Bound for Illorsuit Island (or perhaps the open sea)
71 degrees N, 051 degrees W
by Kate and Hamish Laird

• Planned route this summer: Maine, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Greenland, Scotland
• On board: Kate and Hamish Laird, their children, Helen (4) and Anna (3), Jason Fitschen, and up to three guests on each leg of the voyage.

	Seal among the icebergs, 40 knots of wind and three reefs in the main.

For the past three weeks, we've been cruising what we like to think of as Northwest Greenland, though if you look at a map, we're firmly in the west, not even close to anything that could be termed north. We have absolutely fallen in love with the country. It has a stark beauty - the mountains are glacier-carved and tortured, and the land is dotted with erratic boulders, but in between the boulders (at least where there is shelter and fresh water), there are rich mossy meadows full of alpine flowers. The whole area is "above treeline", so even starting from sea level feels like a high altitude hike - it's heaven for people like me who like to hike and walk up hills, but not necessarily go mountaineering.

Not that the rock climbers haven't found challenges to keep them busy. And they can see many more climbs, if only we didn't have to leave so soon.

Today we're starting to turn the bow south for Narsarsuaq, about 800 miles to the south. We are all feeling sad to leave, and Hamish and I are definitely planning to return to this region in two years' time (next year, we'll probably be on the east coast of Greenland, and then cross over to cruise Labrador on the way back to the States.) We are trying to shake ourselves out of the mood, for the south is supposed to be fantastic as well, but we have really found a favorite place here,

It's hard to put a finger on exactly what we like so much about Greenland. At times it is the absolute loneliness - we haven't seen another boat in over a week, and we haven't had to share an anchorage apart from twice when we planned rendezvous with friends. At other times, it is that we aren't alone here - there are hunter's huts dotted around the coast, and some of our best experiences were meeting locals in the biggest town of the region. There were several yachts tied to the pier in Aasiaat, and Henriette came down with her two children, Ivalu and Peter, to see if any of the crews would like to meet a local family. We were the only boat with children on board, so we had an instant bond. That night, she arrived by boat with her husband Hans-Peder, with several cod for Helen, and an invitation for all of us to go visit sled dog puppies. It was magical for us to have a glimpse of life in Greenland - the amazing contrasts between the sled dogs staked out behind the town - dogs that strangers daren't approach. (The puppies, however, are as cuddly and lovable as any puppies, though they are a quarter wolf.) And then we went home to their beautiful house, perched on the hill with big windows overlooking the harbor and the mountains and icebergs (and often whales, said Henriette), and Ivalu pulled out all her old Barbie dolls for Helen and Anna to play with and practiced her English with them.

View of the harbor at Apat. (Photo taken from 4,300-foot mountain.) Seal is the tiny gray thing with the arrow pointing to it.

One thing we've noticed is that the locals take the water very seriously. Small open boats and cabin cruisers (all with high horsepower outboard motors) are the boats of choice around here, which are ideal - for it seems to be either flat calm, or blowing 40-60 knots. The small boats are much like the ones you'd see in Maine, with a difference: every single one has either a canister life raft bolted to the deck or a fully inflated dinghy hanging on the transom, ready to go. Lots of people wear flotation survival suits working around the water - not surprising, seeing the amount of ice floating in the water.

We were also adopted by two thirteen-year-old girls while in Aasiaat, who liked to come down to the boat and watch us at our daily chores. They both had some English, but not enough for a conversation. They tried to teach us a few Greenlandic words, but we were poor students. The subtle sounds are very difficult for my thick ear. Helen and Anna took to it a bit more, and they like to pretend to be Greenlandic children - Anna "boings" into Paneeraq; Helen likes to pretend she's Ivalu (and usually wants Anna to be a husky). Paneeraq and her friend Rita (though when said with a Greenlandic accent, we didn't figure out her name was Rita until she wrote it in our visitor's book), with their cell phones and denim jackets could have fit in any town anywhere. The world is getting smaller: credit cards aren't accepted in most places in Greenland, but everyone we've met has an email address.

On the other hand, when we're entering new anchorages, we do like to pretend that we're the first ones here - it was a great disappointment to come into a deserted harbor yesterday and find someone had painted on a rock at the head of the harbor: 15/06-2005 - and not even a boat name attached to it, so we could know who to dislike if we met them in a later anchorage! (We did do a bit of detective work - they're not American or English to write the date like that, and they'd left a Mars bar wrapper beside their work with the first language in Dutch.) There's a magic in bumping your way into an inlet, seeing a bay beyond the rocks, but having no certainty that there *is* actually a way in. We've only had one anchorage where we really needed the lifting keel in Greenland, but there have been several places where we've been glad of the security that comes from a lifting keel. (Or more to the point, a bouncing keel - when the keel is unpinned, if we hit, the keel swings on its pivot and rises into the boat like a sailing dinghy's, and then falls back down again.)

	Dinner aboard: Pasta and locally harvested mushrooms.

Our primary anchor has now become the 150-pound Luke. At first, we were changing between the Luke and the CQR, because we hadn't figured out how to make the Luke a "fast release" without using a halyard. The CQR stows on the bow roller, so we can just kick it off the bow if we're anchoring in a hurry, but now we have the Luke stowed alongside the bow, with a single lashing holding it to the rail. We can now untie it and kick it out (though risking a dent or two on the way down) in an emergency, so we're not bothering with the CQR. (Under normal use, we use a halyard to bring the Luke back to dangle under the bow roller, but it's a two-person, two-minute job, and we don't want our primary anchor to take that much time.)

The ice is so prevalent that I find I forget to mention it. The massive pieces are what we remember, though the dangers are the small growlers and bergy bits that hide in the white caps whenever the wind blows. We just passed the most magnificent iceberg I've ever seen - the size of a football stadium sized, with half a dozen arches in it, some which you could drive a dinghy through if you dared. The slightest piece falling off cracks like a rifle; if we're onshore when a big piece falls off, we have to run up the beach to avoid getting wet from the shockwave. We are glad to be in a metal boat.

There are over a thousand icebergs in sight right now. White, blue, gray, and the hard-to-see morainic ones filled with rock. Flat, tabular, massive angular chunks. Where the ice has broken away, the surface is jagged, sharp breaks like broken granite. Where it's been underwater, it is smooth and shiny, showing many different waterlines as the iceberg rises over time as each broken chunk takes a few tons off the berg and it rises slightly in the water. In the sun, meltwater falls off overhangs like rainwater. On windless days, we often shut down the engine next to a berg, and listen to the patter of the meltwater and the chuckle air pockets, many thousands of years old, crackling open in the water around us.

You can learn more about the Lairds and SEAL at their website www.expeditionsail.com.