Sedna holds up to the Arctic’s pounding waves

MIRIAM HILL

Speaking on a cell phone from the bridge of a sailing ship carrying filmmakers and scientists documenting climate change in the North, Geoff Green describes the four-metre waves crashing on the front of the vessel.

“Whoa, we just had a huge wave crash over the bow,” he says. “One of our cameramen is in a dry suit out on the bow filming the waves coming up, and when the big waves hit they just cover him completely.”

The refurbished fishing trawler Sedna IV is working its way up the northern Quebec coast towards Nunavut. Twenty-five days into its 10,000-mile epic journey from the east coast of Canada through the Northwest Passage to Vancouver, Green, the project’s logistics coordinator, says the ship is holding up well in rough weather.

The boat is incredibly stable, he says, and not rolling as they feared she might.

“She’s as solid as can be.”

The 51-metre, three-masted sailboat left the Magdalen Islands on July 8 hoping to complete her trip in six months. It was supposed to reach Cape Dorset last Wednesday, but bad weather forced them to pass by the community.

“We’ve just been pounding away for the last 24 hours making a top speed of about three-and-a-half knots – we could run faster than that,” Green jokes.

The ship visited Salluit, Nunavik, before sailing to Coats Island and on to Salisbury Island. It was just after leaving Salisbury Island that high seas forced them to continue on to Kangiqsujuaq.

Coats Island provided two polar bear carcasses for the crew to study. One was an old bear that hunters told them probably died from a fight with another polar bear. They found blood clots in its nose.

“It was the largest skull of a polar bear that they’d ever seen and two of the guys were elders and they said they’d never seen a polar bear skull so big before,” Green says. “The other bear we saw on the beach, apparently it was shot last year by someone who was camping from Rankin and the bear was trying to get into their tent, so it was shot and killed.”

They left the island July 29 and spent the day at sea heading to Salisbury Island to film some walrus.

“It seems like the walrus are very late arriving to their haul-outs this year,” Green says. “Probably because the ice has been sticking around longer. Even at Walrus Island there were only five walrus there and on the Coats Island haul-outs there were a few more, but not as many as usual this time of year. I guess because there’s still ice for them, they won’t come ashore until the ice is all gone.”

Green says the ship has only visited one community, Salluit, so far and a few hunters mentioned things they’ve seen that are different form years past.

“Whether they’re climate-change related or not we don’t know. We need to take that information back to various experts and see what they think,” he says. “Our observations are this particular year seems to be a quote, unquote, normal year where the ice stayed in Hudson’s Bay well into July now.”

Hudson’s Strait also yielded a surprise in the form of a sperm whale.

“At first I thought it was a bowhead and then realized it had a dorsal fin,” Green says. “Once we saw it up close we knew it was a sperm because their blows are on an angle and their blowhole is very far forward on their head.”

The whale dove just in front of the ship and the animal’s flukes went high into the air.

“They’re such an awesome species,” he says.

The Sedna will wind its way east to Kangiqsujuaq where the crew hopes to film petroglyphs made by the Dorset people, before the ship makes its way up to the coast of Baffin Island. Their destination is Pond Inlet, but they expect to make several stops along the coast.

Five documentaries will be made from the journey, airing on Tele-Québec in French, in English on CBC’s The Nature of Things and on European TV in the fall of 2003.