‘If you can make one heap of all your winnings ... And lose, and start again at your beginnings ...’ It happened like this.

‘Bob’s Angels’ had left from Upernavik at the beginning of October after our successful time in the far north of Greenland (see Flying Fish 2004/2), and I set about preparing for the winter. Strangely, it was the first month or two that were to prove the more difficult time. For a start, having laid out mooring lines ashore and an anchor to seaward I was blown out of my first choice for a winter anchorage and had to abandon them, at least for the moment. This was fair enough, except that motoring out of the fjord in gale-force winds had the dinghy dancing and cartwheeling, first alongside and then astern after I moved it. I tried to anchor in a favourite summer cove to deal with it, but in those winds – 44 and 49 knots were noted on the instrument and that was when I was looking – the anchor would not hold. At last it dragged sufficiently slowly for me to be able to haul the dinghy aboard and dive for the deflation valves. All I had to do then was haul 45m of chain and anchor aboard whilst being pushed inexorably across the fjord to the other side. Somehow I managed it and survived, but I decided that singlehanding – at least in the Arctic – was not really for me.

Then there was the day when I fell into the water – I tell these stories against myself. This is not a good thing to do in the Arctic. Falling in is one thing, getting out again with seven layers of water-logged clothing and big Arctic boots is quite another. I could neither pull myself over into the dinghy, nor up a line from the boat to grasp a stanchion to heave myself up over the topsides. I lay on my back with my feet in the dinghy holding the line and occasionally struggling, and wondered how long it would be before they found the body! Finally in desperation I let go of the dinghy and the line and swam, sort of, to the stern and with a monumental struggle managed to clamber up what I had left of the self-steering gear astern, and so back on board. Another merciful deliverance! It was then that I began to shiver, not from cold with all those clothes on but from delayed shock.

And there were other incidents... A tent pitched ‘just in case’ blowing away in a big storm whilst I was in Upernavik, never to be seen again. The dinghy valves icing up so that when I went to blow the dinghy up ashore they just kept on hissing air. Fortunately sufficient air stayed in for me to pull myself hurriedly along a mooring line back to the boat in the half-inflated dinghy, where boiling water in the valves solved the problem. But the main incidence of stress was when a constant north wind and tidal currents brought ice floes and pack ice from the big Upernavik Isbrae and glacier to the north around the corner into my second chosen winter mooring. In spite of the complications involved with four lines ashore and an anchor out, in the end I unstitched myself from all this and ran, dodging ice in the night, back to Upernavik. I have described Upernavik as ‘lovely people but the worst harbour in the world’, and I spent a very unpleasant night in big swells and ice in this harbour open to the north. Later I solved the problem of threatening ice floes in my cove by stretching a huge, borrowed ship’s towing warp across the entrance as an ice boom. It worked well.

Was I ever scared? You bet I was. And if not scared then wary and on guard. There was always that underlying threat in the background, ‘Make a mistake; you may be dead’ But against this was the incredible beauty of the Arctic in approaching winter, with its snow, skies, stillness, ice, clear night skies with the northern stars and the Pole Star practically overhead, and brilliant moonlight.

 On 4 November the sun disappeared below the horizon for three months. To my surprise, in my ignorance, this did not mean total darkness from then on but gradually diminishing light in both length and quality around local midday. As we approached ‘the longest night’, as we thought of it there, it was really only a twilight, but sufficient to see. I have to say that the lack of light did begin to get to me, but fortunately, though the temperature was well below freezing – at one stage it reached –23°C – I was still able to get water. This involved using skis or snow shoes to pull a sled laden with containers to a buried stream carefully marked in the autumn. Once there I dug through the snow to a layer of ice, and there underneath was still a small pool of fresh water. Having filled the containers I was careful to put snow blocks back across the hole and fill it over, as snow is the best insulator. For the same reason I left the boat plastered with snow – though by now my second tent and the snowhole/igloo I had built ‘just in case’ were also buried under snow, which was perhaps not such a good thing!

At last came the ice. At first this was stressful, but only because it coincided with two strong gales on successive nights. This had the effect of breaking up the newly formed ice-sheet and bringing the big ice-floes so formed scraping downwind round the boat. I know now that this was not as serious as it seemed because new ice is thinner and the edges softer than older ice. But it took a bit of getting used to! Then it all settled down, the boat was iced in and life took on a whole new dimension. We were now safe from floating ice and I could step down onto the ice and walk around, though this did initially have its amusing sides. In my inexperience I invented the ice dance, dragging the dinghy along with me as I was not too sure whether the ice would support me: left foot forward and sideways, right foot up to first foot, pull dinghy to feet, left foot forward ... I was glad none of my Greenlandic friends were around to see me. I sometimes had problems getting across the fracture line between the sea ice rising and falling with the tide and the static shore ice, and on one occasion went for another little dip when a small ice floe I stepped on quickly decided not to bear my weight. But nothing serious this time.                                                                                                                                        

 

The ice soon thickened and I could walk to Upernavik across the fjord to renew stores and fuel, a strange sensation walking across ice where I had sailed a month before. It was fortunate that the first time I did this was with Greenlandic fishermen friends who had left their boat in the ice nearby in order to be able to break out early in the spring. They took a different route to the one I would, in my ignorance, have taken – due to the strong tidal currents under the ice in this area they hugged the shore closely at first before cutting diagonally across the fjord to hug the shore the other side and so round into Upernavik.

I went hunting with Greenlandic friends, or rather I watched their intriguing system of getting a net under the ice for catching seals. This involved cutting a line of small rectangles in the ice with a tuk – a wooden pole with a metal blade at one end, which you must always carry when travelling across ice to test it. They attached the net to the tuk and propelled the pole hard under the ice towards the next hole. The weighted end sank and the wooden end came up through the hole so that they could then pull the net through under the ice. They then repeated the process to the next hole. Seals have to come up to breathe and so were caught in the net, to feed the Greenlandic families and their dogs.

It was all going well and I was beginning to relax and enjoy it. Daylight was lengthening, the engine had been put to sleep for the winter, and systems generally were sorted and working well. And then it happened.

I had been for a trek on skis across the fjords and returned to the boat at about 1530 on Saturday 15 January – I remember it well. I had a cup of coffee and something to eat and took the portable generator up into the cockpit and started it to charge the batteries. ‘Oh yes, I must fill the heater’, I thought, forgetting, perhaps because I had started from the cockpit rather than from below, to go down and unscrew the cap and insert my usual funnel into the top of the fuel tank down below. This was my usual method of filling the tank because the differing gauges of deck filler unit and tank filler opening (which only had a small lip anyway), precluded fitting a pipe between the two. This would have been dangerous in the circumstances, and the Taylor’s diesel heater being gravity fed the tank had to be high up under the deckhead.

I took the half-full container and another funnel along the deck and opened up a small hole in the deckhead I had made especially for the purpose, inserted the funnel and started to pour in diesel. I only realised what was happening when I saw red flames through the hole. I rushed round to the main hatch but already the noxious fumes and smoke were such that I took one breath and instinctively knew I must not go down there. It became ridiculous. I had only one set idea: I must put the fire out. But all I could do was to scrape snow off the ice and try to dowse flames with that, but of course it was futile. Even after the local fire service, alerted by someone at the airport on top of the hill above Upernavik, arrived on snowmobiles across the ice nothing could be done. The boat burned and eventually sank in 7–8m in the pool of water created by the fire. But I had been dispatched to Upernavik by then.

I had lost everything that was on the boat, including all my superb North Face Arctic gear, and was left with little more than what I was wearing. Fortunately the splendidly supportive police in Upernavik gave me an official covering letter explaining the loss of my passport and, without credit cards, my wife Kate was able to transfer money from the UK to my Greenlandic bank account for the air fare to Scotland. At least I could get home.

Afterwards, there was a tremendous sense of loss. This was first of all of course for the boat itself – we had done 90,000 miles together over 25 years, including the Arctic, Atlantic crossings, Antarctica, Cape Horn and a circumnavigation. But later it was perhaps even more that a focal point of my life had been removed at a stroke. There were also feelings of guilt, and shame now that I had to tell everybody that the ‘glorious’ expedition had ended so ignominiously! I was left trying to echo those incredible words of Job of old when he had lost much more, ‘The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord’, or of Kipling’s If, if you prefer.

What of the future? Yachtsure have said they will pay the full claim so the way forward must surely be to get another boat and start again. After all, one is still young at 70!