First day on Greenland

July 15th at 1800 local time we sail our way, in between icebergs into Mikisfjord getting ready for our first stop on Greenland. We had read that at the end of this fjord, there had been done some surveying after minerals, and for fun we wanted to see if we could fine some gold for our self.

As I wrote in the last post, there are almost zero depth plotting done on the east coast. If there are any they are in the 50 to 400-meter spectre, not really to any help for us. So, as we were crawling our way in the fjord, we kept a close eye on the depth-finder. We decided, when we read less than twenty meters, we would put her in neutral and just drift forward just to keep it safe otherwise we would move at around three knots.

We got deeper and deeper into the fjord and had depth reading at around 40-60 meters, when suddenly, in only about twenty meters distance it went to two meters deep and we hit bottom and were stuck. We were stuck in a lot of fine sediments that had kind of a sucking effect, making it impossible to reverse out. We checked the tide-table and we were almost at hightide, not a good situation. We had to act quickly, if not, when the tide went out, the boat would lay on its side.

We dropped the dinghy in the water and mounted the engine on it, thinking we could drag the anchors out behind the boat, and with help of the two hydraulic genoa winches we could maybe get her unstuck before the water disappeared beneath us.

We had kept a close eye on the waterline of the boat, to see if the water was going down and how fast. When we were going for the anchors Bent noticed that water had gone up 5cm. We decided to try and reverse out one more time before we started with the anchors. With the 40hp dinghy and the main engine in the boat, we manage to get unstuck. I think we can say we dodged a bullet this time.

After this, not so fun incident, we moved to the other side of the fjord and dropped the anchor at a more comfortable depth. We all then jumped in the dinghy to set foot on Greenland for the first time on this trip. That turned out to be harder then expected, since there were few places that deep enough, so the dinghy still would be afloat because of the rapidly sinking water. But at last we found a spot, so we at least could get ashore for a couple of minutes. All in all an eventful first day on Greenland.