Not the northwest passage

BEFORE I joined Ross Field in Lymington, UK with the intention of sailing the northwest passage, I looked up the atlas to see where it was. Basically, we would turn right from the port of Lymington on the south coast of England, leave Ireland, Iceland and Greenland to starboard, then head north up Greenland’s west coast. I liked the fact that all those countries ended with 'land'.

The northwest passage crosses the top of Canada and Alaska, after which yachts generally hang left into the Bering Sea and sail south-east to Vancouver.

Some transit in the opposite direction from Alaska to Greenland. The northeast passage goes across the top of Russia. It is easier from a maritime perspective, but has a higher density of political icebergs.

Spoiler alert: as it happened, for several reasons, we did not do the northwest passage, but we didn’t know that then so we prepared as if we would.

Way back in 1999, before 9/11, I had flown over Greenland en-route to England and been invited into the cockpit. Beyond the pilots and the complex dashboard, stretched the largest island in the world. It was black and white.

The brutal Arctic latitudes had carved the mountains. Its stark, black ridges were etched in white snow. There was no relief from steepness. It looked non-survivable.

Two days after my arrival in UK, Ross and I set sail on Rosemary (see Cruising Helmsman October 2019) across the English Channel to Cherbourg, France for a shakedown. The out-going tide zoomed us past Hurst Castle, completed by Henry VIII in 1544 to protect The Solent, past The Needles and into a sloppy motorsail across the English Channel. It is one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, perfect for me to practice learning the automatic identification system (AIS).

Every AIS-transmitting vessel within 15 to 20 miles appeared as a black triangle on the chartplotter. Often there were more than 50 clattered on the screen like a colony of insects. I loved it.

If I put the cursor on a triangle, it reveals the boat name; if I clicked, it opened a data page for that boat, such as name, type, length, displacement, course and speed, including chances of collision. If a triangle appeared bold-black, we