The self-sufficient world of an icebreaker

SARA MINOGUE

From the shores of Iqaluit, the Coast Guard ship the Terry Fox looks like a tiny floating toy, but up close, the icebreaker is an incredible 88 metres long and contains a floating community, complete with its own time zone.

The ship – with its 24 officers and crew – arrived in Frobisher Bay on June 26, in time to escort the first fuel ship into Iqaluit.

Visitors arrive by an inflatable orange FRC boat – short for “fast rescue craft” – and are saved from climbing a wobbly rope ladder by a hydraulic lift system which gently lifts the tiny craft up the side of the mother ship.

The ship’s main deck is almost 18 metres wide: large enough to accommodate a helicopter. The stern of the ship can easily fit two small tractors destined for a community in the North Baffin.

Below decks, a giant reel holds a 1.5 km cable towrope, because the Terry Fox is also one of North America’s largest tugboats.

The Terry Fox is completely self-sufficient, carrying its own food and fuel supplies. The ship carries up to 42 cubic metres of water, and has two desalination systems, which use waste heat from the ship to filter fresh water out of the ocean, though these mechanisms aren’t turned on when the ship is anchored near a community that leaks sewage into the sea.

The icebreaker is one of five Coast Guard icebreakers that will tour the Arctic this summer.

“Our first mandate is to help the re-supply of northern communities,” says Jean Ouellet, the Canadian Coast Guard’s arctic specialist.

That was a fairly easy task this year. Hudson Bay, Ungava Bay and the Hudson Strait were all free of ice by August 2, something Ouellet described as “very unusual” compared to previous years.

When there is ice to be found, the powerful Terry Fox uses its 24,000 horsepower engine to ram itself on top of the ice. The weight of the ship can press through ice up to six feet thick, creating shipping lanes for regular commercial freighters.

For more delicate maneuvers, the ship relies on a bubbler system, which shoots air out of pipes laid into the ship’s body just below the surface. This air reduces friction between the ship and the ice, and can be adjusted to help the ship make tight turns in one direction or another.

From Iqaluit, the ship will head North to Nanisivik, Nunavut’s only deep water port, located at the former mine site just outside of Arctic Bay. There, it will load up on goods already delivered by commercial ships before rounding round the top of Baffin Island and delivering these goods through the Northwest Passage to Kugaaruk – crossing a route that is often too full of ice for commercial ships to travel.

After unloading its goods, the Terry Fox will remain in Kugaaruk for the first three weeks of September before heading back to Frobisher Bay, where it will remain until Nov. 15.

Along the way, the icebreaker will also help out with search-and-rescues, such as the recent assistance they provided when the Ushuaia got stuck on a sandbar in the Koksoak River near Kuujjuaq.

During their five-week stints on board, crew members live and dine in the tower of the ship, where five stories of stairs provide a daily workout.

Officers and crew come from across Canada, but all are based in Dartmouth, N. S., the ship’s home port. They include a nurse, who sometimes travels with the ship through dangerous conditions.

Shifts are 12-hours long, leaving little time to make use of the small gym, a lounge equipped with satellite television and a small library, and the satellite Internet connections that each crew member may access computers their cabins.

The chefs produce a large dinner every day at 4:30 p.m. – Atlantic Daylight Time, as the crew prefers not to adjust time zones as frequently as they cross them – which they eat in a mess hall that resembles a small-town diner.