We weighed anchor at 09.45 Saturday with the skipper and mate having been ashore to restock supplies from the shop.
Roman, the mate had prepared bread dough on Friday night, so we had fresh bread Saturday morning for breakfast, risen overnight in large pan near the heater vent.
We started heading down the fjords and passed a local rescue boat towing a barge of rubbish. Waste disposal is an issue in these remote towns, with many towns having dumps just on the edge of town. This work was to try and clean up the dump but could only be done for a few months in the summer.
There was lots of chunks of broken ice around and the boat was hitting them, not dangerous but very noisy when below. Toward midday the fjord became every narrow and choked with ice so we could not make forward progress, the wind was pushing the ice behind us into a pack. The narrowing of the Fjord was only a few hundred yards beyond us but the ice was too packed for us to get though. The only thing to do was wait for the wind and tide to change to gives us passage out.
Roberto was the last to join us, arrangements had been made for a local Inuit to bring him out in a speed boat, but they had tried to take a short cut though another fjord and found that was blocked by ice, so they had had to go back around and follow the route we had taken. Even in a small boat they could not get though the ice. So, they had beached the boat about a mile away and walk down the side of the Fjord, with Roberto carrying all his kit for two weeks.
The fjords are very narrow and steep sided, when Roberto was alongside on the Fjord edge GS launched its dinghy, this was slid across the ice and rowed across any patches of water the few hundred yards to the shore to pick him up. They followed the same procedure to get back to the boat.
We were still stuck in the ice and had dinner on board and an early night as we were put on to 1 hour ice watches to check the boat was not drifting to the shore and if the ice broke up to wake the skipper. I was on at 5am so set an alarm for 4.30am.