We waved until the ship was out of sight. Soon the waves were breaking over us, hitting us hard from behind. Often we were completely awash … As we watched Ran’s boat pounded by the sea and disappearing in the ten-foot troughs, we had all too vivid an image of how vulnerable we were. I turned to talk to Charlie and saw him lifted bodily by a surge of water and thrown clean over my head. As the boat capsized, I tugged my feet free of the fuel lines and jumped as far away from the propeller as I could. Then the hull crashed down on me.
I was attempting to keep to a compass bearing despite the silt-laden water smashing on to my boat, stinging my eyes and covering the compass glass. At the top of a breaker I risked a quick glance backwards and to my horror saw Charlie’s boat upside-down with no sign of either passenger.
It was a while before I could try to turn round. The secret of survival in such shallow riotous waters was to remain totally alert and keep the bow at all times into the next breaker. In just such rubber boats we had come safely through far worse conditions on the rivers of British Columbia. It was a matter of aim and balance. After a big wave, I whipped the tiller round and the boat sped through 180° in time to face the next attack. In a while I saw Charlie crawl on to his boat’s bottom and then haul Bryn up by his hood. I breathed out with relief. They began to try to right their inflatable using the hull hand-grips, but they were too exhausted. I flung a rope across to Charlie but a wave ripped the line’s fixture point away from my hull. With my propeller blades threshing only inches from their prancing rubber tubing, I flung the rope over again. Timing the arrival of the next big wave, we succeeded in flipping the boat back over. I slowly towed the stricken boat with its waterlogged outboard back towards the distant silhouette of our ship.
Charlie had lost only his rifle, but Bryn’s cameras had sunk and he was decidedly unhappy. Overnight, back on the Benjamin Bowring, a Force Seven gale blew up and the hull began to strike the sea floor in the heavy swell. The skipper weighed anchor at once and we headed 200 miles north to another mouth of the Yukon, known as the Apoon Pass. With 120 miles to go and off a dangerous lee shore, one of the main tie-bolts – which hold the ship’s engine in place – sheared. This had happened before and the engineers had only one set of replacement bolts. After eight hours of toil below decks and anxiety above, the engines restarted and we reached Apoon.
Seventy cold, wet miles in the inflatable boats followed before we came to the river village of Kotlik where we bedded down in the local gaol. The Kotlik sheriff warned us that the summer winds could turn certain stretches of the Yukon into no-go areas.
At Kravaksavak we joined the brown and powerful Kwikpak River, which is the main arm of the Yukon. The banks were thickly forested but we saw fox, bear and river birds. Continuing through half the moonlit night we covered 150 miles to the village of Marshall. The river then narrowed and for days we fought an eight-knot current.
Fifteen miles short of the village of Holy Cross we noticed dust-storms raging on both banks. With little warning the river erupted into a cauldron which caught us in mid-stream. Pine trees crashed down into the river and whole sections of the banks collapsed. The forest swayed towards the river, its upper canopy pressed flat by the force of the wind. There was no question of trying to land in such conditions. In mid-stream we battled through five-foot-high waves which followed one upon the other with hardly a breathing space for recovery. Once or twice my bows failed to rise from a plunge and the next wave swamped the boat. I thanked the Lord for positive buoyancy chambers. Then the river twisted to the east and the storm subsided. My long-nurtured idea of the Yukon as a gentle Thames-like river had been shattered. At Holy Cross, the keeper of the travel-lodge told us we were lucky to be alive. We had been travelling north, he said, in the first big southerly blow of the year, with winds exceeding seventy knots. Local river men stayed land-side on such days.
For long days of glare and heat we moved on across the face of Alaska towards Yukon Territory and the Canadian border. On 15 July we reached the only river-bridge anywhere from the sea to Dawson City, having boated over 1,000 river miles. Ginny and Bothie met us in their Land Rover, on to which we lashed our deflated boats and gear. She drove us 500 kilometres up the recently opened Dempster Highway. Floods held us up for four days where this dirt highway was washed out but, a hundred miles from the sea, we reached the end of the road at Inuvik on the Mackenzie River.
Simon awaited us at Inuvik airstrip with a sixteen-foot open fibreglass whaler boat. Ex-Scots Greys Jack McConnell of the 1970 Headless Valley expedition, now a Canadian citizen, joined us for the journey to Tuktoyaktuk. He took the helm of Bryn’s boat while the rest of us squeezed aboard the whaler and set out for the mouth of the Mackenzie.
The little whaler was a last-minute idea which had come to me back at Kotlik. I had used the sheriff’s radio phone to ask Ginny to obtain one from a sponsor. Somehow she had, after phone calls to Hong Kong, London and New York, obtained the boat, outboards and a cargo plane flight from Vancouver to Inuvik, all free of charge. While we boated upriver she had worked at a motel outside Dawson as a waitress – in return for free telephone calls and a bedroom. Ginny was not just a pretty face and lovely legs.
On the afternoon of 24 July, back on our tight schedule, we entered the harbour of Tuktoyaktuk in the North-West Passage. Jack and Bryn flew south. Ginny and Simon set up a radio base and Charlie and I loaded the whaler for our 3,000-mile journey through the passage.
Worried about navigation, I visited a local barge skipper with sixteen years of experience. I was planning to navigate the passage by magnetic hand compass plus my watch and the sun. The skipper said simply, ‘You are mad.’
‘But I have good charts and a hand-made balanced prismatic compass,’ I assured him.
‘Throw it away,’ he muttered.
‘What do you use?’ I asked him.
He pointed at his sturdy barge-towing tug. ‘She has everything. She goes in the dark, out in the deep channels. Radar beacon responders, MF and DF, the works.’ He shook his head dismissively. ‘You must hug the coastline to escape storms so you will hit shoals, thousands of shoals. Also you cannot go across deep bays for fear of wind and big waves so you must hug the coastline which is like crazy pavement. You have to use more gas and take extra days. Most of the time there will be thick fog. No sun means you use your compass. Yes?’
I nodded.
He flung his hands up. ‘Ah, but you cannot use a compass. Look . . .’ He prodded his desk chart of the passage and I saw the heavily printed warning ‘MAGNETIC COMPASS USELESS IN THIS AREA’.
‘Too near the magnetic Pole, you see. You stay here in Tuk. Have a holiday.’
On 26 July we headed out into the choppy bay of Tuktoyaktuk. In thirty-five days we must not only complete the 3,000 miles of the passage, which traditionally takes three years, but also cover an additional 500 miles further north, attaining some point within skiing distance of our intended winter quarters at Alert before the sea froze, forcing us to abandon the whaler.
Four or five isolated Inuit settlements and eight Defence Early Warning camps were the sole inhabited points along our route. Five years previously I had set up a complex arrangement with the air company which supplied the bases, to take our ration boxes and fuel cans to these outlying sites. To cover the intermediate distances was just possible (given the maximum fuel load capacity of our whaler), providing I made no navigating errors en route.
The coastline, on leaving Tuktoyaktuk, was flat as a board and quite invisible whenever shallow water forced us out to sea. The treeless tundra of the Tuk Peninsula might just as well not have been there. Fortunately the sun was out to give us direction, so we headed due east until the glint of breakers off Cape Dalhousie showed like silver froth on the horizon. A conical hill, or pingo, stood proud from the otherwise unseen coastline, giving me a rough indicator of our position.
The North-West Passage
East of the cape we bucked forty miles through a rising sea which s
oaked us anew at every crest. A flat tongue of shingle south of Baillie Island was the cache-point agreed a year previously with a government helicopter pilot, then in the area, for two drums of fuel.
The sea was too rough on both sides of the spit to allow a beaching. So Charlie dropped our light anchor overboard and I waded through the surf, back and forth with twelve jerry cans. Three hours later, re-fuelled, we entered Snowgoose Passage via a vicious tide-rip toothed by shoals. Once in Franklin Bay the full force of wind and wave struck us and for fifty miles we ran the gauntlet between fourteen-foot breakers and the wave-pounded cliffs to our west. We were soaked and our teeth chattered in unison. Each wave that broke over the whaler showered us. Salt-water poured down the neck-holes of our survival suits, running down back and chest and legs to collect in slowly rising pools inside our waterproof boots. Our underclothes were salty and sodden. Time and again we were forced to swing off our course to face into rolling waves which raced at us from the flank. Once the boat hung almost on its side as a green wall of water surged by in a rush of power.
As dusk approached I saw fires ahead and, an hour later, we passed a section of low cliffs wherein the mineral components smouldered and gave off an acrid chemical odour. Dante’s Inferno. Sulphur deposits glowing red and yellow, for ever burning. Yellow smoke curled up from deep rock crevices.
The storm grew in intensity but, by a piece of good luck, we penetrated the beach breakers via a ten-foot-wide channel into a tiny lagoon beneath Malloch Hill. Next morning, shaking with cold, we marched up and down the beach in our wet clothes until the blood ran again. Then we set out east into thick mist.
‘Surely we should head further to the right?’ Charlie shouted.
Knowing how easy it is to be tempted to distrust the compass at the best of times, I closed my mind to his suggestion: ‘The compass says this way,’ I shouted back, ‘so just keep aiming for that darker patch of sky.’
I had a local error of 43° set on the compass, with five more degrees added to cope with the effect of the boat’s engine and metal fittings. How great the magnetic Pole’s influence was I could not tell but I had, over twenty years of navigating, developed a certain faith in the compass.
To our great relief, after two hours of nothingness and our first chunks of floating ice, Rabbit Island loomed close ahead and, an hour later, we stopped in Cow Cove, a leeward beach. A flat stretch a hundred metres from the beach-anchored boat provided our camp spot. The next morning we returned with our camp-kit to the boat to find the wind had boxed through 180° and the whaler, now on an unprotected shore, was full of water and being pounded by breakers.
For two days we drained the fuel system and dried our gear; then, in a twenty-knot wind and the usual fog, we entered the narrows of Dolphin and Union Strait. For thirty-six hours without a break we ploughed east. We grew very tired and had to shout and sing to force our brains to stay alert. We determined not to stop, for there was no beach with a stitch of cover from the surf. The evenings, when the mists rolled back, were full of wild beauty which faded from red dusk to purple dawn with no darkness between. But winter menaced us unseen like some Damoclean sword. Already the sun at midnight caressed the silent surface of the sea.
For 340 miles we stood in the narrow bucking space between helm and fuel cans until at last, dodging a rash of inlets, we crossed a narrow channel to Victoria Island and left the mainland coast for the first time. We spent the night at Lady Franklin where I set up the radio. Ginny came through clearly from Tuktoyaktuk. She and Simon were watching live coverage of Prince Charles’s wedding. The previous night a storm had sunk many of the local Inuit boats, complete with outboard engines and fishing gear, so she had been worried about us.
Over the next four days we were delayed by outboard troubles 130 miles east of Lady Franklin but limped on through rain and high winds. Wild storms lashed our passage across the mouths of bays, one wider than the English Channel, and past forlorn capes of twisted red lava domes. There was no shelter, no landing beach until we reached Cambridge Bay Inuit settlement.
Because Ginny was losing radio contact with us, she and Simon moved their base to Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island. On their way north they had stopped in at Cambridge Bay and I noticed a black dog, smaller than Bothie, in Ginny’s kit-bag.
‘What,’ I asked, ‘is this?’
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘This is Tugaluk. Two months old and a good dog.’
‘Whose is she?’ I pressed. Ginny blustered and I knew she was feeling maternal. If she had left the dog in Tuktoyaktuk, she said, it would have been shot as a stray. Bothie had fallen in love, she added, but he would doubtless get over it in Resolute and then Ginny would give the puppy to a new owner. The matter was closed, Ginny was clearly intimating, but the very fact that she had given the dog a name struck me as sinister.
Ginny and the others flew on and, a day later, we too left Cambridge Bay.
Originally I had planned to strike east across Queen Maud Gulf by way of Jenny Lind Island, but a tongue of pack-ice had recently slid down in a northerly wind and blocked off this entire route, so we detoured south an extra 200 miles to creep around the pack. The navigation was complex and only possible with total concentration. All day a mist obscured the coastline. We passed through corridors between nameless islands filled with shoals where the sea boiled between gaunt stacks of dripping rock. Hour after hour I strained my eyes through the misty glare to recognise some feature but there were islands of all shapes and sizes and the coastline was so heavily indented with fjords, bays and islets that the fog made it easy to mistake a through-channel for a dangerous cul-de-sac.
After 130 miles of nerve-racking progress between these shoals, a storm came at us from the west and threw great rolling waves over the reefs. I deemed it too risky to continue and we camped on Perry Island in a sheltered cove. After twenty-four hours the storm showed signs of abating so, impatient, we ploughed on east for ten hours, often out of sight of land.
Since the compass was useless and the sun made no appearance all day I kept my nose glued to the charts. At dusk the storm renewed its attack and we plunged through cresting breakers. I prayed we would not strike a reef in the dark.
Close to midnight, a break in the cloudbanks revealed a low gap along the dim silhouette of the cliff-line. Nosing inland, we were rewarded with a sheltered islet where we spent the remaining four hours until dawn. We shivered uncontrollably in the tent and agreed to broach a bottle of whisky. By dawn the bottle was empty and we were shivering less.
With the first streaks of eastern light we squelched back into the survival suits, our thighs red-raw from the long days of salty chafing. For nineteen hours we weaved our way through innumerable gravel islands, a task made easier when the sun decided to show itself weakly through the post-storm haze.
At Gjoa Haven settlement, the Inuit warned us that pack-ice blocked the Humboldt Channel and the Wellington Strait to the north, my planned route, and we would be crazy to attempt to travel to Resolute Bay without first calling at the last Inuit settlement in the region, Spence Bay, to hire boat guides. I eagerly concurred and, after crossing Rae Strait in fine weather, we entered Spence Bay – the halfway point on our voyage to Alert.
Here we obtained the services of an Inuit hunter with an unrivalled knowledge of the area. He was accompanied by the local Mountie and three Inuit boatmen. We followed our guides whose boats, like ours, were some sixteen feet long and outboard-powered. An hour or two north of Spence Bay the Inuit turned inland and shelved their craft on a beach. We hovered offshore. ‘What’s wrong?’ I shouted.
‘There’s a storm coming,’ the Mountie shouted, ‘a bad one. Our friends will go no further and advise you to stop here or head back to the village.’
The sky looked clear and my overall fear of winter catching us in the passage overrode any suspicion that the Inuit might be right. I was also suffering from the delusion that I knew better than the Inuit. There was no apparent danger, so why waste precious time?
For a hundred miles we moved north until the storm caught us. The coastline was not blessed with a single nook or cove where we could seek shelter. Committed, and caught between heavy pack-ice and a hostile lee shore, we had no choice but to struggle on. After six hours of drenching with ice-cold water our eyes were inflamed and our fingers ached with cold. Thankfully, we reached a keyhole-cove named Parsley Bay and turned east – directly away from the wind – to gain shelter.
But the next two miles proved the wisdom of the Inuit and only luck saved us from a watery end. The bay was a boat-trap. Waves followed one another, steep and close, so that our bows plunged off one six-foot wall, down its front and into, not over, the next. The whaler was awash. Waves smashed on to the prow and filled the cockpit. Visibility was difficult. As soon as we opened our salt-filled eyes, more water would cascade over our heads. Surf pounded against the beach when we finally made the crossing, but we located the mouth of a small river and the boat was flung into the safety of its estuary on a surge of flying foam. Next day the sea was down to an angry but manageable swell outside the bay and we clung to the coastline to avoid the ever-increasing presence of ice.
A day later, some miles past the vertiginous cliffs of Limestone Island, a strong northerly wind sprang up and set the entire ice-pack of Barrow Strait on the move. It became painfully obvious that, inching along a north-facing coastline with no likely place of shelter, we stood in grave danger of being crushed. Much to Charlie’s annoyance I decided to retreat until conditions were safer. This involved back-tracking twenty miles to a shallow bay for protection.
On the morning of our third day in this cove a skein of new ice sheened the surface of the bay, a nasty reminder of the approaching freeze-up. Next day the wind changed and we threaded our way out of the cove, now all but beset by crowding bergs. Later we crossed Barrow Strait, forty miles wide, and nudged past pack-ice into the cove of Resolute Bay, capital city of the archipelago.
Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know Page 11
