The Northwest Passage

E

El and Bill

New member
We have 'transitioned' from our liveaboard, cruising lifestyle in our CD 22 that we enjoyed for so many years, but we have not lost our love of cruising. Now, we intersperse our land cruising in our truck, with commercial small boat cruises. We have enjoyed delightful trips down many rivers in Europe.
Now we hope to traverse the Northwest Passage in September on a small cruise ship. My minor in college was Polar Studies and reading the tales of the search for a Northwest Passage across North America was riveting. A sailing friend recently completed his trip through the Passage in a home-made concrete motor sailer. Global warming has allowed passage of commercial ships recently so we have signed up to give it a go this year. 18 day trip.
Anybody interested? It's a Rhode Scholar Trip so should have good leaders.
Cheers - El and Bill
 
I seem to remember last year somewhere up north a group studying Global Warming got stuck in the ice and had to be rescued.
Safe travels
D.D.
 
What a great trip. I was blessed to be on the first successful Canadian west to east total transit in 1995 on a 27 ft motor sailor. There was some tough times. You can peruse Can Ice reports from Environment Canada to get a feel for how this season may be. I've been watching as last year and year before last were extremely tough with boats stuck all over. A cruise ship is the way to go. Several ice breakers will be positioned to assist if stuck. Ice extent is a good measure of passage ability. Keep an eye on North wind flows for the summer. If it blows from North it brings multi year ice down. Very tough. September is a good time to try in a ship. I assume it is an in and back from east to Cambridge bay or is it a total transit you are doing? Very exciting and wonderful. Bellot strait and down to Gjoa Haven is amazing country. Glaciers in Pond Inlet area are magical. Have a great trip! George
 
Well that sounds fantastic (and tempting!).

Gee, Powell or the Northwest Passage (at that time of year). They are both wonderful (like you all always have said: candy counter!).
 
George-
Reading the tale of your trip was an inspiration. We are doing it in a much easier fashion than your trip - however, we'll face the weather conditions and ice just as you did (in your smaller boat). Our attempt will be all the way through -- from near the mouth of the McKenzie to the west coast of Greenland.
 
For you Canadians: here's the first ship that made it around the whole North American continent, the St Roche. It also made the NorthWest Passage in both directions. The St Roche is on exhibit at the Vancouver Marine Museum.

The Royal Canadian Mounted finally made the captain, Henry Asbjørn Larsen, a member AFTER he did those passages. I guess he had to prove his mettle because he couldn't ride a horse.

And if you do visit the ship, and it's a great experience, remember to pay the parking fee. There's no free parking in Vancouver.

Boris
 
Matt Rutherford sailed the Northwest Passage single handed in a 27 Vega. He actually went all the way around N and S America by himself non stop (he did meet some support boats along the way). We were there when he made landfall again in Annapolis.

http://reddotontheocean.com/
 
I just had dinner tonight with my good buddy and skipper of our Northwest Passage Winston Bushnell. He's 78 now and glad we did the passage when we did. We did a lot of research prior to our attempt. For a small vessel the chances are still reckoned at about a one in five chance for a succesful single season transit which is from Arctic circle east or west all the way to arctic circle east or west. A daunting challenge. Our boat Dove III sits at 103 on the recorded transit list. First Canadian private vessel.
The St Roch is a great exhibit in Vancouver and well worth a visit. Her struggles make great reading.
Interestingly enough a friend of mine has uncouvered an earlier Canadian commercial transit than the police St Roch in the Hudson Bay vessel Fort Ross. They routinely went back and forth but didn't put in for an official transit as they were merely doing business. A ship in the shadows is the name of the book about Fort Ross.
There are some great books about the area and it is unlike anywhere I've been before. A highlight of my life for sure being in the high arctic. I felt as remote as being on the moon some days and about as far from help. Much like being in the desert, one sees pretty quickly how insignificant one is in the power of nature. El and Bill you guys are going to see some very cool stuff. The eastern arctic is in your face scenery. Glaciers, mountains and icebergs of immense size. Great stuff. Enjoy!
 
Space based measurements have now shown without doubt that that global warming ceased about 18 years ago We need to drop that well worn phrase. "Global Climate Change" Was the next one to allow a slow back down for the Gore folks. I think the new one that continues the slow backing down of the Gore folks is "weather uncertainty." I can get on board with that one.

There are many recorded cycles over the past century of openings and closings of the northwest passage. Those opening and closings are normal cyclical things. The point about the warming-scientists getting ice locked is pretty funny. However, I'm with Bill and Ell. If I'm going to do that passage I'd leave it to the professionals to make sure I had the highest probability of a warm cabin, good food, and getting back to warmer climes. Now, if I was in my 20's, I might give it a go if I could go in a flotilla of other 20 somethings and one old hardened 70 year old who'd done it several times. It will be fun to read Bill and Ell's trip report. Hopefully well photo documented. Something they are very good at.
 
potter water":mpvvilqd said:
Space based measurements have now shown without doubt that that global warming ceased about 18 years ago We need to drop that well worn phrase. "Global Climate Change" Was the next one to allow a slow back down for the Gore folks. I think the new one that continues the slow backing down of the Gore folks is "weather uncertainty." I can get on board with that one.

There are many recorded cycles over the past century of openings and closings of the northwest passage. Those opening and closings are normal cyclical things. The point about the warming-scientists getting ice locked is pretty funny. However, I'm with Bill and Ell. If I'm going to do that passage I'd leave it to the professionals to make sure I had the highest probability of a warm cabin, good food, and getting back to warmer climes. Now, if I was in my 20's, I might give it a go if I could go in a flotilla of other 20 somethings and one old hardened 70 year old who'd done it several times. It will be fun to read Bill and Ell's trip report. Hopefully well photo documented. Something they are very good at.
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I think that you and I may be getting our information from different sources. IMHO, some of the above statements and the implication that global warming is not occurring are not accurate. However, I am also aware of how hardened opinions are in this area and I've found that I am rarely able to change anyone's opinion even when I bring a lot of scientific data from credible sources to the table.

For more information on global warming/human induced climate change, I simply refer people to what I consider the most authoritative source, the AAAS web site. I will say that a tremendous amount of money is being spent by energy companies and others to fund a public relations effort to discredit science and scientists involved in this research. The sad thing is that these efforts have worked and it's getting to the point where it's hard to find any reliable, trustworthy news source that provides data on which we can all agree. I never expect people to agree on the interpretation of the data OR on how to respond to data. But in the current situation, it's very hard to even agree on what "reality" is, much less on what to do about it. Until we as a country figure out how to get good, solid, reliable and trustworthy information in our hands - e.g. facts on which all can agree, subsequent debate about what to do is completely fruitless. It's my sense that this is exactly the situation that public relations campaigns intend to create - e.g. enough uncertainty in the minds of the public and politicians so that the status quo can continue.
 
“However, the fact that the warmest years on record are 2014, 2010 and 2005 clearly indicates that global warming has not ‘stopped in 1998,’ as some like to falsely claim.”"....said Stefan Rahmstorf, head of earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

Yeah, but if nobody listens it won't still happen, right?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/17/scien ... d=fb-share
 
Rogerbum. Your thoughts are very astute on this issue. I've made my living for the past 30 years before retirement, designing and building advanced weather satellite instrumentation. I have an in-depth understanding of instrument design and calibration.

In the process of my work I had a chance to meet with a prominent Republican Senator about funding a special project my laboratory had in mind. That was simply to form a world wide forum on calibration of global weather instrumentation, both ground and space based and to build super accurate, super stable measurement capability. In a candid moment, he said and it is close to a direct quote. "This whole weather issue is like a courtroom. The prosecution, the warmers, have no real interest in science to prove their case. Nor does the defense, the anti-warmers. The interests of both sides rely on keeping evidenciary information at a minimum so that each sides depends upon theater to appeal to emotion of the jury They both want their ability to deliver theater as most affecting the outcome. The warmers don't really want to know, nor do the anti-warmers, as real knowledge removes their ability to sway national policy on many subjects, most of which have nothing to do with global weather issues."

From a science point of view, I can tell you with certainty that no instruments in space are good for better than a 1% stability over even short periods of time, let alone over years. I can also tell you that ground based measurement methods are barely able to meet a 3% stability over even short periods of time. Remember, we are talking warming or cooling measurements that over decades are less than a degree, well within the margin of error of current ground, atmospheric and space based instruments. If one wants to panic and affect life and the economy in a big way because of a possible .01 degree move in average global temperatures based on instruments that are only capable of measuring accurately, over decades, 3 degree or more changes, then, that is political, not scientific.

Modeling predictions are now widely accepted to be widely disparate and unreliable. All one needs to do is look at what the models predicted 20 years ago and see what the numbers, flawed as they are, actually are today.

The bottom line of my conversation with that senior senator was the there will be no national or international effort funded to develop instrumentation that will remove the issue from the political arena. Neither side benefits from that.

Someday, maybe the repubs and the dems can get their moral compasses working and fund the right level of effort to just track global weather state for the good of humanity and take this whole thing out of the drama of court room shenanigans. I'm not holding my breath.
 
I would say that since a majority of the countries in the world seem to agree the climate change is something real and are trying to mitigate the expected damage, the US government and population should pay a bit more attention to this issue. I doubt that all these other countries are misguided and that the US is the only country that really knows what is going on.

And even should climate change be nothing but instrument error, it certainly would not hurt anything to improve the efficiency with which humans consume the world's natural resources and reuse and/or dispose of the resulting waste products.
 
It's complex and interesting to me the whole climate dynamics. In fact in winter 2013 and '14, ice cover in the arctic set new records for maximum cover . The boats attempting an easy ice free passage in the last couple seasons have been surprised as are many scientists as too what's going on. I enjoy checking ice cover charts and seeing where the floe edge is during winter/spring on Environment Canada sites as a way to see what the coming season may be like. Even in a good melt year there are bottlenecks at Barrow and Bellot strait that can be tough.
This is a voyage thru fascinating country. I'd like to return and doing it like El and Bill is the way to go Warm beds and lots of food!
 
The senators' comments are interesting. He sees it as an ongoing argument, with no-one interested in proving their case, and therefore nothing is done about it. And that appears to be true at the US congressional level.

There's another viewpoint at "lower" levels in government, the state, county and local levels. The see it as a fact that's starting to affect them; it's not a debate. I read an article wherein Miami officials are planning for a rise in the sea level, though the state is ignoring it. Here in California (wouldn't you know it?) the state, county and even super conservative San Diego city are making plans. I guess those who have to deal directly with rising sea levels accept that the debate is over and are concerned and planning, while higher levels of politicians are above it.

BTW, that senator is correct. No amount of accurate data will convince the non-believers. One guy told me that all the theory is wrong, it's caused by sun spots. I don't think he was a solar astronomer but he was sincere.

And to really upset folks, the other day I was told that they're still teaching creationism as an alternative to evolution and letting high school students make their choice.

Boris

Boris
 
I don't need a satellite-based temperature sensor to tell me the earth is warming - just take a cruise up Glacier Bay. A hundred years ago you couldn't even get into the bay, now you gotta cruise miles to the very end to see ice.

Check out the Skeptical Science website here if you want to read rebuttals to the usual skeptic points like "the climate's changed before" or "there's no consensus" or "the models are unreliable" etc.

The Wikipedia write-up of the site is here
 
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