TALES
by Joshua Wheeler
OF THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE: TUKTOYAKTUK - WHAT'S IN A FISH? Tuktoyaktuk (left to right): Bruce's skiff; S/V Breskell (the yellow boat) American flagged, French crew; S/V Morgane, Belgium flagged, Swiss crew; S/V Snow White, Czech Republic. Photo by Eric Maffre. Night had begun to return since leaving the last settlement of Cambridge Bay. Headed west, the wind on our nose, Breskell pounded into the teeth of the Dolphin and Union Strait. At times, she launched off one wave and slammed into the next, shuddering for several seconds on impact. As we ducked behind Read Island to anchor out the storm, we bumped over something unmarked, a constant danger in the poorly charted Arctic. The virtues of Breskell’s swing keel were clear when it avoided damage, pivoting up and over the obstacle. Carrying on after the blow in the Amundsen Gulf, we struck a growler, an iceberg too small to show up on the radar but big enough to smash a hole in Breskell’s upper topside. We made an on-the-water repair which worked until, headed into the teeth of the Beaufort Sea, it didn’t. The bailing commenced, and we headed to Tuk.
A
fter a rough leg, a weary crew of four tied up to the earthen and timber public dock in Tuktoyaktuk to reprovision, repair, and recoup. It was August 27, 2019, and Breskell, a 50-foot, yellow, wooden, cold-molded, sloop-rigged sailboat, built and captained by Olivier Huin, was only halfway
48º NORTH
through her voyage. We had left St. John's, Newfoundland, in mid-July, bound for Port Townsend, Washington, via the fabled Northwest Passage. The Northwest Passage, a sea route through the Arctic Ocean, was elusive to 19th-century explorers, sometimes ending in tragedy, as was the case for the infamous Sir John Franklin expedition in the late 1840s. They braved the unknown and unpredictable cold and ice of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago in search of a shorter shipping route between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. The icy conditions of the time clogged the waterways, and their slow wooden ships were unable to transit in one season. If frozen in, their hulls risked being crushed by the pressure of the shifting ice. Crews faced a long, dark, cold, and hungry winter (or winters) of survival conditions, with only a remote chance of rescue in the short summer seasons. Now, some two hundred years later, and especially since 2000, things are different. The arctic climate has warmed enough to adequately melt the ice in July and August for modern boats to pass, with several transits per year by government, commercial, and recreational vessels. After the season of 2019, an unofficial
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JUNE 2021
