Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [89]
We’ve traveled to this remote spot in search of a famous shipwreck for The Sea Hunters. This is our northernmost adventure. The team includes Mike Fletcher, his son Warren (our dive co-coordinator and underwater cameraman), land cameramen Marc Pike and camera and soundman John Rosborough. We rendezvoused in Iqualuit, the capital of Nunavut, where we took a small chartered plane across Baffin Bay to Aasiaat, where we boarded Mary West for the last leg of a thirty-six-hour trip.
Aasiaat, a small coastal settlement, allows the team to either familiarize, or in some cases, like mine, to refamiliarize, ourselves with the Arctic. For me, that involves a walk to the harbor front where Inuit hunters and fishermen are busy butchering fish and seals. One of the great delicacies of the Arctic is raw fresh seal—or so I’ve been told, somehow having missed this treat on previous northern expeditions. But now, standing on the shores of Aasiaat, with John Rosborough pointing a running camera right at me, how can I refuse the bloody chunk of fresh seal liver that the cheerful hunter is offering me?
With a smile, I pop the oozing morsel into my mouth, slowly savoring each chewy bite. I must look like I really enjoy it, because my gracious host cuts off a bit of fresh seal blubber and hands it to me. It truly is an honor and a gift not to be refused, so I pop that in, too, finishing off my snack by smacking my lips and licking the blood and glistening fat off my fingertips. He offers me another bite, but I politely decline with “Thanks, I’ve already had a big lunch.” We both laugh. Feeling fully reintegrated with the Arctic and like I’ve just swallowed a glass of oil in which sardines have been soaked, I rejoin the rest of the crew for the voyage across Disko Bay.
Qeqertarsuaq is a beautiful town, nestled against high cliffs that at present are carpeted with a summer bloom of grass and flowers. The tops of the cliffs are capped with snow, and in the distance, the solid mass of a glacier that covers the center of the island gleams in the sunlight. The houses, built on the crests of the rocks that line the coast and on the small bay that forms the harbor, are a well-kept array of brightly painted red, blue, green, orange and yellow buildings. Some of them, like the Qeqertarsuaq Museum, are old, dating to the nineteenth century. The museum, formerly the home of the inspektor, the government official in charge of this coast, was built in 1840. Solidly constructed of heavy beams atop a stone foundation, its red walls now contain displays that tell the history of the settlement’s Inuit and Danish inhabitants.
Here, we meet the museum’s director, Elisa Evaideen, and Karl Tobiassen, “an old Greenlander” who knows where all the wrecks on the coast are. Karl points across the harbor to a small cove, known to the locals as K’uigssarssuak, and says that that is where Fox ended her days. More surprisingly, he also tells us that, on the way in, we’d passed a small island, Qeqertaq, where a tall, red-painted metal stack stands as a navigational marker. It is the smokestack or funnel of Fox, taken off the wreck and recycled. Nothing goes to waste in the Arctic.
With the help of our host, the Arktisk Station, and its director, Bente Jessen Graae, we borrow an inflatable boat to reach the wreck site. We refill our dive tanks every day at the local fire hall (there are no dive shops north of 60 degrees). All this helps us to take advantage of the rare opportunity to dive down into history beneath the waters of the Arctic. Pulling into K’uigssarssuak’s small cove, we realize we