Around the Americas

A 64-foot, steel-hulled sailboat cleared the jetties at dawn Oct. 13 and made its way into Charleston Harbor. It’s hard to say what’s more amazing — where the yacht came from or the fact that it could.

The Ocean Watch sailed the fabled Northwest Passage across the top of the world, the once-mythical route through the Arctic ice that generations of sailors died trying to find. The ice is retreating at such a significant rate that the passage is now being opened as a seasonal shipping route.

The crew is a set of experienced trans-oceanic sailors and environmental educators. They thought they knew what they would find but ended up a little shocked at the dramatic impact of the shrinking ice on humans and wildlife.

“It’s a lot more drastic than anybody thought up there,” said First Mate Dave Logan.

Zeta Strickland, a Pacific Science Center educator, tells about talking with George Divoki, who has spent 33 years studying sea birds on a spit in the ocean off Barrow, Alaska. In all that time, he saw one polar bear, which swam to the spit, looked around and swam back. This summer, Divoki saw a new polar bear every day. And now they’re stealing nest eggs for food. He now carries a gun and sleeps in a shed instead of a tent.

“He said, ‘I don’t know about climate change, but I believe in polar bears,’ ” Strickland said.

The crew is on a trip “Around the Americas,” running from Seattle through the Northwest Passage from Seattle, then south to round deadly Cape Horn in South America and finally back to Seattle. During its stop in Charleston, Ocean Watch was hauled out of the water for routine hull maintenance and to replace its large propeller — which the crew opted for during the Arctic portion of the voyage through the ice — for a more efficient prop more suitable for the remaining offshore sailing passages. The crew also took the time to make a presentation on its voyage at the Charleston Public Library.

The effort is sponsored by the science center and Sailors of the Sea, a nonprofit advocacy group promoting coastal ocean restoration and protection in the boating community. The purpose of the “Around the Americas” voyage is to collect data on ocean conditions and produce educational programs on ocean health.

And, oh yeah, to have an excellent adventure. The trip has been all of that so far. Strickland, on her first real sea voyage, talks about watching in horror as the ship heeled over in rough waters so that the Arctic Ocean was fuming at the rails.

“I would look over at the guys and they would be totally chill, so I’d say, OK. This is all right,” she said.

The boat’s captain is Mark Schrader, a veteran around-the-world sailor whom Charleston may best know as the former director of the Around Alone race when it was based in the city.

After clearing the treacherous Diamond Shoals off North Carolina and leaving behind “gale (winds) in the nose and the Gulf Stream” that pushed the boat more than 100 miles farther out to sea, Schrader was finally able to relax a bit in Charleston in mid October.

The Ocean Watch ran on engines for much of the Northwest Passage, a 900-mile trek that is said to have some 50,000 mammoth icebergs floating loose.

How was that?

“Nerve wracking,” Strickland said.

“Unnerving,” Logan said. The passage was odd moments and odyssey.

Near the top of the world they came across two Englishmen in a 17-foot rowboat who were making a run out of Hudson Bay and around to Alaska to raise money for a charity.

The crew gave them “a cup of tea and spot of rum” and some other pick-me-ups.

Strickland now wears an inukshuk-carving medallion on a necklace. Inukshuks are stone cairns in the shape of people that Inuits leave along the Arctic barrens as way markers. The individual designs are information boards for other Inuits, telling where they are, where to go and what might be around them.

Strickland talks about the ship pulling in to anchorage in barrens so desolate she felt like they were the first humans ever to see them, raising the binoculars, spotting an inukshuk, then picking out another and another.

The medallion is a reminder to her of what the trip means — “a way to find your way through.”

Sources: The Post and Courier, aroundtheamericas.org