Ben Edwards, crew, aged 14, writing from the Gulf Of Boothia, NW Passage
Ambassador for young children’s climate education charity Wicked Weather Watch, and fundraiser for Addenbrookes hospital
We’re through the Bellot Strait! It’s an almost completely straight passage between two islands lasting eighteen miles and cutting a huge section off the journey. It almost always has ice in it but as we went through today it was completely clear. It’s odd, hundreds of people died trying to find the North West Passage. Caught by ice and storms they either froze or were shipwrecked. And we went through seeing a grand total of seven small floating ice chunks. If I hadn’t already been through the North East Passage I might wonder what all the fuss was about. A grim testament to greenhouse gasses.
The strait is very odd, the surrounding geography suggests that it really shouldn’t be there. I suppose it’s like phosphorescent algae, it doesn’t care about normal. Now that we’re through there something would have to go really spectacularly wrong for us to fail to complete the trip. There is still time though. There’s some ice north of us that we might have to go through. Hopefully not though. While we were in the strait we put the drone up. The Father was flying, he’s much better than me so it seemed sensible. When he first took off things went wrong immediately. Because we were moving he had to get the drone away from the boat as quickly as possible. He didn’t manage to and the drone collided with the windshield in front of the cockpit. The rotors smashed themselves to pieces and the drone upended itself on the deck. Not a good start. Very luckily non of the motors were damaged enough to stop it flying so we put some new rotors on and took it up. The Father managed to get it away from the boat this time. He got some really good footage and we managed to get it back on the boat safely. All in all, a success. I’m afraid sleep is calling so I’ll go now. I’ll write again soon. Not long till the Passage is over, bye.
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Ben. What an experience given the history behind tragic expeditions more than 150 years ago..Today’s Sunday Times has a piece entitled: ‘Arctic ice shrinks by size of England in a single day’. 22,000 sq miles of the ice cap shrunk in the first 5 days of Sep as a tongue of sea ice in the Chukchi Sea west of Alaska broke up. And you were there! It then accelerated to 46,000 sq miles of ice in one day (nothing to do with Northabout, presumably!)
Bylot Island’s glaciers look amazing in the aerial view on your tracking page.