What a day! We sailed during the night to reach the island of Disko, where we arrived around 9am and stopped to visit the village of Qeqertarsuaq (Godhavn in Danish). It is Sunday so all shops and activities are closed and there are only a few people around. The first visit is to the church were some of us stay for the 10am mass. Although we didn’t understand a word, being in this little warm timber church was somehow reassuring. There was a lot of singing during the mass, that made it quite enjoyable… and if I say so (one that never goes to the church) it means it was great!
Francesca photographed on the shore in Godhavn.
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I cannot begin to start or stop describing this place. To say something is grey means little, it is green also. And white. What we imply by ‘god’ is a being with no perspective, no point of view, but eyes that peer from everywhere. This ship is full of eyes. It docked today in Qeqertarsuaq, a fishing town at the southern tip of Disko Island.
This morning my spectacles fell off my head into the sea as I clambered aboard a zodiac (a low-in-the-water black rubber boat that seats 12 and one helmsman). The boat rolls on the rolling sea. Lemn wonders if we are going somewhere or is it only the sea that is moving? We are going one way and the sea is going another, I assume – and we have to make that work, to get to our destination.
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Vanessa Carlton getting creative onboard the Grigory Mikheev.
Photo: Nathan Gallagher
The BGS experience difficulty surveying the seabed. Carol Cotterill describes how this feels. Audio by Vicky Long.
An MP3 version is also available to
download.
Qeqertarsuaq is a settlement of 800 people on the southern tip of Disko Island. The church, Lutheran like most of inhabited Greenland, sits at the highest point in the village and the houses are scattered on the hillsides mostly on individual plots. Many are brightly painted using every colour in the spectrum contrasting with the magnificent barrenness of much of the landscape. The cemetery makes the brightest splash of colour with the graves heaped with dayglow artificial flowers. Christian missionaries from Denmark started coming to Greenland in the early 18th century and eventually displaced the shamanistic religion practiced by the inhabitants, paving the way for the establishment of Greenland as a Danish colony. Self-rule was granted in 1979 and soon there is to be a vote on independence. Ludvig Hammeken, who is studying marketing management in Copenhagen, has joined the crew as our second Inuit guide and with Karen makes a presentation on Greenland’s history and culture.
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“Never again… I’m never going back… Not even if hell freezes over”. Words I repeated so many times last year, usually to myself, but occasionally to anyone else who was willing to get near to a man who’s day was structured for the most part around vomiting, groaning and fear based perspiration. The last Cape Farewell trip – sailing from Spitsbergen in Norway across the open Arctic Sea to the east coast of Greenland – was tough. Tough like agreeing to have a ride a washing machine on a long synthetics cycle is tough. I was out of my depth in so many ways and iller than I recall ever having been in my comfortable life, including the time I ate indeterminate meat based matter in spicy stew in an Indonesian street market.
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After almost 24 hours sail we get the opportunity to explore Greenland’s soil, disembarking at the small town of Qeqertarsuaq (Danish name Godhavn).
Massive icebergs hover off the shore.
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Oceanographers Simon Boxall and Emily Venables plan the CTD drop, to measure ocean conductivity (salinity), temperature and density.
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Bleak, sleet, cold; howling packs of half wolf hounds that have had their barks bred out of them. Black sand, with blue white icebergs as big as multi-storey car-parks, road bridges, office blocks. Their little relatives pecking at sand, littering the beach. Each of these unliftable baby ‘bergs look like something. A chicken. A swan. A turtle.
The dogs are everywhere, chained, wet, wild. I see a mother with two unchained puppies strangling herself to try and reach a huge hole another dog has dug himself, all the other dogs wailing and straining towards it. The dog in the centre has caught one of her puppies. I walk away feeling ill and deeply domesticated.
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KT and Luke on the shore in Qeqertassuak. Photo: Nathan Gallagher.
It appears that virtually none of us aboard the Grigoriy Mikheev are early risers, so Cape Farewell captain David Buckland made sure to inject his 7 a.m. wake-up announcement with a little info that he knew would have his troops on their feet in a heartbeat. “If you look outside of your window,” he began, “you’ll see a pretty big iceberg.” Minutes later, the cafeteria was abuzz with the din of excited artists and scientists getting their morning tea and coffee before boarding the zodiac rafts for shore. It was the first time any of us had set foot on dry land since Friday.
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