The Air Up There

Sailing in Greenland is not what I thought it would be. It's even better.

- Ben Zartman

I had always imagined, looking at world globes and navigational charts, that the surface of the earth would somehow feel different the farther north you went. That perhaps gravity would pull you at a slanted angle, or that the horizon would look narrower as the longitude lines drew closer together. I imagined one would get shortness of breath or vertigo as the polar regions were approached.

Not surprisingly, as far as those things go, everything seems the same even several hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. The horizon is as expansive as ever, water stays level in a glass, and my head is not swimming from lack of oxygen.

What is different, though-shockingly, disconcertingly different is the perpetual daylight. Long before Polar Sun, the Stevens 47 we're cruising in Greenland, reached the Arctic Circle, we had left the night behind. The last darkness we saw was when we left Flowers Cove, in northern Newfoundland, at 2 a.m. to catch the downtide to Mary's Harbour in Labrador. After that, with the bows pointed north into the Labrador Sea, though the sun would briefly set, the twilight endured until it rose again just a little to the right of where it had gone down.

It was good that it should be so because there are icebergs about in late June in the Davis Strait, and though we didn't see many, the ones we did see made us grateful for the light and a sharp lookout. There was little else to look out for, though. Between putting Labrador astern and fetching Greenland ahead five days later, we saw only one coastal ship between each place. It was a surprisingly benign passage at first, given what I'd been led to expect about the Davis Strait. For three calm and pleasant days, we alternated between the engine and the "whomper"-a huge, yellow asymmetrical spinnaker-and congratulated ourselves on our luck.