Moving south and on the hunt for freshwater

After an exciting start to our summer on Greenland, with the polar bear encounter, we sat on the edge of our seats to see what’s going to happen next. So, after a slow morning on July 18th, we left Kraemer OE to sail across the fjord to look at the glacier.

When sailing away from civilization for as long as we are going to do, you are constantly looking for opportunities to top of the freshwater tanks. We have a capacity of 4000 litres but since everything onboard is on a closed system, meaning we don’t use saltwater for anything, even the toilets, we use around 50 litres per person, per day. Currently, we are six people onboard, so we use 300 litres a day. We do have a water-maker onboard, but it’s a pain to do the conservation on it when the trip is over, so we will only use it, if we don’t have any other choice.

So, when we spotted a large flat iceberg with a big pool of melting water in it we grabbed the opportunity. As a bonus, it was the perfect vantagepoint to look at the glacier.

With some metal bars hammered into the ice to have something to tie of to, it made for a great makeshift dock.

We have a 220v submergible water pump onboard, that came in really handy for transferring water from the iceberg to the boat.

While we were waiting to transfer around 1000 litres of fresh iceberg water into our tanks, we decided to have some fun and make a formal dining experience on the iceberg.

When the water transfer was done, we left our makeshift marine/restaurant and sailed south towards Aputiteq, which is an old abandon weather station. On our way there we came across what we named the “blue eye”. A huge iceberg, with an intense blue cave.

After admiring this iceberg for a while, we kept on going. We sailed along the coast into denser and denser patches of iceberg and growlers and the progress towards Aputiteq slowed down.

But finally, after a very long day and many hours in the ice we could sail into Aputiteq.