Sketches of Greenland

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.

	View of Taiusaq Fjord (note Seal tucked into the closest finger of the fjord).

Writing about Greenland has been a bit of a dead end. I start off a paragraph with a lot of wows, beautifuls and amazings, and then run out of steam. It is very hard to describe this place. We arrived in Nuuk on the Fourth of July, and then headed north as far as Ummanaq Fjord (just north of Disko Island, which is the large island in the middle of the west coast if you're looking in an Atlas).

We turned south sadly from Ummanaq, feeling as though we were leaving Greenland, although we were really only halfway through our visit. The sun began setting! After three weeks of total daylight, it was depressing to come into the raised saloon at three in the morning and find the sun disappeared behind the purple-tinged mountains.

We headed down the coast, with a brief stop in Nuuk again, before heading towards Narsarsuaq on the southwest coast. We considered this part as a "delivery" but in fact, some of our favorite anchorages along the coast were here. The wind was blowing from the southwest and southeast, not favoring our route, so we made quite a few short hops, which led us to find some magical anchorages.

Hillwalkers' paradise, with four lines ashore.

We snugged in to one spot, with four lines ashore, and clambered ashore into the spongy moss. Helen and Anna headed straight for the river, with delicious peaty water, and spent the first day playing in the waterfalls, drinking straight out of the pools like a horse, and sending mushrooms down the treacherous falls.

Aura climbed the hill behind us, and came back nearly in tears at the beauty of the place. The bay to our north was full of icebergs, many of them a bright blue color rather than the usual flat white. Behind her, the archipelago stretched to the south; to the east we could see the edge of the ice cap, looming above.

Greenland is glorious in the macro and the micro scale. We look upwards to the jagged mountains, or downward to the tiny flowers sprouting in a crack in the rocks. It is a place that makes you stop and look.

So far, I have failed to do any justice to the place in words. I'll try to give you a few sketches.

Icebergs

	Icebergs off Qeqertat Island

Some are pure white, with snow gusting off in heavy winds. Bright blue seams cut through them, glistening like crystal against the white. Sometimes the foot of the iceberg shows under the water, swimming-pool blue and inviting. Sometimes surf breaks against the bergs, throwing spray into the air, the iceberg immobile under the onslaught of the waves. In the sunlight, they are blinding, light shining off millions of diamond facets.

Hard, clear ice floats nearly invisible. Beside it a white, car-sized piece breathes up and down, surfaces with every wave, then disappears nearly under water with the next.

There are icebergs cut with rotten grooves, icebergs with smooth faces, icebergs jagged and fierce - fist-sized, person-sized, car-sized, house-sized, skyscraper-sized, football stadium-sized. Our comparisons grapple with the scaleless world of Greenland – few houses, no trees. Sometimes a bird flies by, feeding on the krill disturbed by a calving piece of berg, and we almost lose sight of it – a tiny dot against the ice face and our minds can almost fathom the enormity of it, though only for a second.

Mountains

White-capped peaks rise straight out of the fjord. Below us, the depth sounder pegs out at 600 feet, and then hunts aimlessly for the bottom. Cornices hang so deep and thick on the mountaintops that they look like clouds. Not for Greenland the slow ascent of foothills and mountains – these rise jaggedly 6000, 7000 feet above us, straight up.

The rock is twisted and tortured. Seams of black, seams of tan curl through the faces, make ruler-straight slices through the rock. Rockfalls that look like sand are made of man-sized boulders. Waterfalls pour off overhangs, and explode in mist.

The climbers in our group choose a pitch on a vertical piece of rock, while the rest of us hike through the moss in the flat shoulder of a 4000-footer. Above us, other peaks are twice as high, snow filling the gullies in late July. A hot day's hiking inspires everyone to take a five-second swim off the scoop.

Mountaineers could keep busy for a lifetime here, but it is we hill walkers who are really happy. The moss springs under foot, and glacier-carved valleys carry on for miles. When our legs start to hurt, we can use the excuse of a field of blueberries to stop and graze and rest a bit before the next bit. There are no trails, apart from the occasional reindeer or sheep track meandering through the moss. Mountain tarns full of delicious peaty water are dotted everywhere.

Navigation

We ran aground yesterday – we have spent much of our time in places where the chart is a white swath, uncontaminated by soundings, and often enter harbors with someone at the spreaders on the lookout for boulders. We've become accustomed to the question – can we get in there? Well, let's take a look - and we nose our way in through the rocks. We haven't lifted the keel too many times, but it's very reassuring to know that if we do hit a rock, it will bounce up, as will the rudder. But yesterday, I was driving into the head of a fjord, looking for an anchorage, when the depth suddenly decreased to a hundred feet. I put the engine in neutral. By the time I'd taken her out of gear, we were in thirty feet, and I put her in reverse. Then at twenty feet, I put her hard in reverse, only to find we were stopped in thick mud and seven feet of water. We'd lost 93 feet in just over a boat length.

Tight passages without soundings

Hamish cranked up the rudder and I lifted the keel on its 24-volt winch (the kind you see on the front of Land Rovers), and we backed off into 100 feet again. We turned around and went back to the fjord: this sound wasn't going to give us enough depth to get out of the wind.

Our favorite way of tying up is four lines ashore, no anchor, tied up to the shore with a hose tapping into a waterfall. It takes a while to get used to the sound of water running down the hull – hey, someone turn that hose off! – but it doesn't take long to get used to the idea of standing under the hot shower (the hot water is plumbed to the diesel heater rather than the engine, so we can have showers whenever the heat is on, instead of having to do it as we motor along and miss all the scenery.) Long ago, I'd read a book about cruising Greenland that said their trip was cut short because they couldn't find the right dockside connection for their water hose – after reading that, I'd always imagined Greenland as an arid country. I couldn't have been more wrong: there is water everywhere.

Birthday Party

We ended up leaving our anchorage on the morning of Helen's fifth birthday after spending much time pondering all our weather data - it looked like we would be stuck for four days if we didn't get around the corner, so, with much regret at having to uproot Helen, we headed out into 30-50 knot headwinds. The wind had shifted to the SE however, so we had a bit of lee from the land, and we sneaked along the coast with the keel pin out (we had two charts, the US and the Danish, and each had a handful of rocks sprinkled on the charts in random positions, so we just tried to avoid all of them, not knowing for sure if they really existed.) The radar didn't always agree with the charts (they're usually about a tenth of a mile out, but this was even more.)

Mr. Cummins did hard duty (along with the big three-bladed prop - today was a day we were very glad we hadn't messed around with Max Props or two-bladed or anything like that). We had gusts up to 60 knots on the nose. We had the fourth reef in the main, which added quite a bit of power and pulled us through when the prop was cavitating (when the gusts slowed us to two knots and the engine was still at 1800 RPM). We were quite lucky because the wind backed around - there was one bit where I thought we would have huge seas, but we kept our lee and were able to motor through that. The water was smoking with regular williwaws. We had to feather the boat into those. It was all great fun, although Hamish and I felt rotten that we weren't going to get into a harbor in time to make Helen's birthday cake.

We motored into the village of Arsuk, but there wasn't enough protection, so we continued around to another bay and found a perfect round cove at the base of an smooth brown cliff, with waterfalls pouring off the mountains in sheets of white foam (not just decorative: waterfalls mean lots of silt in the bay and good holding for the CQR). We laid out all 300 feet of anchor chain and ran four lines ashore. One bow line used up two 600-foot shore lines, so we dug out the nylon anchor rode to make up the fourth shore line. We still had 600 feet of nylon anchor rode in the locker - you can never have too much line in a place like this.

Helen, dressed in her full kit, charged out in the dinghy with Hamish and Aura to see a fishing boat that was anchored in the middle of the harbor. There was a rope boarding ladder up the twelve-foot sheer-sided boat; Helen raced up the ladder, refusing any help, much to the astonishment of the fishermen.

There were nine Greenlanders on board, most of them related to each other, and it was a SHRIMP BOAT. Hamish said he had never seen Helen's eyes so bright as when they took her down to the hold and a conveyor belt started running, covered with shrimp. They picked out a bag of big ones for Helen's birthday and gave it to her; she started eating them raw and unpeeled right there in the hold.

They came back to Seal and we boiled up the shrimp, and then four of the fishermen came to visit - two brothers, a cousin, and their uncle. We had a marvelous time with them. They fish out of Narsaq; one of them spoke English, and another one understood it, so we were able to communicate very well. And Aura had found someone who spoke Danish on the boat, so she was able to talk to him in Swedish/Danish.

Even without cake, it was a birthday to remember.

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