October 2nd 2007

TELEGRAPH BLOG DAY 9

I was on iceberg watch this morning, it was very cold, quite dark, windy and wet but exciting none the less. It involved standing in the bow of the boat – starboard side, windward - and watching out for massive chunks of ice in our path. The rule is - if it’s bigger than a car, shout and flap your arms so that whoever is steering at the back can make the necessary adjustments on the sluggish rudder and avoid a collision. When I arrived at 07.58 to take over the watch from Ben, we were breathlessly sliding less than a foot away from a chunk the size of a small bus, so I knew the stakes were high. In fact the mouth of Scorsebysund (where we were this morning) is the place where the berg that holed and sunk the Titanic is believed to have come from. In the dark it’s hard to tell the difference between the white horses on the top of the epic waves whipped up by the sea here and what might be a fatal lump of broken off glacier or a jagged plate of sea ice.

The Noorderlight reached the edge of the ice, clinging to the Liverpool coast of Greenland, a long way inside the Arctic Circle, yesterday evening. There it was, a reflective blueish bank of frozen sea with hundreds of lumps in front, from G&T sized cubes all the way up to ones more akin to a tennis court. It was unimaginably exciting; some of us ran inside and played ‘Ice Ice Baby’ by Vanilla Ice on the Ipod. Having been at sea with nothing to look at for 6 days the sight of anything that gives definition to the view is a visual feast. It’s hard to explain but if you imagine you’ve had the most boring bowl of soup in the world sitting ominously in front of you for a week, then, quite suddenly someone thinks to put croutons in it, it blows your mind.

None of us on board had anticipated the possibility that we would be boat bound for so long (approaching day 8 without even a glimpse of land). Tempers are being held somewhere between friendly hysteria and a low, tooth-grinding, mutinous resentment. The fact that we are still in here is no-one’s fault. It’s the moving, melting, ice – so possibly Jeremy Clarkson’s fault, but even by my standards that is a stretch. Personally I had imagined that by now I would have seen several polar bears, probably with cubs, ridden on the back of a whale, understood the full extent of climate change, modelled a solution, leapt across a glacial lake and made friends with an Inuit called Nukukbluktuk but none of these has happened. We passed a bucket in the sea the other day, but apart from that just a lot of time, missing my family terribly and feeling guilty that I’m away and not achieving much, other than ticking off days hoping something better will happen soon. Solving the problem of how to talk about climate change so that people don’t get frosty or defensive would be worth missing my children for but so far this seems like a rip off. We need to feel a bit of land beneath our boots, and crucially have a day or two without the threat of bad weather and iceberg collisions. It’s not that we don’t talk on the boat, but we are all still coping more than communicating. The two-hour shifts, twice a day, break up most conversations as people peel off to get cold and wonder whether Greenland really exists at all. In truth most of us are a bit board and belligerent.

The latest news is that Scorsebysund, the idyllic Arctic fjord destination, we have clung to hopefully through seasickness, despair and fear… is closed. It has ice across its mouth – brilliant - that mouth is frozen shut and Clarkson keeps talking. Scorsebysund was to be the point from which various wonderful artists were to begin whatever adventure they had planned and I would start turning the message of global warming into jokes for my tour when I return. We are now heaving over open sea again, heading east (precisely the wrong way) following a tongue of ice sticking out into the sea. When we reach the end we will turn round it and hopefully find a fjord, further down the Greenland coast, but to be honest I’d rather head south and get to Iceland, check into a big carbon generating hotel and start negotiating for an early release to be back with my lovely wife. I won’t of course, but this relentless sailing is trying my patience.

My latest thoughts as to why so many of us (myself included) are unable to substantially change our lifestyles to reduce our undeniable contribution to global warming are that we are convinced that science will fix it somehow. Magic if necessary, but problem is the magician doesn’t know how. Scientists can tell us what’s going on and even predict what might happen at the end of the show, but they don’t have a magic fix for the problem. So we’re all sitting staring at the brightly lit stage watching a git in a starry cape and hat saw a woman in half. There’s blood everywhere and her legs have already stopped moving. She’s screaming and pleading for help but no one’s saying anything because in the end the magician always makes it right. I think I might be in the camp of people who are really sure she’s being killed but are too worried about spoiling the show to say… ‘erm, does anyone else think we ought to be doing something?’

Greenland, tomorrow… please.