Mountainous waves, errant icebergs and the wonder of two-hour nights – [a journalist] takes a wild ride to Nuuk. When a former winner of the Whitbread Round the World Race invites you to sail the Northwest Passage, there is only one sensible answer. No. More adventurous types would disagree, but they weren’t the ones facing frostbite on the lungs, having the yacht’s hull ripped apart by iceberg and being part of a polar bear’s picnic. However, after 40 years of ocean racing and a crash off an ocean wave that compressed his spine, Ross Field had given up professional sailing to take up something easy like high-latitude expedition cruising. Officially a pensioner, he was adamant that he wouldn’t be sailing upwind or heeling over at more than 15 degrees. Really? Truly? I’m in. Twelve-hundred miles after leaving UK, we were off the coast of Greenland. The pilot book had said to clear its lowest point, Kap Farvel (Cape Farewell) by 120 miles because within that zone is where icebergs, strong currents and huge waves meet to sort out their differences. Thanks for the tip, but staying clear had put us onto a horrible sideways angle to other huge waves. When I saw Ross’s eyes go wide as he looked over his shoulder and yelled: “Hang on!” I gripped the cockpit table for the best fairground ride I’ve ever had. Over 12 hours and in winds up to 40 knots, we had several wild rides in which a great mass lumbered up behind us, picked up Rosemary’s hard chine bum and pushed her forward like a sled on a ski slope. Every time, the ride swept us on and on chasing valleys, sliding across hills. I’m pretty sure we broke the 15-degree rule. ‘How’s this going to end?’ I’d wonder. It was always the same: a sway back to equilibrium, a steady course waiting for the next wave. The autopilot couldn’t keep up with the strong forces required from the rudder so Ross and crew member Nick shared the helm through the night. I tried to balance my time between making them drinks and food, and sleeping so when calm weather came, I could take over and let them rest. The noise… the wind that roared against the tiny bit of staysail and double-reefed mainsail, the screaming whirr of the windvane. I’ve heard people liken monster waves to freight trains and now I heard the Midnight Express roaring past my station – or not. Occasionally the brakes failed and it smashed against the hull beside me in my port aft berth, rolling me into the pillows I’d lined up against bulkhead: boomph. It sounded worse than it was; the aluminium hull was a drum. Once there was a mighty deluge from above and yelps of indignation from Ross and Nick as the cockpit filled and drained. The other noise was a history lesson on the Battle of Britain. Ross was reading a tome about it and had become an expert. I was trying to sleep but couldn’t help straining my ear muscles as Churchill, Hitler, the invention of radar and even Spitfire-versus-Messerschmitt were debated in the cockpit. The Battle of Britain finally called a ceasefire when Ross went to bed. Nick was helming when we caught another wild ride, on and on through swathes of sound. Now there was a new noise. Quiet. Regular. Swish-a-donk. Almost quiet enough that I could stay in my warm bunk. Almost pretend the noise wasn’t there. Swish-a-donk. Sod it. I pushed myself up from the sway of the boat and scrambled into my seaboots as Nick called that a jerry can had fallen over the side and was still tied on. Ross rolled out of his bassinette – the pilot berth amidships – and took the helm as Nick kitted up and unzipped the clears to the storm outside. I kept an eye on Nick so Ross didn’t have to. If this sounds awfully calm for someone who was over-anxious about polar bears just paragraphs ago, calmness was my standout impression of this passage. When I sailed across the Pacific 20 years ago, I was constantly anxious. If it was bad weather, I was scared it would get worse. If it was good weather, I knew it would get worse. Part of my new-found calm is simply how I’ve evolved in those 20 years but it was also testament to Rosemary’s 25 tonnes, 55ft of solid aluminium hull and Ross’s thorough refit. In 5000 ocean miles, we never heard that dreaded “Bang!” followed by: shitwhatwasthat? But now our force eight storm was behind us and all we had to do was trot a mere 500 miles up the coast of Greenland to its capital, Nuuk. *** Greenland is the second-largest island in the world behind Australia, so 500 miles is not far, relative to the coastline. On the advice of Denmark’s Ice Service, we stayed well out to sea to avoid huge icebergs, individually coded and known to be drifting off the coast. To the east, we could see the tops of mountains jagged against the sky that fired to burnt orange and purple hues as midnight approached. A few degrees to the south, the jags drifted in the softer reds and cool pinks of dawn. It was though as the sun were dipping and rising in different places at the same time, a phenomenon of a two-hour night. Rosemary’s wheel turned and aimed us straight for those jagged silhouettes. “What the hell are you doing?” That was Ross. “I didn’t do anything.” That was me. He pushed the autopilot to standby, brought it back on course: due North, 000. He put it back to autopilot. Within seconds, the wheel spun hard to port. As the manual for the autopilot would patiently explain, in high latitudes the magnetic dip of the Earth’s surface comes in at a shallower angle and can affect compasses. Yes, we knew that. This can affect autopilots, especially if heading due north. We didn’t know that. I hand-steered as Ross and Nick tried to convince the autopilot that north was the way to go. In the bright light of day, I spied our first iceberg, a mighty ship of crystalline perfection. The blunt black bow of a pilot whale rose to split the water of smooth-satin blue. So this was Arctic sailing. Downwind of the icebergs floated growlers that had broken away like errant children. They sparkled as our wake licked their curves. ‘What are growlers? Baby polar bears?’ a friend emailed from New Zealand after one of my reports. Cute, but these growlers had potentially even bigger bites than polar bears. Maybe enough to chomp through Rosemary’s 20mm hull or nibble at her propeller blades. But no problem, they were easy to miss. Then we met the fog. I knelt for hours on aching knees leaning forward in the pilothouse, peering into the grey air. If I saw white water breaking, I looked again. If it was still breaking, it was a growler. ‘Icebergs go away at night,’ Ross said, a Whitbread witticism, but there was no night and since Ross didn’t seem worried enough, I had to worry for both of us. He sent me below. I made him promise to keep a lookout and fell exhausted onto the saloon settee. I woke to a scream so terrible that icebergs shattered. It was me. The world had crashed on to my head. The huge Atlas in its cardboard sheath had toppled from the bookcase above me and punched my face as we came off a wave. I picked up the effing Atlas and threw it across the effing saloon. Ross leaned down from the helm to chide me but realised he had a tired growler on board and he better be careful she didn’t turn into a polar bear. An hour later, I dragged myself up to the pilothouse. Our worthy skipper was snoring at the helm. Growlers all around. Greenland excels at fog. For 24 hours, Rosemary motored through a world of monotony, mapped only by the chart-plotter. We obediently followed its black lines between the menace of islands shapeless in the fog and aimed the brown bearing line from our tiny boat icon on the chart-plotter screen down the narrow confines of the shipping channel to Nuuk. Rosemary emerged like a magician walking through a curtain. The sky was striking blue; the mountains, a drama of black and white. It was as though the sea had risen thousands of metres to float us up to the shoulders of the Southern Alps. We were on a yacht, but we were among the mountains of Greenland. *** In Ireland, Rosemary’s bare aluminium hull had been a rebel among the fibreglass hulls of recreational sailing; in Nuuk Harbour she was a fully patched member of the gang. In the following days more bare-aluminium expedition yachts arrived wearing their wind vanes and jerry cans like campaign medals. One was badly wounded – she had cut the corner at Kap Farvel. I loved the solid scruffiness of Nuuk’s fishing fleet. Fishing boats the world over are staunch and dependable but Greenland’s carvel planked fishing boats were thicker than most and munch growlers for breakfast. Some of the fishing boats were small ships and, naïve soul that I am, I didn’t realise these included whaling ships. Until I figured that out, I loved them. I was brought up on fishing boats; fish guts and diesel smell like love and integrity to me. The mountains may have been pristine, but litter straddled everywhere and black ravens ravaged rubbish sacks like extras in an Agatha Christie movie. Within a week, the rustic charm would wear thin but for now it was wonderfully intrepid to tie up to a Polish yacht which was tied up to an Italian ketch which was tied up to a rusty, oily crane barge. ‘Six fat men and three pretty girls,’ the Pole boomed, accurately describing himself in his tracksuit. He gulped his beer. He told us that checking in would be a two-hour process between customs, police… customs, police. I climbed up to the barge, tried to avoid the puddles on its deck that shimmered with diesel and, from its stern, stretched out my foot to hook into the ladder to the wharf. The water a metre beneath my feet was 4.5°C – an effective health and safety regime. When you know you’ll be a human ice block if you fall in, you don’t. Nuuk’s population is 16,500 of the 70,000 country’s total. We walked into town: sparse, gravelled. A dismal cemetery of crooked white crosses. I wondered how they bury their dead in winter. Do they wait for summer? Random flights of steps climbed rocks on the hillsides, ready to get people home during the dark of winter’s snows. It was mid-summer but there were few blades of grass: more than half of Greenland is green, but only when it is written down. Large, Inuit-style sculptures of igloo people and polar bears hulked at a wide plaza where modern buildings sat among neglected blocks of accommodation. Entrances to shop fronts featured the metal grids of ski lodges and even the babies’ prams were like all-terrain vehicles. The people of Inuit descent walked bow-legged like hunters; the Greenlanders, descended from Vikings, had lighter skin and softer features but were mostly dark-haired. I had expected more blonds, reflecting the guardianship of Denmark. The policeman was tall, blond and film-star handsome. He flicked casually through our passports, thumped a stamp on each and handed them back. ‘Do we have to see Customs?’ Ross asked. ‘Do you have anything to declare? Weapons?’ ‘No.’ The policeman shrugged. It takes two hours to clear Poles; five minutes to clear New Zealanders. Local knowledge, he said, was that the Northwest Passage would not open this year. We didn’t know that either.