The Christmas Story – In Svalbard, where you sail among the bears/2
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 has recreated the essence of reportage, that is, “reporting” from a voyage news, but also stories, feelings and images. Here is the second installment of his trip to the Svalbard Islands in the Great North! (You can find the first part here)
It is impossible to work with halyards and sheets with bare hands: even with gloves, fingers are frozen. But the body is warm. I am well equipped: microfiber “tactical” jerseys and tights, down jacket, oilskin, boots, balaclava, wool cap. Inside Ecland there is a pleasant warmth, the oil stove works, but in the bunk we sleep clothed.
We proceed on autopilot (in turn at least one of us stands watch at the inner wheelhouse or in the cockpit) to the placid anchorage of Salvagen Bay: still water, the sun shines on the glacier, a stream roars through the beach rocks. Two walruses pass puffing aft. And we are alone in the primordial nature. No ships, sails or fishing boats. In the morning we notice some signs of life: next to the remains of a shack of trappers, bear and Arctic fox hunters, are the tents of a scientific expedition. Apart from Longyearbyen the archipelago (62,500 sq. km: 60 percent covered by ice and only 10 percent with some form of vegetation) is almost completely depopulated.
In Spitsbergen, 400 Russian-Ukrainian miners resist in Barentsburg settlement, a hundred Norwegians in the Sveagruva mine, a handful of Polish meteorologists in Hornsund, a team of international scientists in Ny-ร lesund, and a couple of misanthropic seal and blue fox hunters who have chosen to isolate themselves at the edge of the world, drifting into the vast spaces of Europe’s largest wilderness. There are also the Soviet ghost towns of Pyramiden and Grumantbyen, long since evacuated but intact, with busts of Lenin, Cyrillic inscriptions, even a swimming pool and a music school. Discovered by Dutch navigator Willem Barents in 1596, Svalbard (“Cold Coast”) soon became the destination of a wild northern gold rush: whale oil, walrus ivory, seal, fox and polar bear skins. Remains of whaling stations, ancient cemeteries, fat boiling pots, mandibles and vertebrae of whales are scattered throughout the archipelago. Between the late 17th century and the mid-20th century, fleets from Holland, Russia, England, France, Denmark, and Norway exterminated millions of mammals. So much so that large cetaceans such as the Right Whale and Blue Whale are now threatened with extinction. Bears-protected since 1973-are on the rise and pose a real danger.
Michele, in order to obtain permission to sail in Svalbard, had to ensure that there was at least one crew member aboard Ecland with a gun permit. And the manuals go on and on in their recounting of lethal encounters and recommendations: use powerful, large-caliber weapons, from shotguns to semiautomatics, with magazines always engaged and ready for use. We, actually, bluffed, having only the boat’s flares in the boat…. But of bears, fortunately, we did not spot any.
READ THE FIRST INSTALLMENT OF THE REPORT.
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.
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
“Our son Elia is alone in the Atlantic without autopilot. And we are proud of him.”
There is a 30-year-old guy from Veneto, in the middle of the ocean, alone, aboard a 1987 steel Van De Stadt 34 10.25 m) that he put together with his own hands. He is making the Atlantic solo crossing simply
Ernest Shackleton, the Relentless. This is who one of the greatest sea heroes in history was
Some time ago a U.S. magazine asked its readers who they thought was the greatest navigator of all time. Perhaps you would expect the likes of Joshua Slocum, Tabarly or at the limit, if you are nostalgic, Christopher Columbus. But