy and you can also see what else is happening behind the scenes over there a huge thank you to these amazing folks whose continued support makes the production of these films possible cheers guys