Sunday, August 18, 2013

Crossing to Greenland: ice and fog

By dawn we'd left Isafjordur far behind and was out in the Denmark Strait. In Iceland it's called the Greenland Sound which makes more sense to me given its location.

The usual route for this voyage is to head west to go direct to Kangerlussuaq fjord (highlighted as red square below) but at the time the latest ice map below showed rather a lot of ice in that direction so we headed north instead:
There wasn't much wind so we motored most of the way, with the odd hours sail just to say we'd done it.

Even with this more northerly route we did see ice, the encounters made more "interesting" with quite a bit of fog:
We also saw whales, fins and (probably) orcas, but they vanished before cameras could capture them. There were fewer sea birds than around Iceland, just the friendly fulmar (top).

It took another night to get there but when came on deck for my watch saw the most amazing view of a mountainous icy landscape, just as promised.

We had arrived in Greenland...

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