Our Boat Gets Entangled in a Fishing Net (Sailing Greenland)

We are here on the west coast of Greenland, still blissfully unaware of the unexpected trouble waiting ahead. We'll be sailing north through the fog and icebergs and we'll run into serious issues when our boat gets caught in a discarded fishing net. Our destination is the town of Aasiat, which we hope to reach within a few days. Welcome along! Let's go Nova. Yeah, let's go. Good morning. Today we are getting straight into it. We are heading into this narrow channel. We are heading through this channel and then further up the coast of west Greenland. This first obstacle here is a little bit tricky. Like you can see there's a lot of unsurveyed area and it is really quite narrow and winding and at the end there's at least one more really interesting looking obstacle. I haven't even had my morning coffee yet so this might not be so great. We are heading into the narrowest section here at the entrance. It looks like it's almost completely blocked off but there should be a way around on the western shore. It is now approaching high tide again. We've timed it so that we are gonna be going through here at approximately high tide. So let's see. Yeah there's some current here too. Yeah now it's again 10 meters but it was three meters for a little bit at the shallowest spot and the current is really like pushing us around. Really pretty though. Very pretty. All right we are past the first narrow part and I have my coffee from my very limited edition mug. Only one of these was made but it wasn't good enough quality so didn't make it into production. Anyway we are past the first shallow part of the channel and here I have to give a little bit of a plug to Raymarine and the new lighthouse charts. They now offer coverage also for Greenland. Of course there's a lot of unsurveyed areas but that's just because the data is missing. There's just no data available. But if we do a quick comparison here. So this is where we are going now and let's try the other charts that we also have for Greenland and Iceland. And as you can see in this one there's no soundings at all. And as you can see we even went over a rock here on this chart and I believe that earlier on you know we were literally like traveling on land here. So it really does make a difference as to what kind of charts you use and the lighthouse charts for Greenland are really good and I also like the color scheme on this quite a lot. It looks a little bit more like the traditional raster charts. The other feature that we use a lot with the lighthouse charts is the ReelBathy seabottom mapping. So what it does is it logs the readings from our depth transducer and then records the data and shows it here on the map. And here you can see we went through this shallow area that was also uncharted. It just shows how it got shallower and then here was the shallowest part which is also shown in this light red. And all of that is really useful because then I can keep an eye on how quickly it's getting shallower or deeper just by looking at our track and looking at the new map that the ReelBathy is making for us. And then the next time that we go through here, say we go through the shallow section, I can go like okay last time we went through here it was six meters at the shallowest so as long as my depth sounding is showing minimum of six meters then I should be good. So we use that a lot and the other thing that we use it for is for anchoring. So here you can see the spot where we anchored yesterday and this is also uncharted area and even if it was charted you know it's really useful to be able to just go around and here I was checking the depths and it's really nice to be able to see this in an easy format as you are kind of like mapping the depths around the anchorage. Okay this is the last narrow section of this channel. It's a little bit interesting. I don't really like the look of this shore here. It's like there's like rocks and all kinds of stuff. Here on the starboard side it looks deeper. Still seems to be 10 to 12 meters deep here. Just as Sofi said that there's no other boats, there is a boat. Beautiful summer day. It's not always like this in Greenland. You might get the wrong idea from the videos but because we are not on a schedule right now what we do is we sit and wait at an anchorage for nice weather and that's when we sail. You know why would you go into bad annoying weather if you don't really have to. So when we are coastal sailing we usually take our time. I'm gonna jibe here straight off the bat and then probably we'll get the headsail out as well. One of the reasons that we took the inner channel and why we are staying in shore right now is that there's a lot of fog out on the sea and it's very persistent. It's been there for a few days and it's probably gonna stay for a couple more days. There should be an island but the fog bank is so thick that I can't see any signs of the island there. It's this one that we should be seeing but no signs of it. We can see this one just emerging out of the fog right over there. If we get lucky then the fog won't push from the sea into the archipelago but if we get unlucky then we're gonna be sailing in the fog. Meanwhile we have also spotted the first iceberg here. As we go further up north there's gonna be more and more because there's more glaciers that dispatch bergs into the sea. Call us boring all you want but we will actually just keep going with the mainsail only because we are still doing five to six knots even over six knots every now and then so that's good enough for us especially because this route is very windy so we have to keep jibing and if we pull out the genoa it's just so much trouble so whatever and Sohovi and Nova are having a nap so we just take it easy. It's really quite interesting how the fog is coming in from all directions so we are kind of in our sunny bubble here it might end anytime. The sky itself is completely clear though it's blue skies when you look high above. So we're just passing by the village of Attu right now and I don't know much about it and we are not gonna stop here because the wind is just too good we are gonna continue but there's around couple hundred people living here and the special thing about these towns is that because of the winter ice in the winter there's actually like government subsidized helicopter flights like route helicopter flights from the village and now during the summer there is a fast ferry boat that connects these couple of towns that are here in this area. Nice going we're just getting inside the islands now so there will be no more waves at all. We are actually using the same route as what the ferry boats use to go north now. That's her pmat. Usually Nova pees on the far deck but when we are sailing we put the pmat on the aft deck so that she can be there. Nova don't worry, she's licking the camera. She's a sailing dog she doesn't want to come outside if the engine is on too loud it's nicer to be inside but when we are sailing and it's flat water that's fine. We've only pretty much been eating arctic char the last several days and we still have like three or four fish in the fridge but can't really complain looks quite nice. Would you like some Nova? Yes, Nova is a big girl. Top it off with some salsa and some creme fraiche. Well these icebergs here are starting to be quite big these are easily like a tennis field size maybe even a football field but we are now coming to this bay where we want to anchor there is unfortunately a couple of bergs floating around in here as well and those can be annoying when you're trying to anchor because they can if they float around and grab your anchor chain or get stuck on your anchor chain then that's kind of a problem but we'll try to find a spot here. I wanted to try and anchor here in this bay but that freaking iceberg there is exactly in the middle of it yeah this one's actually pretty big and you can see how it goes pretty deep underwater so we've decided that if we go shallow enough then the iceberg will hopefully not come on top of us during the night so i went around the anchorage couple of times just to form the map and now we're just gonna drop the anchor here in the middle there's really not a lot of space here so when it's a little bit more marginal like this then having the bottom mapping feature the reel bathy it actually makes a difference makes life a little bit easier at least i mean this one should have a draft of at least i don't know four or five meters or so i'm gonna drop the anchor here then we hope for the best just testing the anchor here and it seems to be holding yeah we are not moving okay oh yeah she's a sea dog that's why she likes the seaweed i think it's also the first iceberg that Nova sees okay that was the late evening walk it's been a really long day we did like a 12-hour sail so now back to the boat and off to bed good night all right good morning a bit of a reality check here first of all it is extremely foggy Nova and Sofi just left to go ashore and i can barely see them even though they are like 50 meters away also can just barely see the iceberg that is still looming around and as for me well let's get into the everyday life here i'm gonna go inside today's outfit by the way the trendy Hellihansen work overall it accentuates my growing belly and check out this decor provided by Nova the good thing is that this overall gathers all of the shedded fur so i'm like a walking duster here so what i'm doing now is i'm gonna sit on my laptop for a few hours i'll use this moment of silence that everyone else is gone and try and concentrate on some work this is what we do a lot of you know we just sit on our laptops it's just not really shown on the videos because it's not all that interesting you know i don't know how much of this you'd like to see but this is what we do all the time you know we work full time and it's kind of hard to fit that together with the sailing life to be honest you know that's like one of our biggest challenges that we cannot just sail and plan everything around sailing we also have to get some work done it would be life would be a lot easier if you didn't have to work but i'm sure that most of you are aware of that now a couple hours of work then we hope that the dust the fog hopefully tapers off a little bit and then we are gonna head off on our way again Hey, the sun is shining here! So we noticed a lot of plastic trash here on the shore so i'm going to fly an automated drone mission this is one of the first times that i do it but basically the drone is going on this predetermined flight path and it's going to map the whole shoreline in this small area it takes photos that overlap a little bit and then i upload everything into a cloud and into this research project which maps all of that and then it uses AI to detect the trash this stuff is actually pretty cool i use a computer to plan the flight and the drone actually doesn't really support it natively because it's not it's just a cheap consumer drone but there's kind of a hack around it and just as i'm flying the next mission there's whales like right next to us there's whales right there i was listening to this sound of the whales blowing okay i have to get us out of here and then we're gonna clear the seaweed afterwards oh we might be a little bit stuck on something oh we might be stuck on a rope it's a line we're stuck on a line it's a line yeah yeah yeah yeah it was a line and a fishing net yeah so if it wasn't clear that mess had wrapped up all around our rudder sorry our anchor there was some line and a fishing net and a bunch of uh bunch of seaweed or kelp um so yeah that was not so great but it looks like nothing's oh my god okay now so he said we have wrapped up in something else now No, but we are somewhere Now we are moving all right and then we drove over some more fishing gear apparently so we saw some stuff go under the boat and after that we you know all of that stuff disappeared it didn't come back afloat again so the issue is we are afraid that something is stuck on our rudder or i don't really know where because the keel was up and we have checked we took the centerboard out we can't see anything here can't see anything around the rudder we just want to make absolutely sure so i'm keeping the engine in reverse i only i only reversed out of the bay i barely managed to do it and now we are kind of more of in an open area so i'm not gonna engage the forward gear because i'm afraid that if something is stuck let's say on the in our keel or keel box then if i go forward it might get wrapped around the propeller and then we are kind of screwed all right then this thing i'm gonna go inside to look at the footage from the this is like the best way honestly to to look at the underwater stuff it's pretty effective you can see here with the 360 degree camera it's not a good quality picture but you can pan it around and so you can see our bottom paint is clearly falling out we've had the same bottom paint for a few years now and we have some nice kelp growing on the rudder and then i'm sticking it through the rear decker board box and you can see that the yeah the propeller is free the rudder is free there's nothing there between the rudder and the these are our anodes here then have a look from the side of the boat nothing here honestly the honestly the bottom paint is holding up pretty well because there's only some growth at the waterline this is the bow section from the other side i don't see anything and then the keel i think yeah the back of the keel yeah i don't see anything yeah no we are okay it's okay nova i don't see anything so we'll just say that it was fine it's probably it was probably some kind of stuff that's been laying there for ages and maybe it's like partly submerged or whatever and that's why i also didn't see it but we should be good now okay now i'll try to put the gear forward and if we survive that then we call it good good idea by the way to have rope knives somewhere close by always available we always have some like this one on the pedestal we have one here on the vang and one is here at the anchor but and as you saw all three of those were in use by the time we got rid of the first obstacle the fishing net it's not just for getting rid of stuff that's stuck to your hull but also even more importantly it's like if you have a person get stuck on on a sheet you know like somehow get tangled up with the genoa sheet or something that's with something that's under tension it can be really dangerous when you're sailing if someone gets tangled up on one of the control lines so good to have some kind of a knife always handy i prefer to have them here rather than have it on your person because i don't know i'm not gonna like wear or have a knife in my pocket all the time i'd probably forget about that anyway and these are the swedish mora knives and this is a special version with a with a you know stubby head and serrated edge so they're only really made for cutting ropes and i believe it's stainless steel as well so these are now three years old and they are still holding up the fog is coming these two moving targets here these two small ones they are gonna be small power boats they are moving very quickly i don't have them i don't have a target set up for them but you can see they are moving past us really quickly those are small power boats then this one we are heading almost straight for it it's gonna be a really big iceberg here you see this one or well that's what i think it probably is but i can't see anything so it's either a big iceberg or a ship at anchor but in these parts more likely to be an iceberg now it's 0.25 miles away and i was hoping to see it but nothing to be seen it should be right there it's actually not warm here it's like plus four degrees here keep in mind that this is the warmest time of the year the warmest time of the whole summer right now but now we also have our first growlers the first small bits of ice honestly those are more annoying than the larger bits because the ones we can see on the radar and the larger ones are usually just grounded somewhere here but these smaller ones that are floating around are really annoying because you really have to keep a watch all the time okay we decided we probably had enough drama for today so we decided to head to Aasiat and into the harbor but these harbors are so crowded so let's see if there's any space for us we can raft up to this this other sailboat here so that's nice yeah i think this is the best spot in the harbor we have some nice neighbors that allowed us to raft up to them and we are actually on this abandoned island this was used for like fishing industry or whatever but there's nothing happening there anymore so it's actually quite nice because this dock here is nice and quiet and they now have these two barges here which means that it's like a floating pontoon dock which is really rare in Greenland and it's not a real pontoon but it moves up and down with the tides which really is helpful anyway now we'll go to bed and tomorrow i think we'll explore the town a little bit we are going to town and the biggest question of the day is will we find a shower yeah i think we will if there is a will there is a way is it possible to use a shower yeah two showers yeah all right i give this shower a six out of ten it is clean you get fresh towels but for 50 krone that's a i don't know it's a little bit expensive minus points for bad airflow and it's quite hot in here i'm not complaining though it's nice to get unlimited hot water every now and then i feel so fresh now ready to take on the city that's the bank that's the shipyard what do you think should we haul out in here well we don't have that many options let's check out the harbor sailboat with a Greenland flag pallets are like the universally accepted storage solution for boats looks a little bit tippy to me police station not many places in the world where you can just chill out on the parking lot of a gym and look at some icebergs so disco bay is gonna be over there and that's where the icebergs come from that's the school i guess asiat has about 3 000 inhabitants which makes it one of the bigger towns in greenland the backbone of the town comes from fishing and fish processing but there is a growing tourism sector as well being the biggest town in the area it also serves as original service and logistics hub for the someone's getting married let's go and check the damage if the little rascal has been up to something usually she's very good at being alone though so that's that's a good thing yeah nothing has been destroyed so i guess that's good this is a dog channel now i hope you enjoyed the video these summer videos don't really always reach as wide of an audience as the winter videos i mean they are not quite as sensational maybe so if you have made it this far you are part of the core group that really keeps this channel going and if you really want to keep the channel alive the best way to do so is by joining my patreon patrons get early access to new episodes and ad for your viewing and there's also a private whatsapp chat group and even a live boat tracker thanks so much for watching and for your consideration and i will see you all next time bye bye