Yeva Completes Heroic Passage through Victoria Strait

 

Sunset on Victoria Strait, photograph by Ella Hibbert

It's easy to underestimate the risks of sailing through the Northwest Passage. You look at a map and see plenty of blue, suggesting multiple open-water routes around the various Nunavut islands, and it appears that there are a variety of options for intrepid sailors willing to brave the cold. Unfortunately, the maps don't show the seasonal pack ice and bergs clogging that straits and passageways, or depict the fickle weather conditions in the Arctic. To date, only 12 sailors have completed solo voyages through the NWP, the same number of people as have walked on the moon. 

In 1848, the English ships HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, after having successfully explored Antarctica,  became trapped in Victoria Strait. Ice-bound, both ships were abandoned by their crews, and all 130 men died from a variety of causes, including hypothermia, scurvy, and starvation while trying to hike overland to the south. No survivors. Inuit report that some of the men even resorted to cannibalism and forensic evidence of cut marks on the skeletal remains of crew members found on King William Island support the Inuit claims. 

Despite the intense efforts in the 19th Century to find a navigable path through the NWP, the first passage through Victoria Strait wasn't completed until 1967, when the icebreaker CCGS John A. Macdonald broke through. The Macdonald crossed again in 1975, and in 1976, the Canadian icebreakers Louis S. St-Laurent and J.E. Bernier also made it through the strait.

Late last night, Ella Hibbert pulled into Cambridge Bay aboard the Yeva, having successfully sailed from Fort Ross on Somerset Island, westward through the Bellot Strait, and then southward through the Larsen Sound and into Victoria Strait. In the strait, she managed to find an open channel of water between pack ice on both her port and starboard sides, which forced her considerably to the east of her intended route through the strait. Fortunately, visibility was good and the wind was manageable, and she eventually made it south through the strait, and then west through the Icebreaker Strait between Victoria and Jenny Lind Islands, and finally into Cambridge Bay, the first passage through Victoria Strait this year. In total, it was a journey of over 400 miles from Fort Ross in three continuous days of nerve-wracking, around-the-clock sailing amidst all that ice.

Brazilian adventurer Tamara Klink is also sailing the NWP, although not as part of an Arctic Ocean circumnavigation like the Yeva. She and her boat, the Sardinia 2, were in Fort Ross with Hibbert, but Klink took the more traditional route, not sailing through the center of Victoria Strait like the Yeva, but following the west coast of the Boothia Peninsula down into James Ross Strait between the peninsula and King William Island, and then around the settlement of Gjoa Haven, making several stops at bays and inlets along the way. It's a longer route, and in a vlog update, Hibbert discussed the risk/benefit decisions that went into taking her chances that the open-water channel in Victoria Strait would lead all the way through and not force her to turn back. The risk paid off, as Hibbert is now safely in Cambridge Bay, while Klink is currently south of Jenny Lind, still some 100 miles from Cambridge Bay.

It's not a race, to be sure, but Hibbert still has some 6,000 miles left to sail to complete her voyage (900 more miles to Alaska!), and time is becoming a factor.