On August 16, at 2 a.m. Bagan officially
stopped making forward progress. We were hopelessly trapped, unable to
make even an inch forward, backwards, or sideways. We were locked in
with a haunting and deathly en- compassing fog and had completely and
decisively run out of options. Ironically, despite our array of modern
day electronics and safety devices we were no better off than those who
went and died before us and could do nothing about it. The ice had
caught us and we had lost.
“Have I brought my family together only to lead them to their deaths?” I wondered.
While
the past eighteen hours were filled with physical and navigational
challenges, the mental toll was also brutal. Although fairly recent
cruisers had done The Passage over several seasons with seemingly no
concern or fears, I found my experience to be the complete opposite. The
myriad pre-trip pressures—losing funding, the personality conflicts, my
health issues, the documentary, and now the responsibility of my kids’
lives—it was almost more than I could handle. Reading other reports of
previous transits, I found my experience was entirely different because
few of these books or articles mentioned the deep and raging fear that
could start and grow inside of you.
When
we had entered the ice, I was still being plagued by the black thoughts
of how the trip could potentially end. Fears and fatigue showed
nolimits to their depths and, as each futile hour ticked by, the sounds
and experiences became more frightening. At first I thought that the
great creaks, moans, and explosions I could hear from deep inside Bagan were
her hull, her structure being overcome by the icy and deadly pressures.
With each deep and rumbling snap I heard, I could “see” damage being
done below the water line. At one point, I called Sefton into the
pilothouse and quietly asked him to go below and pull some floorboards
because I feared we had compromised the hull. After a few minutes below,
Sefton found that the bilges were as dry as the day we left Newport,
then headed back outside into the sharp Arctic air to continue fending
ice off the bow. I’d be relieved momentarily, until the next groan and
explosion told me that what I’d been listening to was the massive
amounts of thick ice giving way with great protestations as Bagan gained another two or three feet.
At
various times during that first day, we lost power in the bow thruster,
lost two push poles, several sets of gloves, and a two-way radio over
the side only to watch them get swallowed up in a matter of seconds by
the ice. Baganand crew became a floating, small island of
survival that at any moment could be broached, and if past history had
anything to do with it, could be snuffed out and ground into the bottom
in a heartbeat. These were my most fearful of thoughts, not based
entirely in reality but by the same token entirely possible. They didn’t
rule my thinking for the next few days but did manage to lower the bar
of my experience; “Who the hell were we, was I, to think we could take
on a transit in a part of the Arctic which had claimed so many hundreds
of lives before?”
The
audacity and seeming hubris of undertaking such a project gained a loud
and unrelenting voice inside of me, one that I had to constantly
struggle with and try to keep in check for had the others gotten a whiff
of these fears and insecurities, I felt it would be detrimental to
keeping their own fears at bay. It was a constant balance of letting
them know that I felt our situation to be extremely difficult but not
deadly. That first night of being held captive in the Arctic ice was
brutal. That night potential headlines ran through myhead: “Father Leads
Family To Icy Death,” “Half-assed Explorer Loses Not Only Funding But
Boat As Well.”
A sailor and his family’s harrowing and inspiring story of their attempt to sail the treacherous Northwest Passage.
Sprague
Theobald, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and expert sailor with
over 40,000 offshore miles under his belt, always considered the
Northwest Passage–the sea route connecting the Atlantic to the
Pacific–the ultimate uncharted territory. Since Roald Amundsen completed
the first successful crossing of the fabled Northwest Passage in 1906,
only twenty-four pleasure craft have followed in his wake. Many more
people have gone into space than have traversed the Passage, and a
staggering number have died trying. From his home port of Newport, Rhode
Island, through the Passage and around Alaska to Seattle, it would be
an 8,500-mile trek filled with constant danger from ice, polar bears,
and severe weather.
What
Theobald couldn’t have known was just how life-changing his journey
through the Passage would be. Reuniting his children and stepchildren
after a bad divorce more than fifteen years earlier, the family embarks
with unanswered questions, untold hurts, and unspoken mistrusts hanging
over their heads. Unrelenting cold, hungry polar bears, and a haunting
landscape littered with sobering artifacts from the tragic Franklin
Expedition of 1845, as well as personality clashes that threaten to tear
the crew apart, make The Other Side of the Ice a harrowing story of
survival, adventure, and, ultimately, redemption.
( TO WATCH THE OFFICIAL HD TEASER FOR “The Other Side of The Ice” [book and documentary] PLEASE GO TO: VIMEO.COM/45526226)
( TO WATCH THE OFFICIAL HD TEASER FOR “The Other Side of The Ice” [book and documentary] PLEASE GO TO: VIMEO.COM/45526226)
Buy Now @ Amazon
Genre – Memoir, adventure, family, climate
Rating – PG
More details about the author
Website www.spraguetheobald.com
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