Revenge Of The Sea Ice

Our anchorage at Pyramiden seemed ideal, good holding, a spectacular view of Nordenskiold glacier and a visiting piece of sea ice that was large enough for Frances to stroll on with a brightly colored beach umbrella. Though the sheet of ice was four times the size of Snow Dragon, they seemed to coexist without incident. Suddenly the wind picked up, filling the bay with ice, and the friendly ice sheet began pushing against Snow Dragon.

We are not sure if the ice was more offended by being walked on or the bright colored umbrella but needless to say we got the message: the ice wanted us gone. The only thing preventing us from a speedy departure was that the objecting piece of ice was sitting on top of our anchor. This normally would not have been a problem but in this instance the ice was pushing us towards shore.

In effort to let the ice move past without having to cut our anchor loose, Frances dumped all 120 meters of anchor chain into the water while Krystina maneuvered Snow Dragon around the large sheet of ice. The anchor was pulling us towards deeper water but the combination of ice and wind pushing against Snow Dragon’s bow made it questionable how much longer the anchor would continue to hold. The ice had already managed to push us into shallow water where Snow Dragon found herself firmly aground.

While pulling the anchor up from under the ice, our powered windlass stopped functioning and we resorted to pulling 60 meters of chain manually. Two and half hours into our ice dispute, we finally got the anchor up and managed to motor Snow Dragon off the mud. By this time the wind had dropped and the ice had left the bay.

Snow Dragon escaped from her unscheduled shore visit without any damage and headed back to Longyearbyen to spend a couple days free of ice. On our way, we discovered that the anchor windlass had only flipped its circuit breaker when it sensed that it was being overworked. With a flip of the switch the windlass was back in action.

Once we got settled, Frances suited up in multiple layers of dive gear and went down to double check that there was no hidden damage. Everything looked good and Frances took a few moments to do a bit of recreational diving before getting out of the freezing water.

     (photo courtesy of Twinga)