The spinnaker adds a bit of color to the gray sky and sea.

With strong headwinds forecast, we went into a fjord to anchor off the former Moravian Church Mission site of Ramah (which I believe means “high place”). We didn’t see any sign of the old buildings, just polar bears (two adults with two cubs) and caribou.

This iceberg has hundreds of birds living on it.

In the north, storms tend to start coming in September. I wanted to be further south before the storms came (though not as far south as where the hurricanes come), so we left Baffin Island and sailed back across Hudson Strait into the Labrador Sea. We saw a few icebergs, one of which is in the picture, off to port.

Two seals enjoy the weather on a growler. We left Nannuk harbor after a few days and anchored in an unnamed harbor 8 miles NW of there. The seals were on a growler just outside of the unnamed harbor.

We figured that in such a sparsely-populated place as an anchorage on Baffin Island would be deserted. We were quite surprised when three boats motored into the anchorage. There were a total of about 10 people aboard, the Akavak family from Kimmirut and Iqaluit, who had been travelling for two weeks, hunting and fishing. They didn’t need all three boats for the next part of their trip, so were leaving one of their boats for a few days in Nannuk Harbor.

We filled our water tanks (via jerry jugs) from these convenient waterfalls close to the entrance of Nannuk Harbor. The water from the waterfalls was clean and good tasting. We chlorinated the water we put into the tanks with a small amount of chlorine bleach to keep things from growing in it.To answer George’s question, the earlier picture with the polar bears in it is of a river that flows into Nannuk Harbor, not the harbor itself. The tidal range in the harbor is about 6m, and the tide changes about every six hours.

Ted, Gabriela and I ashore in Nannuk Harbor.

Issuma at anchor in Nannuk Harbor.

We anchored in Nannuk Harbor on Baffin Island. Nannuk means polar bear in Inuktitut, so we expected we would see some. Not sure if the polar bears will be visible in this picture after it is reduced for transmission by satellite phone, but there are two of them in the picture, on the right side of the river, where the river first turns around a rocky point. Baffin Island is well north of the treeline, so there is rock visible everywhere, with small amounts of vegetation, mostly mosses, but also some blueberries. It was too cold for mosquitoes, which was nice for us, though there were some other flying, biting insects to remind us that it was still summer.