Row, row, row your boat — to the Arctic islands

RANDY BOSWELL
CANWEST NEWS SERVICE

A British adventurer has announced plans to lead a 700-km rowboat expedition through Canada’s Arctic islands to the North Magnetic Pole, a proposed voyage described as “one of the world’s last great firsts” in polar exploration.

Scottish sailor Jock Wishart, who led a record-setting, 74-day circumnavigation of the Earth in a powerboat in 1998, says he’ll captain a six-person crew on the August 2011 journey through ice-choked waters between Resolute and the magnetic pole — a moving target that is currently located north of Nunavut’s Ellef Ringnes Island.

“It has only become possible to consider an attempt like this in recent years due to the increase in seasonal ice melt,” Wishart’s “Row to the Pole” website stated this week, adding that the sailors “will face dramatic, icebound coastlines and shifting sea-ice barriers on their voyage and their haul of the boat over land, which is necessary to complete the voyage.”

The expedition is being sponsored by Scottish whisky maker Old Pulteney.

Like the participants of other recent Arctic quests, the Row to the Pole adventurers will post daily web updates on their progress and gather environmental information along the way to document the region’s changing ice conditions.

The team’s target, the North Magnetic Pole, migrates according to fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field. In recent years, it has been moving away from Canadian territory toward the central Arctic Ocean.

In December, a French scientist reported that the magnetic pole was currently heading in a northeast direction at a pace of about 64 km a year, possibly bound for Russian territory within decades.

Wishart, 58, drew international attention 12 years ago after leading a 41,800-km, around-the-world boating expedition that broke the powered-vessel circumnavigation record of 83 days set in 1960 by the USS Triton submarine.

He also organized a 2005 “polar race” involving 16 adventurers who trekked 560 kilometres north from Resolute Bay

Wishart, who claims to be a descendant of Scottish poet Robert Burns, says the 2011 expedition will be the first polar voyage to rely largely on rowing since 1916, when British explorer Ernest Shackleton and his stranded crew used lifeboats to reach safety after the loss of the Endurance, ill-fated flagship of an Antarctic expedition.

In issuing a call for other adventurers to bid for a spot on his Row to the Pole team, Wishart revived Shackleton’s famous pitch for participants: “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful.”

Wishart said it felt “incredible,” after three years of planning, “to be unveiling this expedition today and to begin the intense process of work and training that now lies before us to prepare for what will be the greatest challenge of my life.”