Questions about Sailing in the High Latitudes

Winter Boat Storage in the North (2007)

Question: We are thinking of buying a 70', 55 ton, steel motorsailer which we want to fix up and cruise on for 4 months of the year. We would be starting out on the east coast of the US and are contemplating going via Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Greenland to Northern Europe. We would have to leave the boat in dry storage for the winters. Do you know if any of these northern areas could accommodate this?
 

Answer: Most yards that can handle a boat the size of yours in the north will be fishing boat yards and will not be used to dealing with sailboats—with all that entails! As for Northern Europe, boats are generally smaller in size and so most facilities don’t cater to larger boats (we even had difficulty finding facilities in N Norway to haul Morgan’s Cloud at 56’ and 52,000lbs), though I’m sure there are exceptions around the major northern population centres of Oslo, Copenhagen and Stockholm, where we have not been.

We have a few ideas for winter storage in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland but can’t say for sure, without doing further research, if they would be able to handle your size of boat. We don’t have any further contact information on any of these places nor have we been hauled at any of these yards:

Nova Scotia—Lunenburg Foundry in Lunenburg and Sampsons Boatyard in Isle Madame, Cape Breton are two places that might have large enough lifts.
Newfoundland—there are a number of Marine Service Centers throughout Newfoundland that have travel lifts to deal with large fishing vessels. Fermeuse and Fortune are two places where we are pretty sure the lifts are large enough for your boat.

As for Norway, we have a section on ‘Leaving Your Boat in Norway Over the Winter’ in the Norwegian Cruising Guide, see www.norwegiancruisingguide.com to purchase the Guide; however, I do know that there are very few, if any, places that can handle a boat your size outside of the Oslo and West Coast of Sweden area.
 

Circumnavigation of Scandinavia via the White Sea (2005)

Question: Do you know if it's possible to circumnavigate Scandinavia via Holland, the Baltic Sea, St. Petersburg, the Belomorsk Canal, the White Sea, the Norwegian Coast, returning to Holland?

Answer: It has been done. I think the UK Cruising Association did a cruise in company that way some years ago. The tricky bit is the Russian canal. From what I understand it is important to have a Russian with you who can manage things and it is better if several boats travel in company. I understand that that part of Russia can still be pretty wild, with graft (bribes) and stealing. The rest of the cruise should be fairly straight forward.
 

Polar Bears (2005)

Question: How seriously do I need to take the threat of polar bears in the Arctic?

Answer: I have never hunted and don’t like guns much, but the threat is real. On our Greenland, Baffin Island and Labrador trips I have always been a bit skeptical and lackadaisical—carrying a gun, but unloaded; walking into broken ground without thinking; etc. No more. We were wandering around Barentsburg, Svalbard (Spitsbergen) in the summer of 2002 unarmed and discovered that the very next day a bear was on the very floating dock that we were tied to—a real wake up call—and this right in the middle of a Russian mining town. You need to carry a heavy caliber weapon, and equally important, have practiced with it. A friend of ours, a trapper who has lived in the wilderness of Svalbard (Spitsbergen) for 25 years, never ventures more than 5 meters from his front door without a gun. He also says that there is no such thing as a safe polar bear. They are very unpredictable and can go from merely curious to aggressive with no warning.

In the hope of being able to scare a bear so we will not have to shoot, we also carry a flare pistol with thunder flash loads, and hand thrown thunder flashes. I think these last may be the most useful since the flare pistol is very inaccurate and the charges bounce before exploding so that there is a real risk of having the charge go off behind the bear, making a bad situation worse.

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