ADVENTURE
A 3,000-MILE PASSAGE FROM ANNAPOLIS TO ICELAND SEES ANDY SCHELL CROSSING TACKS WITH VIKING ROUTES OF OLD ON A SPECTACULAR SAIL VIA NEW FOUNDLAND AND GREENLAND
Heavy, heavy fog blanketed the boat. We had a rotating watch standing on the bow looking for growlers. Everything, and everyone, was soaked. Falken was charging fast through the horizon-less sea. We would slow down the second we saw our first radar target. Ten knots among icebergs was not my idea of excitement.
In the words of Led Zeppelin: We come from the land of the ice and snow From the midnight sun where the hot springs flow. Will drive our ships to new lands To fight the horde, sing and cry Valhalla, I am coming.
We downshifted. With three reefs in the mainsail and a scrap of staysail we maintained our windward position and picked our way through the 60-mile ice belt that guarded the west coast of Greenland on the approach to Nanortalik in a 25-knot north-westerly with zero visibility, avoiding the big bergs with the radar and the smaller ones visually. At least it was daylight out.
I really wish I’d had the wherewithal to blast Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song that morning of our Greenland landfall – it was a pretty metal arrival – but alas, in the moment I was too focused on not sinking the boat. Now though, reflecting on what was one of the prouder moments of my sailing career, I can’t get the song out of my head. It’s become my soundtrack to the Viking route.
Ah-AAAHHHH, ah!
Ah-AAAHHHH, ah!
VOYAG E FROM VINLAND
The historic Viking route traverses the far North Atlantic between Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland. Technically we were doing it in reverse. Erik the Red, bound for mythical ‘Vinland’ would have come from the east, hop-scotching his way in open longboats from Iceland towards North America. Where ‘Vinland’ really was remains a mystery to this day but there’s no doubt that Vikings established communities at least as far south as Newfoundland.
While the route had been lodged in my consciousness for as long as I’ve been reading about sailing (check out Vinland Voyage for a wonderful account of making the trip in a wooden yacht in the 1960s), it never really occurred to me that I’d sail it. Before my wife, Mia, and I started 59° North, I’d had Svalbard as my own personal Thule, with ideas of sailing there in our first boat Arcturus, a 1960s glassfibre yawl. I’d long pinned Admiralty charts of the Arctic archipelago on my office wall back in Pennsylvania.
But then we sold Arcturus, started 59° North and really did sail to Svalbard in 2018, making it all the way up to 80º North and accomplishing a life’s goal of mine. However, t
