Chill out
This trip to Greenland was part of a clockwise circumnavigation of the Northern Atlantic that began thousands of miles ago on the Skeleton Coast – this leg would add another 900 miles. But the Arctic region was both destination and voyage, the Greenland coast ahead a thin break between sea and ice.
Coastal voyaging around Newfoundland involves constant contact with ice, which drifts south from Baffin Bay – the sea that divides Greenland from the American continent – Arctic breakaways, many from the eastern Arctic ice shelf driven south then north again by currents, and their cousins calved from Greenland glaciers. At sea, it is a traffic problem something halfway between a shipping lane and a rocky archipelago. One never truly has the feeling of being mid-ocean as a route is picked between these icy behemoths, island hopping all the way from one coast to the other.
Midsummer is the sensible time of year for this sort of “cruise”; we were late and made landfall at the end of July, season of never-ending sunsets which only flip, at an indeterminable point, into sunrise. This at least provides navigable light to safely thread a route north-west along the coast while the sun burrows along beneath the terrain east to west.
Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, is 300nm north of the southern extremity, 10 miles in from the western coastline – and it is here we finally closed in with the land, entering into the calm waters of the enclosing fjord network.
A warm welcome
A patrol vessel intercepted us a few miles away, sending a crew on a RIB to board and give us NORDREG instructions and customs and immigration forms – all very friendly and welcoming – and by the evening we were tied up in Nuuk harbour. Ports in Greenland tend to
