The Christmas Story – In Svalbard, where you sail among the bears/1
THE PERFECT GIFT!
Give or treat yourself to a subscription to the print + digital Journal of Sailing and for only 69 euros a year you get the magazine at home plus read it on your PC, smartphone and tablet. With a sea of advantages.
Giovanni Porzio is one of Italy’s greatest reporters and a passionate sailor. In his book “The Sea is Never the Same,” he recreated the essence of reportage, that is, “reporting” from a journey news, but also stories, feelings and images. It is from this very book that the story whose first part can be found here is taken.
“…the miracle island, the last Thule, the last land granted to human life. For there is no other region in the whole world that is so close to the Pole, and where life persists…” Paolo Monelli, Viaggio alle isole freddazzurre, 1926
Boating on the roof of the world, 600 miles from the magnetic pole, among seals, whales and walruses: at the invitation of Captain Michele, owner and skipper of Ecland, I could not resist. One plane to Oslo, another to Longyearbyen, and by the end of July I am in Svalbard, the large, mysterious boreal archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, 1,000 kilometers north of the North Cape. It is midnight when, bag over my shoulder, I walk down the pier and board Ecland, docked among the few sails at berth in the harbor: Canadian, French, Norwegian flags. And the sun is high in the clouds that hide the mountain peaks.
It will take a few days to get used to the dazzling light of the polar night, the sharp wind, the absence of stars…. As a herd of white belugas swims in the fjord, André, Alberto and Filippo, as well as Michele my traveling companions, offer me a welcome beer: it will unfortunately be one of the last, as we find out the next day in the commissary in Longyearbyen.
On Svalbard, Norway’s relentless laws do not allow the sale of beers and liquor to boat crews without written permission from the Sysselmann, the archipelago’s governor whose office, on weekends, is closed. Wine is not restricted but we have to make do with six bottles of a very bad merlot that we will end up using in the kitchen. We console ourselves with a visit to the polar museum and the “northernmost town on the planet“: two thousand inhabitants, a hotel, a couple of restaurants, a bank, a movie theater, a church, a university center, brick-colored wooden houses and little else.
Tourism has all but supplanted the mining industry (the town is named after the American coal magnate John Munro Longyear, who began exploiting Svalbard deposits in 1904), and the only operating mine, run by workers, meets the needs of the local power plant. By contrast, the Global Seed Vault, the underground tunnel that has been collecting and storing hundreds of thousands of seeds of the seven thousand known varieties of edible plants in the permafrost since 2008, cannot be visited-the Earth’s biodiversity bank.
We set sail in favor of the current and sail into Isfjorden, a deep inlet of Spitsbergen, the main island of the archipelago: we aim for Prins Karls Island, uninhabited and a protected nature park, like all of Svalbard. Flocks of seabirds follow us: puffins, fulmars, skuas, Arctic terns. We are in the highest latitude in the world into which it is possible to go deep: only in July and August, when the pack retreats further north; and only because of a Gulf Stream puff, which laps the islands’ western shores while to the east, even in midsummer, the sea is covered with ice.
The cold is biting. Water temperature does not exceed 3-6 degrees, air temperature fluctuates between 5 and 10, but it drops near glaciers that carve valleys between dark mountains and dump icebergs into the sea, with crashes of thunder. The lows, in winter, drop to -50°. In the sun’s rays the ocean transcolors from molten lead to bronze to gold and cobalt blue, then becomes covered with pearly mists and vapors. Rapid flights of birds glide over the waves; the outline of the coast disappears in the mist. When the clouds lift, the light reveals a white cliff, the bright green and purple tundra, the rocks mottled with grasses, mosses and lichens. Then the curtain closes again, amid mists and fumes.
Discover all of Giovanni Porzio’s reports in his book “The Sea is Never the Same!”
Share:
Are you already a subscriber?
Ultimi annunci
Our social
Sign up for our Newsletter
We give you a gift
Sailing, its stories, all boats, accessories. Sign up now for our free newsletter and receive the best news selected by the Sailing Newspaper editorial staff each week. Plus we give you one month of GdV digitally on PC, Tablet, Smartphone. Enter your email below, agree to the Privacy Policy and click the “sign me up” button. You will receive a code to activate your month of GdV for free!
You may also be interested in.
Farewell to Mauro Morandi, the hermit “guardian” of the island of Budelli
Mauro Morandi, a former physical education teacher originally from Modena who lived on the island of Budelli, Sardinia, for 32 years in complete solitude like a modern-day Robinson Crusoe, has passed away at the age of 85. Mauro Morandi, the
Mystery of Pogo 50 “ghost” stranded in Cefalù solved
Last Dec. 7, a 15-meter sailboat in good condition but without a crew ran aground on the beach in Cefalù, Sicily. After an on-board inspection and a series of investigations, the Coast Guard identified the boat involved in an accident
How to go on a sailing cruise on Lake Maggiore
It often happens to tell of adventures, regattas and crossings bordering on the verisimilar, “salty” experiences, so to speak. Fewer, however, happen to talk about lakes. Yet sailing is certainly no stranger to the lake tradition, and we are not
Replica Viking ship sinks: archaeologist on board dies
Twenty-nine-year-old archaeologist Karla Dana died during the “Legendary Viking Voyage” expedition from the Faroe Islands to Norway aboard a replica Viking ship that capsized due to bad weather. It was supposed to be a voyage back in time when the