The North West Passage - Bagan's 2009 transit
by Scott Bowlen, Ketchikan Daily/Sail-World on 15 Jan 2010
Bagan and Sprague Theobald SW
Of the 23 vessels, including a couple of ships and nine yachts, that made it successfully through the North West Passage high over Canada this year, one was operated by an adventure film maker, Sprague Theobald, an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker. Theobald used his motor vessel Bagan as a floating editing facility, and during the passage produced his latest film called, believe it or not, 'The North West Passage'.
The story of his making of the film is a story in itself. When Theobald started the voyage in Bagan, a Nordhavn 57, he already knew something about sea ice.
Part of his pre-voyage research had focused on the early explorers whose ships got trapped in ice as they searched for an open-water link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans above the oft-frozen top of North America.
And he knew Bagan would encounter ice during the planned 8,500-mile traverse of the Northwest Passage trip that began June 16 in Newport, RI, and would conclude in Washington state.
What he wasn’t prepared for was the nerve-racking noise produced by huge sheets of shifting, colliding sea ice.
“The sound was horrific,” Theobald said Oct. 26 while talking with the Daily News aboard Bagan at Ketchikan’s Bar Harbor.
“I thought it was the hull — it’s that grinding, cracking noise (like) you’d think fiberglass would sound like if it was breaking,” he said.
Crewmembers headed belowdecks to check Bagan’s hull ribbing and lay-up.
No damage.
“It finally dawned on me, this
is the ice that’s making all that noise,” Theobald said.
But now the ice had Bagan in its grip, and both ice and boat were moving toward a rock-strewn shore.
“It looked like the only outcome of this was going to be very ugly,” he said.
Two years earlier, Theobald had begun planning for a transit of the Northwest Passage. That year, 2007, was the first year since at least 1978 that late-summer reductions in sea ice had rendered the Northwest Passage completely navigable, according to the European Space Agency.
The situation sparked interest among commercial shippers about the possibility of sending cargo through the Northwest Passage, shaving thousands of miles from the sea trade routes between Asia and Europe.
Indeed, it was the potential for reducing sailing time (and cost) that helped prompt the early explorers to search for a northern route. The ever-present ice proved an almost insurmountable barrier, however, and it wasn’t until 1906 that Norwegian explorer Roald Amundson became the first to navigate the Northwest Passage.
The fact that the Northwest Passage was navigable again also caught the attention of Theobald, who has combined his love of oceangoing adventure with a career in writing, television and filmmaking.
He said about 50 percent of his interest in the Northwest Passage was for the
adventure. “But 50 — maybe just a little more than 50 percent — was if I could get a good documentary out of it,” he said.
He began preparing his boat in mid-2008. Nordhavn makes “remarkably strong” offshore trawlers, Theobald said.
He went through every system on the vessel, upgrading communications and heating gear in particular, and replacing anything else that looked even slightly suspicious. Then, he committed to hiring crew, including Capt. Clinton Bolton and First Mate Dominique Tanton — Theobald’s stepdaughter.
Bagan left Newport, RI on June 16 with Theobald, Bolton, Tanton and Ted Croy aboard. Joining the crew later were Theobald’s son, Sefton Theobald; master diver Greg DeAscentis; and cameraman Ulli Bonnekamp (Croy and Bonnekamp were aboard
early in the trip, but not in the Northwest Passage itself).
Bagan headed north to Newfoundland and on to Greenland’s Disko Bay before cutting across Baffin Bay to Lancaster Sound.
There, Bagan entered the 1,800-mile Northwest Passage July 31, and the crew started work on photography and filming.
For most areas of the world nowadays, nautical charts are filled with scores of numbers indicating depths, and most hazards are clearly marked.
That’s not the case for much of the Northwest Passage.
“Blank, except for one little line that was done in 1850,” Theobald said.
Lack of chart soundings made Theobald think better of visiting an island where an ill-fated expedition is believed to have become icebound in the 1840s.
If Bagan got into trouble, “it’s not like there’s Sea Tow or somebody around to come and get you,” Theobald said. “You were on your own.”
As they traveled through Canada’s Arctic Archipelago, the Bagan crew was downloading the Canadian Ice Service’s daily maps that rate the varying thickness of sea ice in the region, trying to discern where and how fast the ice was melting.
Based on a lead in the ice on an Ice Service map, they headed toward a small Inuit community called Gjoa Haven on King William Island.
On Aug. 15, Theobald blogged that the crew hoped they were just two days out of Gjoa Haven.
The ice intervened.
Bagan’s progress was reduced to a crawl, its crew looking for any leads in the surrounding ice through which the boat could proceed.
“We really had to ask the unthinkable of the boat, and turn her into a tug and a battering ram,” Theobald said.
A crewmember would sit high on the boat’s radar arch, calling out directions for promising leads. Other crew would stand on the bow and stern with boat hooks, pushing ice away.
“Making our way through this solid ice barrier was beyond nerve-racking in that the protestations from the ice were heard in the forms of shrieks, screeches, explosions and deep powerful shudders,” Theobald wrote in the trip’s blog.
“If any of the ice bits found their way to our exposed stabilizers, propeller or rudder the potential damage could have bordered on the unthinkable. Time and again we’d fight for 500 yards, only to have it taken from us at the last minute, finding that the lead ahead had closed in the 10 minutes we’d been trying to get to it.”
They’d traveled only 18 miles in 17 hours. And they were now trapped.
“Not being able to move forward or backward, we shut down the engine and anchored onto a floe, one and a half miles from shore,” he wrote.
The next morning found them just one-half-mile from shore and moving slowly closer.
They received an e-mail from a boat that was icebound, about 60 miles away. The Canadian Coast Guard had sent an icebreaker to free the other boat from the ice’s grip.
“That really wasn’t going to be an option for us,” Theobald said. “Because we got ourselves into that mess and I didn’t want to ask Canada to spend a lot of money to get us out.”
They decided to try to push their way out. But they made three miles before anchoring again on an ice floe.
“It was rough,” he said. “We were all pretty beat and exhausted at the end of it — especially with no guaranteed outcome. It’s not like, ‘Well, if we fight through this, the guidebooks say you reach the end of the ice and you’re free.”’
The next morning revealed that they had drifted seven miles in the right direction.
“By three that afternoon we had broken our way clear into thinner and less dense ice packs,” wrote Theobald, who was impressed with the Nordhavn’s toughness.
“Some of the hits we took on the ice, there was no creaking and groaning from the boat. The ice hit and sort of bounced off,” he said.
They reached Gjoa Haven at 2:30 a.m. the next day.
“Never have I been so glad to hear the engine shut down,” he wrote.
After a pleasant visit in Gjoa Haven, Bagan transited Mclintock Bay en route to a community at Cambridge Bay.
From Cambridge Bay, Bagan continued west through the Coronation and Amundsen gulfs before exiting the Northwest Passage at 130 degrees west longitude.
The crew celebrated, but they knew there was still about 2,000 miles to go through some famously nasty waters, including the Chukchi and Bering seas.
They got lucky with great weather in the Bering Sea, but they got slammed when they came through the Aleutians and into the Gulf of Alaska.
“It really, really piped up,” Theobald said. “We had our hands full until we got to Sitka.”
Capt. Bolton had departed the crew at Nome. DeAscentis stayed on through Sitka.
Bagan departed Sitka en route to Ketchikan in early October, with just Theobald and his three family members aboard.
But the ice wasn’t done with Bagan quite yet.
The boat was entering Wrangell Narrows when a small berg of glacier ice appeared out of the fog.
“It was ... maybe about the size of a freezer trunk,” he said. “And I saw it and I was just, ‘AAHHH. NOOO! No more ice!”’
Bagan cleared the berg and arrived safely in Ketchikan on Oct. 9.
It continued south toward Seattle on Oct. 27, traveling slowly to try (somewhat unsuccessfully) to coincide the rest of the voyage with pockets of good weather.
While still in Ketchikan, Theobald wasn’t certain about when the documentary resulting from the voyage would be finished, or how it would be distributed.
“If I’m doing it on my own, which I kind of am leaning toward, it will probably be finished by the end of the summer, so I would be hoping to sell it for the fall, or the next spring,” he said.
Theobald said the Northwest Passage experience really opened his eyes about the toughness of the 19th century sailors who explored the Northwest Passage area, some of whom got stuck there in the ice.
“That sailing breed then was a different breed,” Theobald said. “But we had GPS, electronic charts, (satellite) phones, e-mail, could download weather reports — and when we were locked in the ice, there was a huge amount of terror involved.
“Those guys, who were stuck up there for two years with nothing, I mean, they were supermen in that regard. They would come back, and if not do it again, they would go off to do (Cape) Horn or something,” he said.
So, what about Theobald? Would he do it again?
Well, maybe as a crewman aboard someone else’s boat, he said.
“You know, I loved every minute of it, but not to be repeated,” said Theobald. “I would never take my boat above Glacier Bay again. I’m a little filled up with ice at this point — but I’m not regretting a single minute of it.”
Theobald may not be doing the North West Passage again, but he has just invested in an even bigger Nordhavn, a Nordhavn 63, which will give him more room for editing and still be able to mount his adventurous voyage expeditions. To learn more about 'Hole in the Wall' Productions - visit the http://hitwproductions.com/!website
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