Northeast Passage expedition

Following three flights and two long stopovers, I finally lumber into a cloudy, wet Tiksi in a packed plane. Staring at the pile of unsecured baggage to my front and side, it is one of the few landings I feel like clapping for. It is all self service in the North, so I wait with the plane load of passengers as two people start to hand out bags. I quickly spy two men in the blue expedition gear, our leader Ola Skinnarmo and the famous Russian arctic explorer Victor Boyarsky. Following a warm welcome, we are off to “town”.

So begins my small part in the 2009 expedition to successfully sail through the Northeast Passage, retracing the route of the famous explorer Nordenskold. I am replacing Neil Hamilton, director of the WWF Arctic Programme, and plan to go on with this blog as the journey continues across the Laptev, Chukchi, and Bering seas!

This will be my last blog from ‘Explorer of Sweden’ as I leave the boat tomorrow morning at Tiksi, and will be replaced by Geoff York a day later. I thought therefore that I should reflect on what I have seen and learned, and what lessons others may find useful.

Now that we are ‘on the road’ again I can give you some impressions of the third legendary sea we are travelling through, the Laptev Sea. It is named after Dimitry Laptev, one of the leaders of ther famous russian Great Arctic Expedition. Lying between the Taimyr peninsula and the New Siberian islands, the Laptev is, like the Barents and the Kara, part of the hgue russian arctic continental shelf. It is also, like the Kara, shallow (we haven’t been through water deeper than 25 metres yet!), and very, very empty.

We have been anchored for a day in the calm and beautiful Bukta Pronchishchevoy, basking in 15 degree temperatures and bright sunshine. It’s ideal for filming the rarely seen Laptev walrus (which Frederik is doing) and adjusting to the 6 hour time change between Murmansk and Tiksi which we chose to’ implement’ on ‘ship time’ here.

This summer, WWF is helping support two expeditions that will take on some of the world’s most difficult waters, to see first-hand the effects of Arctic climate change. One expedition is sailing across the top of Russia, a journey of 6000 nautical miles through the Northeast Passage, while another is attempting a west to east […]

Well, what an utterly incredible day. Having just written a blog about why there have been no polar bear sightings today I saw five, all in a small area.

Last night we celebrated our successful passage past Cape Chelyuskin and the Taimyr peninsula with a wonderful dinner of reindeer, from the leg that we bought from the Nenets herders on Weygach Island. It has been hanging outside for the past few days aging perfectly and simply melted in the mouth. Culinary bliss on an expedition is a rare thing, but it does happen!

I guess we weren’t as lucky as I thought we might be. We spent all of yesterday negotiating our way through heavy drifting pack ice that had moved south from Severnaya Zemlya, trying every lead to see if any opened up. At one stage we moored to an ice floe and drifted for an hour to see exactly how fast the ice was moving, in which direction. I never doubted that we would make it through, but you do start making mental plans about what you will do if you do get stuck.

Since about 6am we have been negotiating increasingly present drifting fragments of sea ice with a recent snow cover of about 20cm. The ice has all the forms of the last stages of melt but makes navigation difficult. Ola then Hannibal then Per Magnus take turns standing on the middle cross trees of the mast, about 15m above the deck, to see as far as possible and find a path to open water.