A whale tale
A summer ‘break’ abroad forges love of work – and adventure By Jim Leonardo
The Daniel en route to the fishing grounds.
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nglers are notorious for spinning tales about their catches, but few will ever top the true big-fish story of ASPS Life Member and ASMS past President Andy Wexler, MD, Pacific Palisades, Calif., who spent the summer of 1972 with five Dartmouth ski teammates on a commercial fishing boat north of the Arctic Circle in Greenland. For three months, Dr. Wexler removed himself from civilization and disconnected from communication with home in an environment where you ate what you killed or caught; where you could be summoned to the icy waters literally at any hour (the midnight sun at the top of the world allows for such work hours); and where he and his friends were once deposited in the remote Greenland tundra where they had to hunt to keep food in their bellies. The excursion culminated in a grueling encounter with a 40-ton humpback whale in the Davis Strait. “It was a summer ‘break’ consisting of brutal, physical labor,” Dr Wexler recalls. “Three of us were Outward Bound instructors and all were very accomplished woodsmen, but every day we felt seriously challenged.”
Crewing with a classmate
Dr. Wexler, wearing his Phillips Academy Andover prep school letter sweater, stands at the bow of the Daniel.
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The adventure was set into motion when Lars, a Dartmouth teammate and Greenland native, asked if Dr. Wexler and four other teammates on the Dartmouth ski team would work as crew that summer on one of two fishing boats owned and operated by Lars’ father. Days later, the young
men boarded a flight to Copenhagen, and then to U.S.-controlled Sondstrom Air Base in Sonder Strong Ford, Greenland. “The villages in Greenland are isolated, and there’s no good way to get to them,” Dr. Wexler says. “Travel on the islands – where many villages sit – in the winter is done through dog sled or snowmobile; when the ice breaks up in the summer, it’s by boat. A third method is by helicopter, which we did, but we had to camp on the tundra for three days before the weather allowed it to fly.” The chopper flew Lars and his American teammates through the fjords to a village named Sukkertoppen but known to locals as Maniitsoq – “the Hard Place” – on the coast of the Davis Strait, a small parcel of livable island inhabited by about 2,000 people in little cottages built upon rock and snow, along with a few government buildings and a nearby fish factory. Dr. Wexler and his friends were taken to a small cottage, where they would live while working on the Daniel, a wooden, 44-foot fishing boat. “The non-Greenlandic population included a Danish schoolteacher, doctor and a few merchants, but the locals had never seen Americans before,” he recalls. “They were extremely lovely, friendly and open to us – in spite of the language barrier. The local language is Danish, but on the boat they spoke the native Greenlandic language of Kalaalisut. In order to communicate on the boat, we had to go from English to Danish to Kalaalisut. It would’ve been impossible without Lars translating for us.” Suffice to say, communication is important on a commercial fishing boat, as the profession ranks among the world’s most dangerous. “We were on a small boat rolling in the waves, with fish blood all over the deck that made it quite slippery,” Dr. Wexler tells PSN. “There were winches and net haulers pitching back and forth overhead and sharp knives everywhere. If you went overboard in that water, by the time the boat came around to pick you up, it would be too late. You don’t have much survival time in below-freezing salt water infused with ice. That’s what we worked in for hours. “It’s brutal, dangerous, cold and hard work – all of us were very strong, young guys and serious athletes – and after the first few weeks of this, we thought we were going to die,” he laughs. “We wore long johns and woolens with oil skins over those, and thin, wool gloves with which we pulled-up heavy nets – each one taking a few hours. Then we’d have six to 13 tons of codfish on board, which five guys had to clean by hand.” Once done, the boat returned to shore and the fish were transferred to a Danish processing plant. The Americans were paid a percentage of each catch, which allowed Dr. Wexler to pay for airfare for the trip with about $600 to spare. As the
hours on the job accumulated, so too did the difficulty. “The hours are: You fish when it’s time to fish,” he says. “Because we were in the Arctic Circle, the sun was up for 24 hours, and with daylight all the time, we’d work 16-20 hours straight. Between nets, we’d crash in the bunk room below the deck in the bow of the boat. We’d catch sleep when we could, eat when we could and work when the captain said it’s time to fish. “It’s a very hard life; if you want breakfast, you catch it,” Dr. Wexler adds. “You survive on fish and hardtack, a biscuit made from flour, water and salt. We’d be out on the water sometimes 48 hours at a time. When we had a break, we’d take advantage of social events in the village. But when the captain called you back – whatever time of day or night – you report to the boat and work.”
The hard road to acceptance Quick to learn and adapt to the lifestyle, Dr. Wexler and his friends eventually earned the respect of the locals, he says. “I got pretty good at cleaning fish,” he notes. “I could clean a 40-pound cod in under 10 seconds and with three knife strokes. Salmon could take a little longer.” It was one particular incident, however, that cemented the reputation of the college students as hard, capable workers. A Greenlander who was exiled from the community once chewed out the boat’s captain for putting foreigners on his boat. “He lived alone for years by the side of an isolated fjord in a single room, old-style Greenlandic house made of tundra sod,” Dr. Wexler says of the angry resident, known as Ole, who had actually been found guilty of murder years earlier. The legal code at that time only allowed for a forced relocation to remote Greenland instead of jail. “He survived by hunting and fishing, and through the good will of the community – people would leave him necessities such as bullets and oil for his lamps, allowing him to maintain his lonely existence,” Dr. Wexler explains. “One day, our boat was fishing in his fjord, so we stopped to deliver supplies. He looked ancient – though I’m sure he was much younger than he looked – and was tough as reindeer sinew. After seeing us, he began to berate the captain in the native language. Lars told us later that Ole reprimanded him for having foreigners crew his boat instead of Greenlanders. But by that time, we’d been there a month and had gotten up-to-speed. The captain told Ole: ‘They eat and drink like us, they sleep like us, they laugh like us and they work hard. They are just like us.’ At that moment, we felt like we had become Greenlandic fishermen.” That approval spilled into the local scene. “We were initially accepted solely be-
July/August 2021
