Goodbye Greenland

Qaqortoq July 17th 2015

We are back in Qaqortoq for two nights before we leave on Saturday morning for Iceland.  Since the last blog post we have fixed our chart plotter and radar with the help of Kikik, a very friendly and helpful electronic technician with very strong negative views of the government in Nuuk - more on that later. (Kikik runs the Furuno shop and he calls Nuuk or Denmark for technical assistance- lucky!). We left Qaqortoq on Wednesday morning and motored using the inner leads to Zacharias Havn via the little fishing village of Sadrloq - see photos.  The entrance to Zacharias Havn was almost completely blocked by large ice bergs but we managed to thread our way through and anchored for the night in a quiet corner in 25 feet of water.  This anchorage unlike most around here is both completely protected and quite large.  As usual we saw no other boats.  The next morning Gregers and I took the dinghy to the end of the bay and walked across a narrow isthmus to the other side of the island.  We also went back out to the entrance to see if we could still get Ariel out - of course the bergs had all moved but there was still a narrow passage.

Our destination that morning was Unartoq, site of the Viking Hot Tub.  On the other side of the island to Zacharias Havn we passed Sydprovn another small fishing village with a somewhat more substantial dock and a large fishing boat tied up to it.  All of these villages are very picturesque when viewed from the water.  They all consist of small square house perched on the hillside overlooking the water and painted a kaleidoscope of bright colors.  On the way we were passed by two high speed passenger tour boats heading for the same destination.  There is a wooden dock in the anchorage to which the tour boats anchor and four large orange mooring buoys, three of which were available.  We picked up one of them and took the dinghy into the beach because there was no way to get onto the dock from a dinghy.  It was a short walk to a naturally heated shallow pool surrounded by rocks with a view of snow covered mountains in the background.  No shower necessary that night.

Since we arrived in Greenland we have done almost no sailing.  The winds are either light, from the wrong direction or both.  On the other hand sailing through the fjords and the inner leads is breathtakingly beautiful.  Our photographs do not really do it justice.  My comment in the last blog about the Norse was of course inaccurate.  They had more patience than I do and if the wind was blowing the wrong way down the fjord they just waited until it blew from the other direction and away they went.

After the hot tub we continued on to Nanortalik (Place of the Polar Bears) which is a small town with about 1500 inhabitants and is the furthest South population center of any size in Greenland.  We tied up alongside the end of the container dock in a rather precarious situation.  It was late, there was no one around and we decided the face of the container dock, which had more space might not be a good idea.  We arrived at high tide so getting on and off the boat was easy but figuring out how much slack to leave in the lines to accommodate low tide without running into the rocks at the root of the wall was a challenge.   As it was when I got up at 1:00 AM to check the lines three of them were tight and had to be eased some more.  At about 11:00 PM a Royal Arctic Line cargo ship arrived and tied up at the face dock (good thing we decided not to stay there) its bow about 5 feet from our stern I walked around town early next morning and I must say it was a big disappointment.  Nanortalik gets a very good write-up in the cruising guide but it is obvious the town is in serious decline.  The hotel was boarded up as was the restaurant and the whole place had a sort of neglected and sad look.  The economy in Southern Greenland is suffering and even Qaqortoq, which is a truly delightful place, is showing signs of decline.  According to Kikik the politicians in Nuuk care only about Nuuk and are seriously neglecting the more remote areas.  Greenland is a very big place with only about 56,000 inhabitants - as he says Nuuk has a government sized for 2,000,000 inhabitants and they look after their own interests and are not taking proper care of the more remote outposts.  South Greenalnd could be a wonderful summer tourist destination but they have a lot of work to do on the infrastructure to attract more people - of course we loved it without all of the people.

We decided to leave Nanortalik the next morning and return to Qaqortoq where there is a working fuel dock.  This morning we refilled the fuel tanks, replaced the dinghy on the deck and generally got Ariel ready for an offshore passage.  The forecast is light winds for the next two days with wind building from the East by the middle of the week.  Our intent is to round Cape Farewell on the 59th parallel and make as much easting as we can until the wind does turn when we should have a good sail for the rest of the way.  Anyway that is the plan and it probably won't turn out like that at all.  It is 840 miles to Reykjavik and the earliest we could arrive is late Thursday, more likely some time Friday.  No more blogs until then.  One more thing; having viewed the pictures on the blog I am disappointed to say the least.  We will be creating a link to a site which has these and other pictures with the size and definition that come direct from the camera and the quality will be orders of magnitude better.  That will not happen until Reykjavik but we will make sure it does then.