We Crossed Baffin Bay

Ben, 17th September 07:43 UTC

So we made it.  We crossed Baffin Bay, which seemed to have something against us, and found the very very long archipelago that is the coast of Greenland, found some icebergs, found a port, and tied up.  Upernavik is an odd place.  It’s a very small town built on a hillside.  All the houses have half of themselves up on stilts so they’re not leaned over.  Because of the angle there aren’t any normal streets, instead they’ve got winding roads that somehow manage to go past every house.  The small harbour they have is inside a bay with a number of large and really quite impressive icebergs.  There’s no real pontoon for small boats.  They get tankers in with oil and provisions so the community can survive so they have two massive pontoons, one of which we’re tied up against with a couple of fishing boats, the other is occupied by a large ship, we don’t know what it’s doing there but I assume unloading something or other.  When we arrived we had a little trouble ting up, the way in which we had to tie up meant that the front of the boat was knocking against the pontoon.  Alas tis severed the cable tie attaching the croc shoe that we’ve had at the front since Ardfern last year and I only noticed when it was gently floating out the harbour.  Luckily there was a friendly man with a dingy to hand who went and picked it up and brought it back.  I have now reattached it with three times as many cable ties.

Johan and I refuelled the boat by getting all the fuel canisters out of the back and siphoning them into the fuel tanks.  After that Dad and I went to John/Jon’s guest house. Like almost all buildings is such communities it looked positively dishevelled on the outside, but on the inside was warm and dry and nice.   Dad went to sleep for a bit before we went out to buy things for dinner.  The Mother, Frances, Colin and Alison would be staying there as well so food was going to be necessary.

At five o’clock we walked down the road to the local supermarket. Because of where it is it’s one of the ones you can buy anything from, food, clothes, furniture, guns, the lot.  We selected a number of pizzas and roles of garlic bread that would be A, nice and B, easy to prepare.  We returned to the house and put the pizza and garlic bread to defrost.  At that point John/Jon and his wife Agina arrived to drive us to the airport.  We got there about ten minutes before the plane landed and so got some pictures of the surrounding mountains and the military vessel sitting in a nearby fjord. The plane arrived and everyone got off.

Rather sadly the airline failed to put Colin’s bag onboard and so he has to use the stuff being left behind for him by David.   We have now got back to the house and dinner is ready so I’m going to go now.  I’ll write again when we’re underway, bye.