Cape Farewell Greenland Voyage 2007

Plates, tins of Formaggio, crisps are falling around my head as I write this in the dinning room outside the galley. The past 36 hours have been grim, SW gale, cold driving wind and rain – the stockiness of our team amazes me and I am surprised I haven’t been lynched for subjecting them to such an ordeal. We have continued with our oceanography measurements and oddly lying in the purgatory of my bunk yesterday I envisioned how to make all this scientific visioning into a piece of art. It is difficult not just to illustrate the science but to somehow get across the poetry of this great Greenland Sea ‘tract’ they are conducting. Working this through in my studio on my return will be it’s test but I have been trying to find a way of working the science and art together and the forced prone position of my bunk mixed with endless agitation might have just cracked it.

We are all exhausted and each have found a unique way to suffer, Brian, healthy of body is suffering dark dreams and hallucinations, for Aminatu this place is foreign, the sea frightening and after her deserts she cannot comprehend the fact that the earth is 70% ocean – she is even looking forward to the calmness of ice.

Our watch systems continue, it is a good rhythm as we plough forward. We are 160 miles from Greenland but cannot access there due to ‘old ice’ blown down from the north – the seas are far too warm to freeze. This needs to be about -2 degrees C. Scorsby is 298 miles so we expect to arrive Sunday lunch, ice permitting. We are at this moment 75 miles from the ice edge and there is a promise of calm seas tonight. Last night the full moon glowed dimly through the cloud mass and it would be great if tonight we got clear skies, the moon, northern lights and the glow of the ice sheet.

Kathy and I send out the text and images on our 4am watch, this is no simple matter with the laptop connected to the Iridium phone and all this outside on the pitching ship. It is a wonder at all that the Iridium works in such environments and that we can communicate and send images. Your passed on messages are very welcome to this most northerly sailing ship on the planet!

David Buckland Friday. [I think].

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