Airplanes and Icebergs
Three flights and thirty hours after leaving Manchester we stood by a lonely runway waiting for a taxi to cart our outsized baggage to the boat. The winter sea ice here has all gone but the coastline along the runway was peppered with icebergs forming a picture perfect backdrop to our departing plane as it roared skywards leaving behind an Arctic peace and a faint smell of kerosene.
The dozen or so disgorged passengers took their turn as the two town taxis shuttlecocked to and fro. Sally and I were their last load. A couple if Inuit students from Tasilaq, a Danish refrigeration engineer and a French couple in oilskins and sea boots were amongst those deposited in Aasiaat today. The French were joining a commercial yacht for a week of adventure cruising in Disko Bay.
Jens is the operations manager of the shipyard and had been care-taking Shimshal for the winter. He only has a few words of English and, ‘not good’ were the ones on his lips today. We had tasked him in March with dropping the rudder and welding up the bracket for the bottom bearing. He stalked off into his office to find a technical drawing of the snag he had run into. Corroded, dissimilar metals meant that an easy job had hit a brick wall as the rudder stock refused to drop out of the upper bearing housing. He was full of gloom and doom but seemed to brighten a little when we proposed a solution that didn’t involve dropping the rudder. He agreed he would get it sorted just as soon as his welder is back off sick leave. He has been off for 10 days!
With no real idea of when repairs might happen or when we might launch Sally and I set about the slow task of reversing the considerable layup works we had done last August. Off came the winter cover and on went the spray hood. Down below the boat was bone dry and had thawed out gently. So far no untoward developments have been detected but we continue to have a nagging uncertainty about when and how the rudder will get fixed.
Tomorrow we will dig a little deeper and see if the electrics and plumbing has survived. We will get some heat on and, with luck, flush through the antifreeze and connect up the gas so that we can cook and move on board from the Fisherman’s Mission.