October is late in the year to be sailing. It’s cold. An icy rind is forming around the shore and a blanket of frost now rarely releases its grip on the land. We took the boat out for one of our last trips of the season. The bay we sailed into, only a short distance from Nuuk, was home to the rusty wreck of a fishing boat, resting half-submerged on its side. I could hear a waterfall nearby, but could not see it. Around the wide bay, I spotted two, three, four summer cabins in the hills.
“It’s a bit busy here isn’t it?” I asked my husband, before realising the absurdity of my comment; there was not soul around, not a boat in sight. Just us.
In the late afternoon, clear skies overhead, the temperature was falling fast, and an oily slick of ice began to appear on the sea around us. Our little family huddled under warm blankets into the evening, frozen breaths condensing above us.
Around two in the morning an ominous grinding, crunching noise woke us.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I think it’s ice” my husband replied.
We leapt up. The sea had frozen around us. We were sitting in a broad plate of thin sea ice. Every few minutes the anchor chain tightened against the drifting ice before tearing through it with a juddering crunch, and the parted ice would grind past the hull. Pacing the frigid cabin, lit by the dim light of the GPS, I could see the concern on his face. We weren’t in an ice breaker. There was noone around. Hours of dropping temperatures lay ahead before sunrise. And yet the prospect of weighing anchor in the icy darkness was unappealing. Finally, reluctantly, we concluded that the safest of two unsafe options was to move.
My husband steered the boat through the darkness, while I stood with my head out of the sunroof – or moon roof in this case – directing him through the ice toward the moonlight flickering on the open water at the mouth of the bay, eyeing the ghostly icebergs crouching in the dark. The crunching stopped as we slid out into the black water. Dressed in a freezer suit, and tied to the boat by a line, my husband climbed over our sleeping son, out of the hatch onto the icy deck, and dropped the anchor. We waited, quiet, relieved, checking that the anchor would hold.
Above us, a broad sweep of green light surged in an arc across the sky, a quivering green fire above the silhouette of dark hills, reflected across the mirror of ice we’d left behind in the bay. Now four in the morning, the lights fading, we climbed beneath the warm covers and plunged back into deep and welcome sleep.
