It was the sort of darkness where it’s hard to discern the boundary between ocean and sky. The fog didn’t help. It condensed on everything, requiring the intermittent hum of the wipers, a metronome for monotony.
Daylight was coming, but so was the ice. We had seen a few larger icebergs on the radar. Just a day earlier, the area we were now traversing appeared to be impassable on the Danish ice charts. Sea ice from farther north up the Greenland coast was breaking apart and being sucked south in nearsolid floes by the East Greenland Current.
We had departed Iceland two days back, making use of a narrow weather window in July between Greenland and Iceland. The weeklong stretch of fog and cloud cover had made all the recent satellite photos useless, and we were banking on a dying northerly gale to have opened up the sea ice near the east entrance to Prince Christian Sound, an interconnected fjord system that forms an inland passage across the bottom of Greenland. If we couldn’t find a way through, we’d be forced to travel an extra 250 miles or so to round Cape Farewell on the bottom of Greenland, a place where fog, ice, currents and gales often create the world’s most dangerous patches of ocean.
As I scanned the radar and FLIR thermal imaging on the multifunction display, my heart skipped a beat—or maybe three. I reached for the throttle, threw it into reverse to stop motion, and then neutral for fear of ice jamming between the hull
