Member-only story
I recently returned from a research sail through the Denmark Straits and I couldn’t be more in awe of mother nature.
We sailed aboard the gaft-rigged ketch Tecla out of Isafjordur, Iceland, bound for Greenland. We were thirteen women and men on a hundred-foot steel-hulled sailing vessel. As we cleared the steep-sided fjord and sailed out into the bay past towering headlands, we saw a humpback whale breach.
It rose straight out of the water, extended enormous knobby flippers, rotated and fell on its side with a large splash. We sailed on, and another wheeled before us.
Further out, white-beaked dolphins streaked, exhaled, and splashed in the bow waves at the front of our boat.
Gray and white fulmars with outstretched wings carved the sky and nearly scratched the sea. And then there were icebergs.
