Gingerly we approached the mouth of the fjord in the half light before dawn. We had no charted depth information but at least the position of land on the chart appeared to match with what we saw by eye and by radar.
We crept into the mouth of the fjord and began the zig-zag advance against the advancing army of ice warriors now gleaming white in the morning sun.
We picked our way up the fjord for 2 miles before steering to starboard, across a 6m bar, into a deep pool littered with icebergs. The known anchorage was so tight we had to manoeuvre to our anchoring spot with bow thruster before dropping the anchor in 24m and then falling back on the chain so that we were 20m from the rocks behind with 11m of water under the rudder.
Tim and Sally were quickly into the dinghy rigging four shorelines, each 50m
long and set with one at each quarter belayed to rock flakes or chock stones. By the end we were very well tied in but a sitting duck for passing icy visitors.
And sure enough the cobweb lured the icebergs in, entangling them in itʼs
fronds of polypropylene. A big ugly brute wrapped itself around our bow which succumbed to being poked with our ice poles. We sent it packing only to have it return a few hours later to retaliate by attacking our rudder with itʼs huge underwater tongue. Itʼs plan was clearly to haunt us and intimidate us for the duration of our stay so Tim and I lassoed it from the dinghy and set up a hauling purchase whereby we managed to haul itʼs estimated 20 tons to a nearby rock to tether it and keep it out of mischief. The process was akin to a type of reverse crevasse rescue whereby a crevasse is towed to a rock! We thought we had now tamed the mischievous monster but more drama was yet to come from the miscreant.
Our ice poles were purchased for us by Roddy our Scottish born crew last year before we left Iceland. They are simple, sturdy and very cheap as one would expect from a Scot. Just 5m lengths of 2" x 2". Destinyʼs ice poles were a completely different class. They used two carbon fibre windsurfer masts stowed vertically against the shrouds and mounted in bespoke stainless steel holders. No Scottish thrift involved there!
The smaller bergs we easily kept at bay by a little pressure on the pole but the tethered miscreant cast off itʼs belay by shedding one of itʼs limbs and came limping back into the attack. Again we returned and tied him to the rock. Next he capsized and, in the process lifted off our mooring belay and set Shimshalʼs stern adrift. Again we returned it to itʼs kennel where it was punished by the sun. Now shrunken to a quarter itʼs previous size it is lying subdued, dismembered and slowly dying.
