YachtTeleport.com

After spending 13 hectic days repairing everything while in Greenland's brightly painted and picturesque capital, Nuuk, we're thankfully on our way again at last, officially in the arctic now, with a fully-working engine and ready for more adventures!

You remember how the kindly policeman & customs chappie gave us a lift into town with that heavy old seized starter motor (it's a prehistoric ‘dynastart' actually), well that very afternoon when I called past the workshop, they'd already pulled it apart, and as he said, shaking his head in wonder "I've never seen one as broken as this." Inside it was a snarled mess of tangled wire and metal shards. Somehow the wire windings on both the armature and the field windings had ripped themselves apart and intertwined. "It's not worth repairing." He assured me. Great. "But, amazingly, I found this brand new one down in our shed, it's been there since I can remember…" It gleamed as he held it up. "You are very lucky, it's probably the only one in Greenland!". He gave it to me for a very good price. It fitted the old mounts almost exactly - nothing I couldn't fix with a hammer and a blow-torch anyway! What luck!

Of course the old v-belts didn't fit the new dynastart, and so back into town I went, and asked the first mechanic I came to. "Do you sell v-belts?" The local chap straightened up from beside the car he was in the middle of working on. "No, but here, I will drive you to a shop that might…" So friendly! We found some that fitted, but after test running the engine for a while I found the dynastart grew too hot (likely because I'm not using the charging side of it as the old regulator doesn't work), and so I have taken it back off again, put it aside for ‘a rainy day' when I might have time to take the dynastart apart and try and modify it to behave only as a starter. One day. For now though, hand-starting is fine, if we can first solve the other, more major engine problems that is!

The same Norwegian yacht we'd crossed paths with in Newfoundland was already in Nuuk, and upon seeing us arrive flying the yellow Q-flag (signaling we are entering the country), and hearing our 12-day battering to get there, the two guys onboard showed us around town, and took us out to an amazing dinner. I had reindeer, and Jess local salmon!

The next job was to sort out why our engine was getting cooling water in the cylinder. After redoing all the usual checks I'd already done out at sea, in the end I decided that it was time to take the head off the engine - quite a task, and not something I've ever done before. I was hoping for a leaking head gasket, but it was fine, however it didn't take long to find the problem - the raw (sea) water cooling had actually rusted right through it's confining galleries, and busted out into the engine itself, right at point where the exhaust comes out of the side of the cylinder, still inside the head of the engine, letting cooling water flood back in. Not a pleasant discovery. I slung the head of the engine into a sack and heaved it doggedly up the 200-step staircase out of the harbor into town to see if I could find someone who could weld the hole closed.

The first mechanic I asked, having finally managed to explain what I needed (Danish is the local language) took it upon himself to drive me around for hours from workshop to workshop trying to find someone who could fix it. Everyone shook their head and said it could not be welded, and just as I was starting to dread that this would spell the end for our little engine, at last one guy said "Just glue it - use that liquid metal stuff - I've used it to fix things like that before!" We then drove to the shop and bought some ‘metal' epoxy type glue designed for high temps and resistant to oils, fuels etc. Could it be that easy? I cleaned it up, mixed up some glue, smeared a good dollop on from both sides, and placed the engine head high on our bookshelf next to our kero lanterns for heat (as the glue only sets above 15 deg C), and with fingers crossed, moved onto the next job.

A very large and luxurious yacht, this one full of Italians, pulled into port and we went to say hi, which culminated in being invited around for a traditional Italian dinner with cheeses, wines etc all recently flown in from their home town. Afterwards, we clambered back across the 3 or 4 decrepit fishing boats back onboard Teleport, and it was a depressing contrast to their super yacht. Teleport was a workshed, with engine parts strewn everywhere, grease, rags, tools, smelt of diesel, still had problems and was basically a mess. =(

I reassembled the engine the next day after buying a torque wrench (a nifty but overly expensive tool that lets you tighten the huge head bolts on the engine to the exact tightness), and having also flushed a lot of rust out of the cooling chambers, and tuned the engine a little with valve clearances etc, to my absolute delight, it started perfectly! I test ran it for a while to see if the ‘glue' was going to fall off, but it seems to have adhered heroically! Problem solved! What a relief!

Next major problem - the pitch control on the engine that lets us go from forward, to neutral and reverse (which as you'll recall was stuck solidly in forward). Having gone through the manual and tried everything except for potential (And likely sounding) propeller problems, I unfortunately decided that we needed to get Teleport out of the water to fix it. Asking around, the slipyard was too expensive, but we found a crane company that could lift her out with a truck-mounted crane for only 800 kroner/hr (that's like $150 aussie!) We motored very slowly over to an empty wharf (un-clutching the engine like a mile away and slowly drifting in - no reverse remember), just as the crane drove up. After some careful sling positioning by the operators having studied a photo of her hull shape under water, they tightened up and started to lift Teleport up. I was holding onto a rope at her bow, watching, as she lifted perhaps ½ out of the water, when suddenly with a sickening jolt, the bow webbing slipped forward a meter or more, plunging the bow down as it almost slipped off over the bow. (even though we'd tied the 2 straps to each other to prevent this!) Talk about adrenalin rush! Wide eyed, the operators hastily re-lowered her, adjusted things, and tried again. "Do you think it'll hold?" I managed. "I hope so…" He said, not very encouragingly, "Let's see…" You can imagine the stress as Teleport was lifted clear, up and over the wharf and hovered above the concrete. "Seems to be holding - do whatever you need to do and we'll get her back in ASAP."

So with Teleport vaguely touching the ground for stability, I nervously crouched underneath and took apart the propeller, helped by the kindly operator, and Jess (being lighter, you see) climbed delicately aboard to try out the pitch lever. Nothing - it still wouldn't move. Damnit! I climbed aboard and disconnected the propshaft from the engine and now that the prop was all nicely greased and free, I found I could actually push and pull the shaft by hand (which changes the pitch), revealing that the problem was in the engine's push-pull mechanism after all. What a waste of time and effort and non-grey hairs the crane operation was! Still I wouldn't have found it otherwise, and so after re-launching her, and ‘slowly' motoring back to raft up beside the fishing trawlers again, I spent a fruitless afternoon attempting to coax the pitch ctrl mechanism to move but to no avail, however to get that whole combined clutch / pitch box off the front of the engine to take it apart any further, alarmingly, required the whole engine be actually lifted off it's mounts and moved forward into the galley! Not something I wanted to do.

Feeling glum, I did dome other jobs up the mast, and then Jess and I wandered around town running various other errands (including picking up some replacement clip-parts for our GoPro camera that I'd dropped over the side back in Newfoundland - GoPro kindly posted new ones to us free of charge - thanks Dad for organizing this!), and having bought some wonderfully cheap fish for dinner from the fish shop, we then stood staring at the tables of assorted bright red seal meat, blubber, and then, a weird fish or shark tail. But there was something wrong - the tail was horizontal, not vertical like a fish's. It was a small whale or dolphin's tale!! I pointed at it, looking puzzled, and the shopkeeper said brightly "Harbor porpoise! Yes!" Then a few tables further down, we saw the rest of it. Flippers, and rather gruesomely, beside it, the complete blood-spattered head, still smiling that happy dolphin smile. "You want?" We assured him we didn't. "We had a Fin whale the other day - shop very full!" I can imagine.

On the way back to Teleport, we bumped into another yachtie couple - two lovely friendly English people Les and Ali who we'd seen sail in. (Seems Nuuk's exceeded it's 3 yacht average this year already!) And Les, being a fellow engineer, kindly said he'd pop around later and look at the engine with me. After levering and banging it like I had for over an hour, Les reluctantly admitted that he too felt to do anything further we needed to get it off the engine - ie lifting the whole engine. Damnit! At least a two day operation. "We'll start tomorrow," Les kindly encouraged me, "I'll see this project through with you.".

Borrowing scrap bits of wood from a nearby construction site as cross beams, along with a convenient length of webbing with a ratchet, we set to work trying to crank up the engine. Naturally it wouldn't budge. Seems the six suds holding the engine down were epoxyed into the mounts with the engine in place, and so the whole engine was actually glued down too. Bummer. So we spent a pleasant day prizing it up with huge screwdrivers tapped in with hammers etc until at last with a crack, she was free and we were able to hoist the beast up, tilting it so we could then take off the clutch/pitch box, and hold the problem in our hands. No amount of banging with hammers and dollys could convince the piece that was supposed to slide to move at all. Exhausted by evening, we sprayed it with WD40 stuff and left it overnight. It still wouldn't budge the next morning, nor would it after we heated the outer part with a blowtorch while chilling the inner bit, it was completely seized, and so we spent all day applying the basic engineering principle of "start with a small hammer and work upwards from there", until completely defeated, we put this even heavier part of the engine in a sack, and Jess and I carried one handle each as we lugged the thing up the mountainside and then all the way into a metal workshop, hoping they could force it out with a hydraulic press. A team of six people dropped their current project of fixing a huge trawler propeller, and spent over an hour on it, and after doing drawings on a whiteboard and discussing what to do, they set about applying the same principle as we did, but eventually with even bigger hammers than we had, and just as I was getting worried that they'd smash the brittle cast-iron housing leaving us with a completely useless engine, suddenly one of them exclaimed something in Danish, held up a ruler, banged it again, and grinned. It was moving! Eventually they belted it out, and gave it to me. In a true example of just how friendly the people are here, they wouldn't accept any payment. Try walking into a workshop in Sydney and you'd be lucky if they'd schedule your project in at all, let alone then and there, for free!

It then took me a further two frustrating days before I had sanded, filed and polished the parts enough that they slid together easily like they should, and I was at last able to make a new gasket for it and bolt it back onto the engine, and again with Les's help, lower the engine back down onto it's mounts. After about 5 days working flat-out on this problem, I crawled into the cockpit and tried the pitch control lever. It worked effortlessly, better than it ever had, and - better still - actually moved a good deal further than before, giving us significantly more pitch for motor-sailing extra fast, and stronger reverse. Awesome! As I tidied everything up, Jess made Teleport look homely again, and we celebrated having Les and Ali over for dinner - our first ever dinner party onboard. Jess cooked up an amazing dinner of muskox, followed by chocolate moose (made, just quietly, from whipped up tofu as the base!!!).

Having bought a backup alternator, and borrowed a handheld tachometer to see how fast we should be revving the engine so as not to blow it up, at last, Teleport was ‘All systems go'! Such a relief! There were several times when re really feared that we might be looking at a new engine, a delay that would likely mean we'd have to leave Teleport here in Nuuk for the season, then the winter. We motored past the iceberg that had drifted right into the harbor (very rare, apparently) and (smugly reversing to a stop) filled up with diesel at the fuel dock, and returned to wait for the weather window to leave.

Studying the GRIB weather files, we decided along with Les and Ali to leave the very next morning, catching a firm breeze up the coast. Go go go! No rest for the wicked hey! We hastily dingied over to the only hose in the harbor to fill up on water. We now use our 50L extra durable Turtle-pac flexi tank plumbed into our galley for water so we can still use the foot-pump etc, along with seven x 10L plastic jerry-cans beside it, all fitting neatly in the locker where our crap 200L sieve used to live. It's a great system, and lets us keep track of water usage too. The other good thing about this system means as we run out, we can just bring a single 10L jerry can shore with us and fill up from a stream etc. It just sucks a little filling all seven of them, and lowering them down the 10m drop into the dingy on a length of rope (the tides here are phenomenal!)

Rather than heading all the way 20 miles back out of Nuuk before being able to turn North, we discussed the idea of trying various ‘inside passages' that weave through the myriad of islands and fiord channels here. Although alarming unmarked on the charts (so no way of knowing how deep or where the rocks are), the various guide books, pilot guides and local fisherman's advice basically boiled down to us deciding to attempt the largest, widest, deepest-looking option, cutting as much as five hours out of our trip, and likely much more scenic, and with places to stop for the night. Les and Ali left about an hour before we got our last jobs done, and by the time we cast off and motor sailed after them, we couldn't actually see them, but instead, watched their little ship icon from our AIS Watchmate system inch along on our chartplotter screen. While we crossed the 800+ feet deep main fjord, I was shocked to suddenly see our depthsounder show 40 feet, then 35. It turned out it must have been a big school of fish, likely cod. In other news, our electrical autopilot doesn't seem to work anymore - so it's back to hand steering for now when there's no wind and we're motoring, damn! (Our Hasler-Gibb windvane self steering still works, when there's wind).

We watched the screen as their yacht slowed down to a crawl and left the ‘charted' part of the fiord into the ‘passage' I cheekily started marking waypoints on their trail every minute or so for us to follow when we got there. Suddenly, I saw their position icon stop, and then gradually turn around. I called them up on the VHF. "Chris, we've just hit something rather hard - there's no water coming in, but we're coming back out." Apparently even though Ali was standing on the bow looking for rocks, and they only had their engine just ticking over, moving about about 2-3 knots, by the time it loomed up into view and Ali threw up her hand and called out, and Les instantly threw the engine into reverse and tried to dodge it, it was too late and with a sickening jolt their whole yacht rode up onto whatever it was, and then slid back off it. Yikes!

We instantly chickened out before we'd even got to the start of the passage, and together we headed for what looked like a nice anchorage for the night just inside a slightly better charted passage on the longer way back out. The trip in was stunningly beautiful, and we gently nosed into a perfect little anchorage where the 300+ foot deep canyon rose to an anchorable 25 feet, and we also ran a big rope ashore to tie our stern in to prevent us swinging around and hitting the sides of the narrow passage. We headed over to their yacht with our underwater GoPro camera on a stick, and poked it around under water to inspect their hull for damage. Reviewing the footage it wasn't hard to see. A fist-sized chunk smashed out of the leading edge, just before it swept down into their keel. Thankfully it was a very strong part of their hull, solid fiberglass actually, and they were happy to carry on North until they found somewhere to haul out and repair it. Interestingly, of all the yachts we've met, they are the only other one going any further north than Nuuk, and even then they are just aiming for Disko Bugt (pronounced Disko Bay - apparently an absolutely stunning place with a huge glacier, towns of dog-sleds etc) before heading back south.

Jess and I ventured ashore for some photos, (Jess is getting heaps better at driving our outboard on the inflatable!) and after failing to fix the autopilot or catch fish for dinner, we got to bed quite late, but decided that we'd wake early at 5am and get the high-tide out of here, not risking even this better chartered passage. So that's what we did.

GRIB file in the morn showed 2 days of good strong S-SE wind then basically dead calm for days. "What do you think?" I asked Jess, and she nodded, already in agreement. Rather than slowly day-hop up North, we decided to head out and high-tail it direct to Disko Bugt, making use of the weather. We're feeling a little time-pressure now, as we certainly didn't want to spend almost 2 weeks in Nuuk!

So we were at sea all day Saturday, Sat night, and during Sunday we ceremoniously crossed the Arctic Circle - 66.5 deg North marking the invisible line above which, in mid-summer, you get at least one day of perpetual daylight - the ‘midnight sun'. Our friend Jeff Rowe gave us a very fancy bottle of French champagne when we left Halifax to drink at this moment, however with the wind getting more and more boisterous towards 20kn +, and the seas building, we decided we'd enjoy it a lot more in the sanctuary and splendor of Disko Bugt. We can't wait! So Sunday night at sea was a bit lumpy and unpleasant, well reefed, and rolling like a pig as the wind was directly astern, but we made great progress (aided further by a strong current flowing up the coast of Greenland!) and the weather eased by morning, leaving us becalmed all Monday, with still a good 90 miles still to go. Prior to leaving Nuuk, Jess, unable to find any more of her favorite anti-sea-sickness patches from the local chemist, went onboard a huge cruise ship that came into port, and they very kindy donated several packets! Thanks! To both of our relief, Jess felt a lot better on this passage.

We opted to slip inside the coastal islands and cut off a good twenty miles, following a very well charted ‘inside passage', and we're glad we did. It was beautiful - glassy calm, motor sailing around countless islands of spectacular scenery and rock formations, past the occasional berg, pausing to pick some up for our ice-box, spotting hug groups of seals ripping the water apart as they evidently feasted on a shoal of fish, and even huge whales (looked like humpbacks?) diving, lifting their immense tails into the sky before sinking out of sight. Still waiting for a photo of that!

We stopped for the night in an impossibly colorful village called Egedesminde, arriving about 10PM (it never really gets dark anymore, with about 2-3hrs of beautiful twilight between 12 and 3), slept peacefully, and today we woke early, and are currently steaming across the endless, berg-strewn expanse of Disko Bugt towards our long-awaited dream spot of Jakobshavn - a town described as ‘a busy fishing port', which also breeds 5,000+ sled dogs - the barking from which can apparently even be heard above the roar huge hunks of ice breaking off the enormous Isfjord glacier that extends out into the sea nearby. The cruising guide says "A walk from the harbor across to the Isfjord provides one of the greatest sights in the world" over the glacier and a view to all the immense bergs forcing their way out to sea. "Undoubtedly one of the wonders of the world!" Such splendor brings many dangers though, and "apart from the slight danger of being locked into this harbor by ice, another unusual phenomenon is the ‘kanelen'" These are violent oscillations in the water height, up to 2m, caused by the shockwave of icebergs calving off the glacier. These waves apparently rush even into the harbor causing severe currents and whirlpools. Yikes!

Once safely there, Jess and I intend to take a much-needed day or two out to relax (there's no wind anyway for sailing), send this update, and spend time taking some photos, enjoying that champagne, and for the first since Canada, unwinding. We're feeling a bit burnt out, and can't wait for a break.

Thanks again everyone for all your continued encouragement, we love reading all your messages. Thanks!

Jess's just spotted a whale! Better go and try for that elusive shot of the tail, ideally in front of a towering berg!