I Love It I Hate It

Mario’s Log: 22 August 2025

Everything was going fine and none of us saw anything in the window that bothered us. Then the sound of a ton of ice slamming the hull rang out and the boat shook. We had had hit a clear-as-glass chunk of ice the size of a refrigerator. It rolled and banged along the keel until it spit out from the stern, directly under the shaft and rudder. After we pulled our hearts out of our throats and could find no damage to anything, Scott went forward and asked me to take the helm. I sat down at the station and thought “I won’t miss seeing the next one.” Two miles later I was staring at two twenty-meter wide “growlers;” pieces of ice no more than 1.5 meters high, that I had to avoid. To port was no good, to starboard was worse. I aimed for the middle. We had been splitting the difference of ice like this for days. As the bow passed between the floes I saw it, the longest blue/green shelf of underwater ice we’d ever encountered. The two sections of ice were connected.

At nine knots and 1,700 RPM, all that was left was to hope that my eyes were wrong about what five feet of water looked like. They weren’t. The stem of the bow plowed into the connecting ice bridge and the bang was so much worse than the previous one. Sarah-Sarah rose enough that we all felt it. As the ice scraped and banged along the keel, all shoulders aboard tensed as we waited to feel it clear the stern …or not.

Sarah-Sarah has an extremely tough hull. The stem is 120 mm thick and 50 mm wide and rounds down into a substantial keel that is welded to the 13 mm bottom. She is a tank, but, she is not invulnerable to damage. At best, I’d made a hell of a lot of noise and made Scott rethink handing me the helm. At worst, I’d just ripped a stabilizer from the hull or cracked a weld. The hull had risen slightly but not slowed down. We likely just took a couple of inches off the top of the ice then slid off the shelf. I let go a raft of expletives, and Scott called out from the forward berth, “Did you get that one?” with more sarcasm and adrenaline in his voice than I’d heard in two months at sea with the man. We had eighty-miles of this stuff to get through and I was rethinking the life choices that got me into this whole thing.

Scott came up from below while I was shaking out my nerves. I expected him to take the helm – permanently. Instead he puts his hand on my shoulder, “You remember how excited we were back in Labrador when we saw that first chunk of ice?” he smiled. For a guy who had to have just spent at least a few seconds wondering if I had ruined his boat …in the middle of sea ice …in the Arctic he was remarkably calm. He might have even laughed. Again, I was rethinking life choices.

We’ve come a long way since that first ice sighting and I’m here to say that there is nothing I’ve loved seeing on this trip more than the ice. It has been a magnificence that cannot be captured in images. It truly must be seen, in the cold arctic air, to really appreciate. Also true is that there is nothing I hate more about this trip than this [expletive deleted] ice. Honestly, It’s hard to truly love something that hides in your path and tries to kill you.

Icebergs are not the worry. Despite all the (annoying) Titanic references, they are easy to see and easier to avoid. But sea ice, that spreads out in every direction for miles, is another thing entirely. If you wait until it is gone completely, you might have to wait another year. To be successful at a crossing like this, the sea ice must be managed, not completely avoided. The trouble is, to manage any risk you need information. What you want is certainty. What you get, however, despite the daily Canadian Ice Charts and Satellite Images, is delayed images of what was and might be true now – but probably isn’t. Then you have to overlay current weather predictions that may or may not be true, and then push out into the sea and hope everyone involved – the ice guys, the meteorologists, and your gut – was right. It’s part science part hope-as-a-strategy navigation.

Sea Ice – especially a mix of 1st year, second-year, third-year, and old ice (how they describe the thicker and thicker pieces of an ice floe) is stunning to look at, but it is hell to get through. Our first attempt out of Point Pearce had us stuck in the stuff for six hours one day before we finally escaped the ice (read: used the hull and weight of Sarah-Sarah to smash through) and made it back to our anchorage. It was the finest example of running away bravely from a bad decision as I’d ever been involved in (Friends, that is saying something.) In fairness to the Canadian Ice Office, their charts – that had been saying for weeks that there was ice in places there was not – this time all but had printed in bold across our path “For the love of God, don’t go here, you idiots.” We thought we knew better.

(The above video is a 360 degree view of the sea ice we were trapped in several days ago. Yes, trapped is exactly the right word. Use “beset” if you like, but it just means “trapped.” )

Over the next two days, including yesterday morning where I tried to run us aground and make us part of the floe for a week, we thoughtfully and, most of the time, carefully picked our way through the floes, dodging port and starboard and port again, looking for long leads in the ice that were going (sort of) in the direction we wanted to go. Then we hoped that the part of the ice chart that indicated “all clear” was actually clear. Navigating sea ice is, to put it mildly, a little unnerving.

Today, as we are move into clear waters with some sea ice to the north on the horizon we look at it, more like an enemy than a friend. The hate part is winning to a bunch of guys who really want to see home again on the schedule we predicted. I’m so very glad I got to see it, the bergs, the bergy bits, and the long forever-stretching floes of sea ice and growlers that so captured my imagination when I first saw them.

I’m not saying I don’t want to come back or that I never want to see the ice again. I do. But if I never hear the sound of tons of ice slamming into tons of hull again, I’ll be just fine. As for the boat, sometime in the future, I’m sure Scott will pull Sarah-Sarah and look for the scars later, but like I said, she never slowed down. I was probably worried for nothing. Poor ice never stood a chance, really.