Sailing east through Lancaster Sound met with lumps of ice the size of cars. Day watch and night watch with torches on the bow. Winter sunset over Baffin Island; feels like winter is really setting in here. Note the wave splash at the right hand end of the flatter ice floe. These are sometimes called growlers because of the noise they make caused by the wave action. First light of an Arctic morning and a sunrise, (no colour adjustments made!)
This was the start of 24 hours of occasional fun with the ice. We managed to push through this narrow band after about an hour searching and it was only scattered pieces for the rest of the daylight hours. However much thicker bands appeared about 1 hour after my watch at about 21:00 and the various watch teams, supported all night by Nikolai, explored, pushed, shoved and nudged their way through various bands of ice until about 03:30 when they reached clear water again. Barbara spent a very cold 4 hours standing at the bow with a powerful light looking for the next ice and eventually the passage way through. My watch started at 04:00!
I’m not sure whether I have been lucky in avoiding a cold, tiring and stressful night or guilty of not coming to help or unlucky that I have not had one of the few serious ice encounters on the NW passage.