By Corey Sandler

After two days in Svalbard, the last significant populated area short of the North Pole, we sailed out of Longyearbyen on the Adventfjorden and turned south.

(If you could somehow shrink yourself down to subatomic size and perch on the exact point of the geographic North Pole, every direction you face is south. But once you leave, the ordinary rules of navigation apply.)

And so we set sail slightly west of south through the Barents Sea to the island nation of Iceland. The trip was relatively smooth, and after two days we were ready to exit the Arctic Circle for the first time in more than a week.

Our goal was Isafjörður on the remote west coast of Iceland. Almost everywhere in Iceland other than the capital region of Reykjavik is remote; some are more remote than others. The West Fjords of Iceland are in a corner that is off the famed Ring Road.

The seasons of Iceland can perhaps be described as Winter and Not-Winter.

Isafjörður means Ice Fjord. Is that enough of a hint?

The west side of Iceland faces Greenland, divided by the Denmark Strait which is what they call it in Greenland.

Denmark is far away, but still politically linked to Greenland. Just to make things even more confusing, in Iceland they generally refer to the stretch of water as the Greenland Strait.

I’ve been to Isafjörður many times, but as I thought about it, never quite this early in the year.

The night before our scheduled arrival, we began to see pieces of ice in the water. Scientists classify ice in the sea thusly:

• Growlers, small chunks less than 5 meters or 16 feet in length;

• Bergy Bits, bigger pieces 16 feet to 165 feet in length, and

• Icebergs, ice cubes larger than bergy bits, some of them running to hundreds of feet in length.

It was, of course, a very large iceberg–almost certain broken off from Greenland–that met up with the S.S. Titanic near midnight on the night of April 14, 1912 and I trust you know that was not a happy ending for the souls aboard.

The difference between then and now include the fact that we have satellites, aircraft spotters, radar, and the internet. Our captain and the officers on the navigational bridge were carefully studying the conditions.

And though it was most definitely not in my job description, I was also studying the reports for for days ahead of our intended entrance in the Denmark/Greenland Strait.

So we passed by the growlers, and then by late afternoon we began to see bergy bits. And the wind began to pick up, blowing from the south which meant that the ice was moving toward us.

Modern ships like ours have sophisticated television systems that include a map that shows the vessel’s location and course. Watching that screen–or just looking out the windows–or indeed, just tuning yourself to the inertial movement of the ship told us something notable happened. We suddenly made a wide but determined U-turn in the sea.

Soon afterward, the captain came on the speaker system to tell us that the growlers and bergy bits were being followed by icebergs. And also, the ice shelf extending off the east coast of Greenland was getting a bit close for comfort.

The good news was that we were safe and in good hands but our scheduled call at Isafjörður was now off the books. After a few hours the wind calmed down and we successfully negotiated our passage to the intended final call of this cruise, the capital city of Reykjavik.

Out of the ice and off the ship for the day I made an unplanned circumnavigation of parts of the capital city not often visited by outsiders. Eventually I made my way back to the harbor and found my bearings to locate our ship.

On the outskirts of town is the handsome Harpa, a concert hall and conference center in the Austurhöfn district. It was originally intended as a major banking, shopping, and housing center. Construction came to a screeching halt in 2008 with the onset of the Icelandic financial collapse.

The concert hall was finally completed in 2011, and more recently–as Iceland has once again begun to boom–other elements of the building have been completed.

My favorite part is the view from within, looking out the window wall.

Dodging the Ice

I made it back to the ship and prepared to sail the final leg of this set of voyages. We had a mostly uneventful trip back around Iceland, headed for the top of the island nation and once again through the Denmark Strait.

Our visit to Akureyri, Iceland brought us back to the indistinct diving line between Winter and Not Winter; it was reasonably warm but there was still snow up on the hills, and our ship was shrouded in indecisive fog in the early morning.

That evening we set sail and the next morning we successfully made it to Isafjörður. Ahead lay the Denmark Strait.

Our plans for Greenland called for a transit of the Prince Christian Sound which cuts the southeast corner of that nation; the northern side of the sound marks the edge of the huge ice sheet that covers three-quarters of the entire country, the only permanent (for now) ice sheet outside of Antarctica.

From there we were due to call at two small communities on the southern edge: Nanortalik and Qaqortaq. These are not place most people get to visit; I do, but I guess I do not qualify as “most people.”

But I could see on the online weather and ice reports that growlers, berg bits, and icebergs were carpeting the sea.

And so we skipped the sound and the two small villages…but our captain and the special ice pilots we had on board consulted the charts, worked the radios, and came up with Plan C.

Sunday morning we rounded the bottom of Greenland and proceeded up the west coast just a bit to an even-less visited place called Paamiut, home to about 1,300 brave and mostly isolated souls and not at all a regular port of call for cruise ships.

Once again, the clue lay in the meaning of the name. Paamiut means “Those who Reside by the Mouth (of the fiord)” in  Kalaallisut or Western Greenlandic.

There was no dock for us, but that was beside the point. The fact that the town was near the outside reaches of the fjord meant that our ship did not have to leave the open ocean. That’s important because there was little chance that our ship might become embayed, trapped in a harbor because wind or tides had moved icebergs across our exit route.

At the end of the day we made a careful exit from Paamiut and moved to Atlantic Canada. A planned stop at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland had to be scrapped; icebergs once again. But we enjoyed a glorious day in handsome Halifax, and a day later made a triumphant procession up the Hudson River to our dock on the west side of Manhattan.

As you read these words, we are preparing for our next set of voyages, an unusual routing from Montreal to Los Angeles. We’ll head south, then west to pass through the Panama Canal, and then north to California. Forecast for icebergs: slim to zero.

All text and photos by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you want to obtain a copy of one of my photographs for personal or commercial use, please contact me using the link on this page.

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