By Cameron Dueck
Silent Sound completed her epic voyage through the Canadian Arctic on October 10, four months and four days after slipping her moorings in Victoria, BC. It was a cold day with pouring rain when she pulled into Halifax Harbour, but there was still a crowd of family and friends waiting to welcome us ashore, reminding us of the community that has formed around the Open Passage Expedition.
We sailed 8,100 nautical miles, or about 15,000km, and spent two of our four months above the Arctic Circle. We spent on average more than four days a week at sea throughout the entire summer. We ran into ice, storms and days without wind that left us frustrated and behind schedule. But numbers and facts and logbook entries will never be able to tell the real story of this voyage of discovery.
Sailing through the Northwest Passage without assistance was our primary goal. Ice, bad weather and a lack of support in this remote part of the world made it challenging, but we succeeded. Our secondary goal was to learn more about the people that live in the Arctic, and tell their story of how climate change is impacting their lives. We have succeeded in that too, telling the story in this newspaper as well as other papers and websites throughout the summer.
We only had one summer in the Arctic, so we couldn’t see the change happening ourselves or become experts in Arctic issues. But we met many people with the knowledge we lacked and we learned from them. Many people opened the doors to their lives so we could learn more about how their world is changing.
And what they said taught us that there are real, significant changes taking place in their lives because of climate change. Changes that threaten their ways of hunting, their culture and their food supply.
This summer brought a third straight year of rapid melting, putting the sea ice coverage at well below the 30-year average. We saw only the remnants of the sea ice that normally covers the water, but this ice is core to the lives of the people who call the Arctic home, and it is hard to over emphasis the impact of its melting.
That said, any amount of ice is frightening when you are at the helm of a small yacht, and although more yachts may follow, this remains one of the most challenging sailing routes on the globe.
Our journey also gave us a real look at life in the Arctic, and in many cases that shattered our romantic notions and stereotypes. This is a region struggling to bridge a cultural gap and keep up with the changes around it. Seeing their lives from afar and making judgments on how they hunt, socialize and operate their communities will not help solve their problems, climate change related or not. Understanding the Arctic and the Inuit is something we can never claim to have done in a summer, but we saw enough to know that we need to learn more.
August 4, 2009
By Cameron Dueck
The Silent Sound has covered more than 4,000 miles of sea since leaving Victoria two months ago, and each mile has given us a better understanding of life in the Arctic and its challenges.
We have just left Sachs Harbour, a remote hamlet on the shores of Banks Island. This is one of the more remote communities we’re likely to visit, and it was interesting seeing how their traditional reliance on the land has changed to suit modern times.
Maintaining a community with modern conveniences in the Arctic requires massive amounts of infrastructure and resources, particularly fuel. Sachs has less than 150 people, raising the per capita cost of their infrastructure: a clinic, school, police detachment, store, two different administration offices, a visitor’s center and a post office. They need these services, but they are costly to deliver, as Sachs is the only settlement in the vastness of Banks Island. While the Inuit living on Banks once lived off the land, needing to buy only the very basics, they have now come to rely on modern conveniences. Their use of fuel highlights this.
“We’ll go through 160 gallons of gas on one snow machine to get to the north end of the island for hunting. And it costs $40 for one five gallon can,” a hunter told us. And when he goes hunting, it is not for sport, but for food and furs that bring in his only cash income.
The price of milk has slowly been rising from community to community as Silent Sound has sailed deeper into the Arctic. In Barrow, Alaska, we were surprised to see milk priced at $10 a gallon. A few hundred miles to the east, in Canada’s Tuktoyaktuk, a gallon of milk fetched anywhere from $15 to $22 a gallon! Fresh goods must be imported by airplane, often going through four or five transfers before a floatplane lands on the water in front of a small village with its precious cargo.
Aboard Silent Sound, we are also very conscious about the cost and usage of resources. We carry about 260 gallons of diesel fuel, which is used to run our main engine and is burnt in a small furnace to heat the main cabin. Direct Energy has bought carbon credits to offset our use of fuel, but we still have to carefully monitor how much we use, as the next fuel stop may be thousands of miles away.
We also have to carefully monitor our water use. We carry the same amount of water as fuel, about 260 gallons. There are four people living on board, and this is our home where we cook all our meals. This water must last us more than one month, as there are no chances to top up our tanks in between towns. This means washing dishes and bathing with seawater (yup, it’s very cold, about 41F) and we’re wearing our socks a bit longer than we normally would.
Being in the Arctic reminds us of how precious these resources are. The people that lived here thousands of years ago survived using little more than the animals and fish they could harvest from the land. Today, they have a lot more resources at hand, but they came at a high cost, encouraging us to think twice before turning on a light, starting the car or running the tap.
- Cameron
Stay tuned for more adventures from the Silent Sound.