Stuck in the Ice = No Vacation
I was scheduled to go on another trip aboard the Kapitan Khlebnikov, this time circumnavigating Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. Yesterday afternoon I received a call from the tour operator that the trip was being canceled because the Khlebnikov (a 123-meter Russian icebreaker) was stuck in the ice near Barrow, Alaska during it’s Nortwest Passage tour and wouldn’t be able to get to Resolute, Nunavut, Canada (the embarkation point for our voyage) in time for our trip. Damn. My first thought was “That sucks,” my second thought was “I’m glad I’m not on the Northwest Passage trip.”
Doing a little reasearch on the web, I learned from a CBC news story that there were actually three icebreakers stuck in the ice off Barrow. In addition to the Khlebnikov, the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Sir Wilfrid Laurier and US Coast Guard icebreaker Healy were also stuck. Here’s the story: http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/northwest-passage/logbook.html.
The USCGC Healy has extensive information available on the web, including mission information, tracking map and pictures from it’s webcam.
The Healy and is back on the move, but I grabbed a some of the data and images from the past week so you can see what they’ve been up against, after the cut…
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