6-Sept-24 Baffin Bay
Clocks move forward another hour. Four days on trot. There’s a few looking tired. Quite rough in the night. Ship creaking and groaning like an old galleon. In the swell. But. Surprisingly do manage to have a cinnarizine and wine induced sleep. For 11hrs. Having gone to bed at about 2130hrs. Like old folk. Being more a midnight to 1am type of going to bed chap. Much needed lie in.
Like Christmas morning as a kid. Open curtains to discover it’s snowing. Flurries here and there. Then a quick blizzard. Then flurries. Flurrying across the white horses. Swell’s up.
And then bright blue sky and sun. For the rest of the day. Warm enough to stand at the bow observation deck in jumper as ship acts as a wind break from the northerlies/westerlies. This is the life. A life on the ocean waves. Passing one cargo ship. Second seen in two days.
Leisurely day catching up on diary and blog. You lucky people.
Did you know that sedimentary rocks are formed by weathering or chemical erosion of existing rocks or dead bodies of animals. White Cliffs of Dover are obviously chalk, calcium carbonate. But did you know these were formed by the calcium carbonate shells of algae over one to three million years? Just think about that for a moment. The White Cliffs of Dover are one gigantic graveyard of algae.
In England we have Old Red sandstone. The red colour is caused by iron oxide representing about 1% of the sandstone. Means that the area was a desert.
Limestone on the other hand is formed by dead animal shells and thus denotes that the area was a sea. Millions of years ago.
Another day’s sailing to Greenland. Greenland has a massive ice cap. So heavy it has caused the earth to sink. And earth below the ice cap is below sea level. Glaciologist shows an animated velocity map. Fascinating. Shows the velocity of the glaciers flowing down from the ice cap into all the smaller fjords. Glaciers formed by snow. More snow. Some more snow. And then some. Over millions of years. Snow on top of snow compacts and over millions of years compacts with the pressure to form clear ice at the bottom of a glacier.
Shown a clip from a film called ‘Chasing Ice’ (www.chasingice.com). Which shows a glacier calving. Massive chunks of ice rearing up from the glacier before plunging into the water. There’s no sense of scale. Only when Lower Manhattan is superimposed across the film do you realise that the massive chunks of ice are skyscraper sized. Unbelievable footage. Go watch.
Navigation lecture is both useful and informative. In Europe and the Rest of the World you pass a red buoy with it on your port/left side. A green buoy you pass with it on your starboard/right side. But. In USA and Canada it’s the opposite way around. Allegedly to confuse the British during the American War of Independence.
I nautical mile = 1 minute of latitude. 1 nautical mile = 1.15 statute (land) miles. 1 nautical mile per hour = I knot. 1 nautical mile = 1,852m.
The stuff you learn on this blog.
And then, important matters. Whisky War. In Baffin Bay is Hans Island. Exactly half way between Canada and Greenland. Both agreed the border would skip over it. As it was uninhabited and so insignificant. Until. Denmark landed. Placed a flag and bottle of schnapps. To claim it as Danish.
Which wound the Canadians up.
So they landed. Planted own flag. With a bottle of Canadian whisky.
So another bottle of Danish schnapps was placed. So the story goes.
This humorous diplomatic incident became known as the Whisky War.
Hansa Island now split between the two countries.
