Author: Myron ArmsPublisher: Doubleday
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Book Description
For twenty-four hours after leaving Gotthabsfiord, Brendan's Isle races before strong easterly winds, skidding down the faces of following seas, vibrating and shuddering, throwing a curtain of spray from her bows, carving a line of white foam in her wake. The knot-meter ticks ten, eleven, twelve knots as she surfs downhill, surrounded by streaks of spindrift and flanked by long, breaking crests....We'll keep three on watch at all times tonight, I decide, and we'll rotate a radar operator and a person on the bow every half hour, adding an extra lookout forward if we get into heavy ice conditions. We'll run at speed directly for Saglek Bay -- a fiord in the Tourgat Mountains with a decent anchorage near its mouth that is protected from the north. And we'll cross our fingers, rub every lucky stone, and kiss every four-leaf clover we can find -- hoping we make it safely through.By any account, the impenetrable barrier of sea ice that blocked the Brendan's Isle halfway up the Labrador Coast should not have been there in July, in what was one of the hottest summers on record only a hundred miles to the south. Frustrated and mystified at having to turn back so early in his 1991 northbound voyage, sailor Myron Arms became determined to explain the unsettling anomaly.Three years later, having pursued this obsession from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Arms took his f
