Tug inspection keeps Amundsen’s Maud in Nunavut for another year

This is how the Maud looked last September just before freeze-up in Cambridge Bay. (FILE PHOTO)

Here’s the Tandberg Polar tugboat pulling the custom-designed pontoon barge on which the Maud Returns Home project wants to tow back the Maud from Nunavut to Norway. (PHOTO COURTESY OF MAUD RETURNS HOME)

ANDREA HILL

KIRKENES, NORWAY — The famous Norwegian sailing vessel that sank off Cambridge Bay more than 80 years ago won’t be leaving Nunavut for Norway in 2013.

That’s the latest from Jan Wanggaard, head of the Maud Returns Home project, who has spent the last couple of years planning an operation to lift the Maud, once sailed by the Norwegian polar explorer, off the seabed and tow it 7,000 kilometres back to Norway.

Wanggaard was supposed to head to Nunavut this June to begin the process, but announced June 3 in Norway that plans have been pushed back a year because of the long wait to get his newly-purchased tugboat, the Tandberg Polar, inspected by Norwegian shipping authorities.

“It’s not like we can push this back three or four months,” Wanggaard said. “There’s a very short period during the year when you can go.”

Cambridge Bay, where the ship, known locally as the Baymaud, sank in its mooring in 1930 after Amundsen tried unsuccessfully to sail her to the North Pole, remains iced-in 10 months of the year.

So, to get into the bay and raise the ship, Wanggaard says his crew must leave Norway in June to sail for Greenland and up the Davis Strait.

His team must then wait for drift ice to melt before pushing ahead to Cambridge Bay, which he expects they would reach in early August.

The team would then spend up to three weeks raising and securing the ship to a custom-built pontoon barge before embarking on the slow journey back to Greenland for the winter.

But the journey now won’t start until 2014.

Although the delay in plans is unfortunate, Wanggaard said, neither he nor the Norwegian-based Tandberg investment company financing the operation are concerned.

“We are not in a hurry,” he said. “We feel that we would be much more confident about every detail in this expedition if we actually wait until next year.”

Wanggaard said the delay has nothing to do with concerns about the ship’s ability to survive being lifted from the seabed and taken on an Atlantic voyage — something critics have been speculating about since the Maud Returns Home project was launched.

“A lot of people who don’t know the technical state of the ship and who look at the project from the outside say ‘oh, the ship will fall apart completely,'” Wanggaard said. “But this ship was built stronger than any other ship in the world because it was made to take the strain of the ice.”

“It was technically in a very good state when it sank and it’s been put into a freezer more or less so it’s been conserved in a very good way,” he added.

Last November, when Wanggaard visited Cambridge Bay to see the Maud in winter, he said the oak used to build the ship seemed to be in prime condition and made to withstand cold temperatures.

Once the ship returns to Vollen, Norway, where it was first launched — likely now not until 2015 — a protective, ultra-modern building will be constructed around it and the whole thing will be turned into a museum.

Wanggaard says such an attraction should prove popular in the area because Amundsen, who was the first to sail the Northwest Passage in 1906 and the first to reach the South Pole in 1911, became a national hero at a time when Norway gained independence from Sweden and was searching for a national identity.

“This is a boat which has a very strong link to our national history,” Wanggaard says. “We will build a house around it and it will stay there for centuries.”

In March 2012, Canada’s cultural property export review board directed the Border Services Agency to issue an export permit to the Maud Returns Home project.

The board said in its decision that “the Maud is of outstanding significance to Canada, but that its loss would not significantly diminish the national heritage.”

Andrea Hill, a Canadian recipient of a Norwegian High North Journalism award, is working at the Barents Observer, an internet news service, in Kirkenes, Norway