Sailing from Home to Nome

As the receding Artic ice increasingly gives way due to global changes, so do the opportunities emerge for sailors to explore it.

In the Ocean Cruising Club we have a retired revered member named Bob Shepton. He and his glass hulled 33’ Westerly Dodo’s Delight recently were awarded our Vasey Vase ‘for a voyage of an unusual or exploratory nature’; for the transit through the Northwest Passage from Greenland to Nome.

The Arctic has changed, with decreasing multi-year ice and increasing open water in the summer.  After passaging from Scotland over the northern and western Greenland fiords, Shepton sailed with a crew of four very adept and anxious South African mountain climbers, who took many anchoring day’s opportunity to scale a wall, some climbs straight up 850 meter sheer rocks from the deck of the sailboat. They motor-sailed and beat reefed down, wested to the destination, and in the Bering Strait finally, having a benign by comparison enjoyable sail, reached Nome on September 20, 2012. They had left Scotland June 8 and covered 6059 miles.

The Northern Sea route shortens the distance between the Atlantic and the Pacific by 50%, and the navigational season is basically from July to November. This is the Northwest Passage that was so coveted by early explorers, many buried along the shores of the bays Bob anchored in. Open water continues to replace ice cover in the Arctic during warmer months and the USCG is scrambling to evaluate the risks there, though as long as we have explorers like Rev Bob, at least for some the path is clear.

Bob was awarded the prestigious Blue Water Medal from the Cruising Club of America in 1995.

Author Captain Art Ross, who pens the Flotsam and Jetsam blog, recently published Sixty Years of Sport: Sailing From The Age of Gatsby to The Grenadine Islands