Warship stands on guard for Arctic fish

JOHN THOMPSON

Captain John Newton sleeps with one eye open inside his small cabin, a tight space where radio equipment and computer monitors crowd his bunk. No matter what hour, he’s often asked for directions from his crew as HMCS Fredericton floats through the icy waters of the eastern Arctic.

“It’s just like having a cranky kid,” he says.

Make that a 4,750 tonne toddler, armed to the teeth with artillery, missiles and torpedoes. The frigate may be finishing up a fishing surveillance patrol through Davis Straight and along Lancaster Sound, but it’s prepared to re-deploy at a minute’s notice elsewhere.

“Remember, I’m the captain of a warship.”

The ship dropped anchor off Iqaluit Sept. 5, as it traced the eastern coast of Baffin Island on its way back to port in Halifax. For most of the 200-odd crew, the tour was their first visit to the Arctic.

Aboard the bridge, Cpl. Rick Treen had completed 21 years of service just a day earlier. During that time he toured as far as Venezuela, the British isles and the coast of Iceland, but until recently had never visited Canada’s north.

“It’s like being in another world, but you’re closer to your country than before. It humbles you,” he says.

In contrast, Newton first visited the eastern Arctic when he was only 14, after his father, also a naval officer, brought him aboard a tanker. This year he exchanged memories with Inuit in Pond Inlet and Clyde River as the Fredericton stopped to refuel and let residents aboard.

An iceberg bearing down on the vessel cut their visit to Pond Inlet short, however. The crew encountered an unexpected amount of ice in the Davis Straight for this time of year, remnants from the old ice pack.

For the two officers on lookout, small hunks of ice broken free from larger icebergs, called “growlers,” glow bright white against a sea of green through their night-vision goggles. Inside the bridge, radar monitors, known as “sea chickens,” track ice at both one mile and 10 miles away. And far above, satellites beam down updated information.

The ship is just a small part of the collective eyes and ears used to monitor northern waters. Every second day an Aurora aircraft flew overhead. They also remained in contact with the Canadian coast guard, and their Danish naval counterparts.

The biggest challenge during their operation was locating the small number of fishing vessels scattered across huge distances. When patrolling the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, most vessels are within a few hours reach. In contrast, a “fleet” in northern waters only consists of a few ships, with the next group several days away.

Newton didn’t have any serious infractions to report, and no Greenlandic vessels were found fishing in Canadian waters.

“We didn’t come up here to hunt down anyone doing anything manifestly bad,” he says. “If there’s one message you take away from me, it’s how much respect I have for these people.”

The ship also refueled in Nuuk, Greenland, where they pulled up in the deep-water port near the HMDS Vaedderen, the Danish vessel that periodically visits Hans Island. The warm reception they enjoyed puts the lie to media-fueled controversies over the disputed territory, he said.

“Can you say NATO allies and circumpolar neighbours?” he asked. “If they really thought that we were up there challenging their sovereignty, we wouldn’t be up there taking their fuel.”

Newton spends hours each day in his cabin, plotting the ship’s fuel consumption on long sheets of graph paper. Small fishing vessels can afford to steam along with only a small surplus saved as reserve, but as the most recently refitted ship of its class, the Fredericton could be redeployed at a moment’s notice.

Its two sister ships have already been sent to Louisiana to help with disaster relief, along with another Canadian vessel.

The ship is also a world in itself. During a tour the captain walks by his on-board golf partner: a day earlier the crew pulled brass plugs from the floor and practiced their putting.

A few days before arriving in Iqaluit, the Fredericton crashed through eight-metre seas, a storm formed by the death throes of Hurricane Katrina.

As the ship rocked in the grey waters, a fin whale at least 60 feet long — the length of a fishing vessel — surfaced beside them. With the din of the crashing waves, the whale didn’t appear to notice the 134-metre ship, and a few moments later it dove beneath the waves once more.