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What with all the ice, fog, narrow channels, polar bears (dozens of them, including one that I had to wrestle my camera back off which was tied to my fishing line back in the blow-up dingy), seismic explosions and stopping at tiny islands detailed in my childhood alaskan adventure books my dad gave me - it's been all action since leaving Tuktoyaktuk! We enjoyed a good break at Tuk - the mayor proudly showed us around, we had dinner with an Aussie couple who are the local nurses, and we marvelled at the surrounding bizarre hills (some xxx m high) called 'Pingos', that have a core of solid ice that expanded as it froze, heaving the land up into these perfectly conical mini-volcanoes.

It was an overnight 140nm sail to Herschel Island, weaving around hunks of sea ice and dangerously large bobbing logs, all drifting in and out of veils of blinding fog which made watch-keeping a bit of an adrenaline sport at times. However, the cliffs rimming Herschel eventually rose out of the sea before us and we dropped anchor in the beautifully snug little Pauline Cove at 2PM on 15th August, Luc on Roxanne pulling in soon after.

Herschel Island is a fascinating place, and we wasted no time in flipping our dingy in and heading ashore. We were greeted by some researchers and the two rangers on the island, one of whom had basically grown up on the island. The whole island, it turns out, was created eons ago by a huge ice sheet pushing outwards from the mainland, sagging down and essentially scooping up a huge chuck of the seafloor and depositing it here. There is a corresponding deep section called the 'Herschel Basin' that we sailed over to get here, that is the same volume as the island - where it was gouged-out from.

After receiving due cautions regarding an apparently large and angry brown bear in the area, Jess and I went for a hike along the coast to what looked like a huge mud-cave we saw on the way in, which turned out to be a massive ice 'slump' - an increasing phenomenon being studied here, where the cliffsides are being quickly eroded, exposing great walls of pure ice carpeted atop only by a thin <1m layer of topsoil/peat that keeps breaking off in hunks as the exposed ice melts away from under it. Pieces splashed down into the muddy slurry right before our eyes.

On the way back we came upon Jess's first-ever caribou which soon pranced off, and the next day we got great (if slightly too-close) views of what is apparently the only musk ox on the island this year. It's funny - whatever animals happen to be still here in summer when the ice melts away end up marooned here (intensionally or not) until the Fall, forming a closed system. We brought some of the researchers and then later one of the rangers (and his tiny <3 month old puppy) out to Teleport for a tour which he loved, and he then gave us a tour of what's left of the once-bustling whaling community on the island, and very generously said we could use the rangers wood-fire sauna cabin to have our first shower in over 2.5 weeks. It was bliss.

As we headed out early the next next morning for Barter Island (110 nm further West), we briefly saw a distant pod of Beluga (white) whales, and also a large polar bear prowling the cliffs of Herschel island (unbeknown to the rangers who said there weren't any, so we reported it by email and the researchers apparently managed to go out and find it soon after!). Annoying we had unpredicted headwinds most of the way, as well as more fog, some rain, and more patches of sea ice, which somewhat muted our celebrations for crossing from Canada into Alaska/USA. I did make, kneed, rise and bake a tasty loaf of cheese-and-herb bread in the pressure-cooker however. Drawing closer to Barter Island by sunrise the next day however, we passed through a region of lots of sea ice, and managed to get some beautiful photos as we swung close by some of the beautifully sculpted pieces, conveniently taking pics for Luc as he took some of us.

Trying to get into the interior protected lagoon of Barter Island proved impossible, and we spent a good hour put-putting very gently around holding our breath as we watched the rippled sand passing sometimes less than one foot beneath our keel, waiting for our depth sounder to reveal some form of deeper current/flow channel that we knew must be there somewhere. Onboard Roxane, Luc ran around a couple of times before we too eventually touched bottom and had to reverse off. We were reasonably well sheltered by the island itself out there anyway, and so I decided in the end to give up, and just anchor essentially out in the ocean instead, in 10 feet of water. It's crazy how shallow the sea is along this north western side of North America… way out of sight of land it's still often only 25 feet deep.

After catching up on some much needed sleep, Jess and I popped the dingy in and we motored around looking for polar bears - and we were't disappointed! There were literally dozens of them lazing on the tiny little gravel strip island in front of the main island - I counted nine at a time! Each year, the locals of Barter Island engage in a traditional Bowhead Whale hunt, and the resulting bone-pile attracts stupendous numbers of bears, even just in anticipation like these ones, as the hunt wasn't scheduled for a few more weeks. We went ashore later, and using our ice-pole as a depth measuring stick on the way I did actually find a channel deep enough that we could have got Teleport inside, but we were happy where we were and for one night didn't think it was worth the risk. It's a small community of only 300 people, surrounded by huge fences to help prevent the snow drifts from engulfing the town in winter. Doing laps around the handful of dirt roads was a red 4WD which we were told was the much needed 24/7 polar bear patrol - for example only a few days ago a group of six bears had apparently punched in the front door of a house to eat some seal meat the owners had left inside their house. Yikes!

That evening Luc and I went out to try and get some better polar bear photos from our blow-up dingy, put-putting spine-chillingly close to them on the shore, not daring to look away to ensure we didn't drift close enough to fall prey to a sudden charge, but also forever scanning all around us - checking we weren't being stalked by any swimming up to us from behind, and also trying to ensure the outboard motor didn't hit the very shallow bottom and die. Talk about high-stress photography - but damn we got some killer shots. I stuck one of our little GoPro waterproof/shockproof HD video cameras into a foot-square plate of insulation foam I found, tied it to the pathetically-thin fishing line on our fishing rod, and towed it around in front of some bears (way behind our dingy) in the hope they'd swim out to investigate it, which annoyingly they didn't. In the end, the phenomenon known as 'Kodak Courage' got the better of me, and Luc manoeuvred the dingy to briefly touch the shore in a suitably bear-free section of the gravel island, and after triple-checking there was nowhere where a bear could be hiding in wait, I sprang ashore and hastily placed the video camera on the shore, and found myself half-back in dingy pushing it back out with one leg to outboard-depth all in the space of about half a second, and we were away, paying out the fishing line as we rocketed away to a safer distance, eyes wide.

Within a minute, a young-ish polar bear started lumbering curiously over to the camera, sniffed it, licked it, and then, put the entire thing in it's mouth and looked at us. In hindsight it was a pretty funny scene - it looked every bit like I was out fishing in the dingy, with this length of hair-thin line leading from my fishing rod to the mouth of a polar bear standing ashore looking at me. "Drop it!" I shouted, "Oy!!!" Terrified that if I pulled the line at all, it simply snap and I'd lose the camera and the awesome footage I knew was now on it. "Give it back!" A quick engine-rev in neutral finally distracted him enough that he spat it out, still staring in complete incomprehension at these two shouting idiots in the dingy. Seizing the opportunity, I started reeling in the camera, but the instant it started skittering across the beach back to me, the bear pounced on it, batting it with one of his huge clawed paws. Long story short, to our complete disbelief, we did finally manage to get it back, and reviewing the footage with great trepidation back onboard Teleport, the bear strides up to the camera perfectly in frame, sniffs it, and engulfs it in his mouth, and then it cuts - it ran out of space on the memory card! Gutted! So we missed the 15-minutes of the bear was playing with it! Agh well, surely after the first mouthing, the rest of the footage would be been uselessly saliva-covered anyway, right? Right??!! Surely. *groan*. Still, what we did get is awesome =)

The next morning we left early and sailed the 90 miles to 'Cross Island' - we've been so delighted to find all these tiny little places that offer somewhere to anchor, shelter and explore along the way - it makes all the difference, compared to rocketing all the way through in on hit, the way many boats are forced to, when trying to do the whole passage in one season. On the way we passed under two strange, low, solid cloud bands stretching from the horizon, and as each rolled over us, the wind literally swung 180 deg from behind us, to head-on 20kn and back again. Crazy. Also, for the first time, it was getting dangerously dark around midnight, and the last couple of miles around behind the island was a bit too dicey, straining to see well enough to dodge ice etc, (dodging bears too - what we thought was a hunk of ice out in the water as we sailed past turned out to be a big mama polar bear and a big young one swimming over towards us! Yikes!). Protected inside the apostrophe shape of Cross Island that night we decided that from now on we'd better either find somewhere to stop before it gets dark, else just be somewhere safe enough to just drift / heave-to for those couple of hours. Cross Island was particularly special for me as it's detailed in the amazing and sketch/diagram filled old book 'Arctic Hunter' by Bud Helmericks that my dad gave me as a kid (which his uncle had given him as a kid), about the adventures Bud had as a young man traveling with and learning the ways of the Alaskan 'Eskimos' as they used to be called. There is a sketch map of Cross Island (better than the one on the best charts we have, actually), marking where he found a grave with some spears in it, and the skeletal remains of a man, with 4 puncture holes in his skull, from a polar bear. Before sleeping that night, the question I asked Jess "I wonder if a bear could climb onboard Teleport?" saw us putting the remains of our smelly dried char hanging in the wind instead into a sealed plastic bag, and putting in the 'wash-boards' in, sealing our doorway to down below and blocking off our round mid-cockpit hatches so that we could sleep in peace.

As sunlight spilt over Cross Island the next morning, we counted still more polar bears - 10 all up - and so before departing, Jess and I did a dingy trip around to get some more photos, and Jess got some great ones, of a big mother bear standing up on her hind legs looking at us, towering a good 12 feet in the air, with a cub beside her. Deciding we'd pushed fate far enough, we put the dingy back onboard and sailed onwards to 'Thetis Island' only 45 miles away. Along the way we spotted some yellow dots atop distant sea ice 'bergs' (while not ice'bergs' we're surprised how huge, tall and convoluted some chunks are!) - more polar bears - this time on ice! Yay! We spared the time to change course and sail silently past their ice hunks, getting more great photos, before we at last reached the shelter of Thetis Island just before dark, where Roxane was already anchored, surrounded in the distance by no less than five separate oil drilling rigs, lighting up the sky like cities. The number of oil rigs along the North Alaskan coast is mind-boggling - often we could see three or four at once, huge flames burning off atop each of their towers - we almost even sailed right through a seismic survey area, where a whole fleet of ships were setting of air-explosives to send shockwaves into the seafloor to map what's under there. Boom! We could feel it through our hull, and over the VHF radio, they advised that in a wooden boat, we might like to keep a few miles distant. Not surprisingly, we've not seen any whales the last few days.

We spent all the next day anchored off Thetis Island (well, it's no more than a curved spit of gravel really), waiting for the wind to shift so that we could then actually sail the remaining 140 miles to Barrow rather than motor. We swapped to the other side of the island for better shelter (interestingly our GPS chart plotter showing that we a) anchored in the middle of the island, and b) had to sail an extra couple of miles as the island was in fact about a mile longer than shown - not the world's most accurate charts around here, despite them being this year's electronic issue.).

The trip to Barrow was team sailing conditions - 15-20kn of tailwind, no logs, no ice, and we just flew. In fact, our junk rig with our one easy sail outpaced Roxane, despite her being 5 feet longer (34 feet), and having her spinnaker up! Go junk rigs! We passed the time playing cards, filming things for the next video update (thanks for the ideas people!) and listening to music that our engine usually drowns out. It was wonderful, and Jess wasn't even a little seasick.

We reached the tiny entrance to the 10-foot deep but huge 'Elson Lagoon' beside Barrow at around 5Am just as fog engulfed us and the wind amped up to 25kn. Finding the very narrow (but 40 foot deep) channel in amidst the shoals in the turgid muddy water was a bit dicey, staring at the depth sounder, but we eventually squeezed in and blinded by fog dropped the anchor just inside and tried to get some sleep while Teleport bucked and plunged in the waves. With Jess starting to feel ill, we decided that evening to relocate the 15 miles out and around to anchor in front of the Barrow township itself, offering a bit better shelter until the Westerlies kick in.

Dingying ashore here at the most northerly point of Alaska involved a full-on surf-landing as it's just a completely unprotected expanse of coast, open to the sea, so had 'fun' trying to time the breaking swell to zip in and up the beach on the back of a wave, kick the outboard up, and leap out as the wave recedes and grab/pull us further up before the next wave tries to sweep us broadside and roll us. Good times. I learnt a lot, fast, and of all the 8 dingy trips, we only got majorly wet once. =P We filled up on diesel at the local fuel station, lugging 130L with Luc and later 70L for us back to the dingy and running it back out to the yacht in several loads (surf exits each time.. heavily loaded.. good fun). We called a friend of a friend in town, and Jess, Luc and I went out to lunch with a whole group of very interesting people, which later turned into dinner at their houses. 'Geoff' is a friend of Brent's from Cambridge Bay and was on the north-pole by dog sled trip he did in the 80's, and in fact Geoff still has the only dog sled team in Barrow, and we went and fed and played with his nine gorgeous dogs in his backyard. Another of the guys, Craig, was the whale scientist who famously discovered some ancient harpoon heads made from stone (i.e. pre-european contact) still embedded inside old Bowhead whales the locals had hunted recently, indicating these giants can live as much as 200 years or more.

As you can see on our live website tracker, we're now anchored back inside the lagoon, waiting for the perfect weather window to head onwards, southward now, on to the dreaded Bering Strait, and eventually to our final stop of this season in 'Nome'. Wish us luck!

Thanks for following along our adventures, and for all your messages. Keep them coming. And don't forget, if you haven't already, please add your email address to our list of family & friends that we send an email alert to as soon as we post new updates like this. You can easily 'unsubscribe' anytime you like, but it just means like when we get home and Jess finishes making the next awesome video update and put it online etc, we'll let you know =)

Ciao!

Chris & Jess