Leg four - Iceland to Greenland

On the morning of July 14th, we left the civilization of Iceland and headed for the open ocean. This was going to be the longest ocean passage so far on our trip at around 250nm nonstop. The weather forecasted was clear skies and some breeze from NNE. Catrine whipped up some fresh bread on the way out from Iceland, really appreciated by the crew.

We rolled out the genoa a motorsailed NW, but it didn’t take long before someone yelled iceberg ahead. We hadn’t even sailed half the way, only 90nm from Iceland we encounter one.

And after that they appeared one after another, making the day fly by.

Entering the first night, we were happy that the patch of icebergs seemed to stop. We were quite far north so it didn’t get that dark during the night, we couldn’t get the icebergs on the radar before 2nm ahead of us, and only the large icebergs. Leaving the small ones to be spotted by eye.

Getting into the next morning, the wind had dropped all the way down and the ocean turned into a mirror. We had heard a lot of stories on how the Danmarkstrait, the ocean between Iceland and Greenland, could be an unpleasant place to be. Guess we were lucky, able to spot land 100nm of the coast. With the sun rising in the horizon.

Since we must do these types expeditions during our summer holiday, we enter Greenland very early in the season. One of the downsides from this, is that there are usually a lot of drift-ice laying as a belt around the coast. We have made a deal with the Norwegian metrological institute, that they will send us icecharts every day on email, so we can get them down over the satellite. They showed almost no drift-ice where we would enter Greenland. So, when we arrived at the coast, there where almost no drift ice, but a lot of icebergs and smaller pieces of ice that we had to navigate thru.

Icechart for the day of arrival

Our first stop on Greenland was going to be Mikisfjord. A place described as a nice place to anchor with decent protection form the elements. We navigated between icebergs and floating chunks towards the bottom of the fjord, and on east Greenland, there are simply no navigational charts with decent depth plots. As we would find out the hard way. But more about that in the next post.