Off to Greenland
Millybrown
Mark Hillmann
Tue 29 Jul 2008 13:04
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We sailed yesterday afternoon for Greenland. It blew
quite hard in the morning, so we sat having coffee in a hotel with wi-fi,
checking weather and ice forecasts on the lap tops: They were all
good.
We then put on full waterproofs and set off; and after an evening drifting downwind in eight knots, with twin genoas up, we came on to a reach overnight, but with little more wind. Apparently Reykjarvik recently had its warmest day for years and I was considering shorts, but it feels out of place in Iceland. The wind has picked up a little bit now, but it is still a comfortable reach, heading straight for Prins Christian Sund. Paul (son 3)
is reviewing the Danish ice charts daily and emailing something I can read,
so we can decide whether it is
feasible to go into the sound, before we arrive. There are connected channels, with glaciers calving directly into them, that avoid going round Cap Farvel, the southern tip of Greenland. They are described by Willy Kerr in the pilot book as "One of the world's most magnificent passages". I discussed it with an Icelandic yacht skipper who charters out of Isafjord, in north west Iceland and he regarded conditions as good and that it was a passage not to be missed. The forecast is for more wind so the slow start should not be a problem. We have only covered 70 miles so far, with 546 to go. This leg is long enough for
our chart plotter to indicate that our course is curved. If we wanted
the shortest (great circle) route, we have a special paper chart to plot
and work it out on. As the winds towards the Greenland coast are currently
predicted to be northerly I am sticking with the GPS and going a little
north.
Here we are between Iceland
and Greenland wearing sunhats, reaching along in a flat sea at 6 knots. Oh
what a hard life
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