Shipmates for life

ABOARD THE CCGS AMUNDSEN – After two weeks I’ve finally figured out what I’m doing here on the icebreaker: I’m “embedded” much like a war correspondent with troops in Afghanistan.

My troops are the 40 Coast Guard crew and 41 scientific personnel on board. Like a war correspondent, I depend on them for my safety, shelter, food and – most importantly – my stories.

The parallels are eerie. I’m not supposed to leave the ship (equivalent of a military base) without clearance. Out on the ice, I’m always accompanied by someone with a gun (for polar bears.) Travel is on their snowmobiles or heavy duty snow cat (in Afghanistan it’s light-armoured vehicles).

Peter Calamai

Researchers Ralf Staebler and Klaus Hochheim launch a weather balloon from the helicopter platform at the stern of the icebreaker Amundsen. The balloon ascended to 20 kilometres, radioing back readings on wind direction and speed, temperature and humidity.

They look out for me in other ways too. When I was stumbling around on the deck with frosted-over spectacles the other day, Myriam Paquet-Gauthier, a “matelot” or seaman, gently guided me to the entryway. I try to do my bit by checking other faces for hints of frostbite and lending a hand with simple tasks (although just staying out of the way is my biggest contribution.)

Inevitably, the normal cautious separation between disinterested reporter and subject disappears, much like it does in war zones.

We’ve chorused Happy Birthday to our shipmates and together scoured corners for the miniature chocolate eggs secreted by some unknown Easter Bunny.   

It would be impossible – no, downright inhuman – to remain disinterested when someone with whom you’ve shared a life-altering exposure to the Arctic is obviously feeling joy or pain.

So I’m rooting – and not that quietly -- that Maike Kramer from the University of Kiel manages to incubate the thousand-plus rotifers she needs from that chest of sea ice. Or that a balky laser doesn’t create any more woes for Jeff Seabrook from York University. And I’m crossing my fingers in the hope that a crucial missing instrument component turns up for someone who will remain anonymous.

I realized my embedded position just a couple of evenings ago when, after several hours of minor tribulations, two researchers finally managed to release the first weather balloon on this leg of the Amundsen’s expedition.

As the white sphere rose rapidly from the helicopter deck, someone was imploring “Go, go, go.”

It was me.

 

Throwing a wrench in the works

ABOARD THE CCGS AMUNDSEN—Put a wrench or a screwdriver down within reach of anybody aboard this icebreaker and they’ll pick it up and fix a piece of equipment or machinery with it.

PETER CALAMAI PHOTO

Research technician Sylvain Blondeau carries out repairs under a water sampling apparatus assisted by Pascal Massot, both with the University of Laval.

(With the exception of the two reporters/writers, that is, one of whom sometimes has problems merely connecting his laptop.)

You’d expect such mechanical dexterity from the Coast Guard crew on the Amundsen. After all they’re often all on their own thousands of miles from the nearest hardware store, much less the closest repair shop. So if they can’t fix something, it stays broken.

Yet too many people think of research scientists as nerds wearing white lab coats and peering at computer monitors or grasping foaming test tubes.

That outdated stereotype is really warped here on a ship out in the midst of the frozen Arctic Ocean. A walk around the labs shoehorned into crannies and deck containers reveals example upon example of inventiveness with rubber hoses, bungee cords, clamps (plastic and metal), foam board, alligator clips and that reliable stand-by, tin foil.

Sure there are fragile custom-made glass components for air sampling that cost $800 a pop. But there are also passive air samplers cobbled together out of two stainless steel salad bowls, a threaded rod and a few washers and spacers (total cost: about $25).

When the researchers can’t fix something themselves, they turn to the ship’s experts, like the busy electrician Rémi Bisaillon who performs  miracles by the hour such as hooking up a 240-volt European air pump that’s 50 metres away from the ship (with distance, voltage drops and amperage rises).

Or the scientists turn to research technicians such as Sylvain Blondeau from Laval University, who works with colleagues Luc Michaud and Pascal Massot. It’s not exaggerating to say that without these three a lot less science would be accomplished on and off the Amundsen.

For example, Sylvain used heaters to unblock a frozen fuel line in the Bombardier BR ski cab, which had died five kilometers away from the ship. He taught himself hydraulics to commission a 10-tonne A-frame winch when the ship sailed before the manufacturers could finish the job. And over the past several days he brought the winch back to life from its winter hibernation on the port foredeck

Perforating the ice to free the ship took its toll on the Amundsen’s population of gas-powered augers and chain saws and it was Sylvain and colleagues who patched up the mechanical causalities and sent them back into the front lines.

Just this morning Sylvain was squirming under the water-sampling apparatus called a rosette to repair a flange, with Pascal assisting. They had to remove the recalcitrant part and clamp it in a vise in the ship’s machine shop.

When a bolt sheared off, they didn’t even swear. That part is now back in working order on the rosette.

 

Sundogs smile on icebreaker

ABOARD CCGS AMUNDSEN—After a run of bad luck, the Amundsen experienced an omen last night, and it’s turning out to have been a good one.

For almost an hour, everyone could see three suns setting off the ship’s port side. The phenomenon is called “the sun’s dogs” — or sundogs — and is visible in southern Canada under rare atmospheric conditions.

In the supercold Arctic air, conditions are much more favourable, since what’s needed is a sun low on the horizon (check), an atmosphere heavy with ice crystals (check) and an absence of smog (double check).

Acting like miniature prisms, the ice crystals bend the sun’s rays at least 22 degrees so your eye sees two mock suns, one on each side of the real thing. As the photograph here shows, the dogs are squished vertically and also have a tail stretching away from the sun.

PETER CALAMAI PHOTO

Ice crystals in the frigid Arctic air combine with a sun low in the sky to create an atmospheric phenomenon known as sun dogs.

 

An everyday rainbow is a reminder that sunlight is composed of a spectrum of colours, from red to blue. The colours have different wavelengths so they are bent or refracted different amounts by water droplets, spreading the sunlight out into a spectrum.

Something similar happens with sundogs, for which the scientific name is parhelia. If you look closely at the photograph, you’ll see the sundogs are reddish on the inner side, shading to blue on the outer.

There’s all sorts of neat physics involved in how the hexagonal ice prisms so often become aligned  horizontally as they fall through the air, the position that produces the most spectacular sundogs.

Perhaps more interesting to us, however, is that yesterday the ship was finally settled in a secure berth and today a controlled frenzy of measurements, observations and experiments is underway. Maybe the sundogs smiled on us.

 

 

This ain't no namby-pamby passenger ship

ABOARD CCGS AMUNDSEN – The icebreaker Amundsen is just like any other steamship you’ve been on – except that is crashes through metre-thick ice and all its inner workings are exposed.

Walk the 98-metre length of the ship inside on the main deck and four times you’ll have to step up six inches to pass through emergency bulkheads. Maybe passengers on cruise ships realize such doors exist but they aren’t drilled in how to operate them manually should the power fail.

Peter Calamai

Swedish researchers Agneta Fransson and Melissa Chierici of University of Gothenburg pass supplies down one the Amundsen's many stairways.

Going outside also provides a reminder that you are on a workaday vessel which, when it isn’t ferrying scientists around the Arctic, earns its pay keeping shipping lanes free of ice in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. There are genteel wood doors with glass windows – as on cruise ships – but on the main deck they open into forbidding metal vestibules from which escape is through a water-tight door.

It’s opened by spinning a wheel that engages steel rods at four corners plus the top and bottom, with a satisfying kerchunk. Exiting requires stepping up well over a foot.

There are loads more examples – the long fire axes on the corridor walls, brilliant red pipes with mystifying markings, corridor handholds draped with drying mittens.

For me, however, the most satisfying reminder that this isn’t some namby-pamby passenger ship are the dozen or more yellowing plans that have been lovingly preserved behind glass in frames and mounted on the walls of the two most heavily trafficked decks – Upper and Main.

The drawings were done in the late 1970s when this ship was built at the Burrard Dry Dock Co. Ltd. in  B.C. Hand-drawn and hand-lettered, they quietly proclaim the skill of those draftsmen and also the pride which that company took in building well.

The engine room plan is mesmerizing, with neat notations of additions and subtractions from the original design. Even more remarkable are the drawings of the ship’s intestines – the bilge and ballast pumps – and its dual circulation systems  -- for fuel oil and fresh water.

The drawings also reveal some of what was lost when the Franklin, the name by which this ship was commissioned, was saved from the scrapyard and converted into a floating centre for Arctic research.

The Franklin boasted a substantial gymnasium and also a “hobby room,” both sacrificed to housing 40 researchers and their equipment. As well the ship originally had cabins reserved for “hydrographers” and “ice observers.” These have vanished too with the loss of some maritime romance in the bargain.

There’s one aspect of the Franklin/Amundsen’s design that doesn’t come across that well in the drawings, both historical and modern.

That’s the stairs. From the bridge to the main deck embraces five flights of stairs, with narrow treads and steep risers. In all, there are 55 steps. Then there are all the stairs outside and a further 15 steps down into the engine room, off limits without special permission.

On the Amundsen many people probably go up and down a thousand steps in a day. I’m sure that I’m managing at least 500. Finally I’m doing the step exercises which the physiotherapists ordered after my hip replacement operation last June.

 

Fantastic feasts on-board

ABOARD THE CCGS AMUNDSEN–The secret is bound to get out so I might as well come clean: We eat very well on this icebreaker. Very, very well.

Easter dinner today, for instance, started with a choice of superb spinach soup or, for those so inclined, escargots with puff pastry. Then a main course of ham off the bone in port sauce with rice and two green vegetables. Followed by a selection of cheeses. And finally far too many dessert choices (I opted for the chocolate cake with strawberries).

All that accompanied by your selection from one of four wines ranging in price from $10 to $20 a bottle. The wine is available for sale only on Sundays and limited to a bottle per cabin, meaning a half-bottle per person in most cases.

I don't want to leave the wrong impression. In the crew cafeteria where I usually eat along with most of the scientists on board, you line up at a hatch opening into the kitchen. When finished everyone is expected to rinse off their dishes, glasses and utensils in the wash-up area.

The officers dining area, one deck further up, gets its food from the same kitchen but has table service. A few senior scientists regularly eat there, often joined by other media people on-board.

It’s a marvel that anyone had any appetite left for the sumptuous dinner this evening.

Usually breakfast on-board is from 7:30 to 8:30 to straddle the times when officers come on and off watch. But today we had a brunch beginning at 10:30 and extending past noon.

It resembled one of those all-you-can eat buffets on cruise ships, except that the dishes were of much higher quality.

Instead of lining up at the hatch, we filed through the kitchen itself where every breakfast offering from individual weekdays was on offer – fresh croissants, bacon, sausage, ham, scrambled eggs, porridge, French toast, crepes, beans, several kinds of cold salad, assorted fresh fruit and maybe a half-dozen desert choices. (Honest, I didn’t have desert at both brunch and dinner.)

Star reporter Peter Calamai (right, in red) joins crew and scientists for Easter Sunday brunch on the icebreaker Amundsen.

Lunch and dinner throughout the week are equally impressive culinary feats, especially when you remember that the Amundsen normally receives fresh fruit and vegetables only every six weeks when there is a crew change. Ingredients for the meals come mostly from stores and huge walk-in freezers originally stocked when the ship left Quebec last July 23.

So the variety and quality of the cuisine is truly a tribute to the inventiveness and skill of chef Jacques Beaudet and the two cooks, Joelle Dube and Fabien Castonguay.

Here's just a sample of main dishes from the past week – blanquette de veau, sole meuniere, linguini Alfredo,  turkey tetrazini, pork filet a la Dijonnaise, asparagus quiche and – believe it or not – pizza (either meat or vegetarian) with French fries. Plus a choice of two desserts every day, including tarte au citron, tarte au sucre, tapioca and a decadent treat called gateau crunchi.

Those on-board who have also been on the scientific ships of other nations never cease to proclaim that Canada is the best, by far.

It's even said that the regular fare on the U.S. Coast Guard’s polar research icebeaker, the Healey, is wieners and beans.

Wait for me!

Peter Calamai

Environment Canada research scientist Alexandra ("Sandy") Steffen and University of Manitoba research technician Debbie Armstrong collect samples of surface snow to analyze for mercury deposited from the atmosphere.

ON THE ICE – Black exhaust smoke suddenly began billowing out of the Amundsen’s funnel, a sign that the six powerful engines were being revved up.

The Coast Guard icebreaker was only a few hundred metres away. Nonetheless it’s an alarming thought that your cozy floating home is about to steam off when the temperature is minus 32 C out on an Arctic ice floe.

Of course, that wouldn’t have happened. Our trio was in radio contact with the bridge officers. As well, the captain had said she was merely trying to shuffle the stuck ship back and forth to clear floating ice from beneath the doors of the moonpool. That’s the hole cut though the hull in the stern where sampling and recording devices can be lowered into the water, as far as the ocean floor if necessary.

Nonetheless I’ll confess to some relief when shortly afterwards Debbie Armstrong announced that she and Environment Canada research scientist Sandy Steffen had finished gathering samples of surface snow from a pristine patch they’d marked with reflectors as off-limits to snowmobiles.

The two women are part of a group on board that’s researching how mercury moves through the air, snow, ice and Arctic food chain (.pdf)(And it does some very peculiar things. More about that in the Star later).

Debbie, an ebullient and impressively accomplished research technician from the University of Manitoba,  has a firearms certificate so she was toting the polar bear rifle. A close-up glance revealed something blue was stretched over the end of the barrel.

“It’s the finger of a latex glove,” Debbie explained. “There’s so much salt out on the ice that it was getting into the guns and they were rusting.”

That was the second surprise of the morning. The first came when we arrived to be lowered by a crane down to the ice in a metal cage, like miners going to work underground.

Amundsen crew members were busily scraping ice from the deck with choppers and shovels, just as Canadians do to driveways and sidewalks. But while spring has officially arrived across the entire country, conditions are going to remain wintry up here for weeks.

Hours of toil for a ship-length of progress

ABOARD CCGS AMUNDSEN—Vincent Gagnon, the Amundsen’ helmsman at the time, was the first to notice.

“Yes, it’s moving,”  he said just after 5 o’clock.

The icebreaker’s engines had been running at full for almost an hour, starting up after the crew members and scientists spent a second three hours outside in the minus 29 degree temperature to finish perforating the ice around the part of the ship wedged tight in a floe.

Initially the propellers were running in forward gear, churning water up onto the ice beneath the ship’s hull and clearing the path behind of floating ice. Then Captain Lise Marchand switched to reverse and the floating Arctic research laboratory inched slowly backward.

Now the ship is again stuck and the same manoeuvre is being repeated.

In between, however, those on board were treated to a half-hour of ramming -- something novice icebreaker sailors known about only from movies like Pirates of the Caribbean.

In this case it wasn’t another ship being rammed but a tough pressure ridge that stretched to the far horizon horizontally in front of the ship. (The not-so-far and much more curved horizon to be scientifically precise with my clichés.)

With several assaults the ship probed the snow-topped ridge. Then it backed up a half-kilometre or so and charged ahead with all 15,000 horsepower. The Amundsen bucked over the ridge, came down clear on the other side, and stopped dead.

For all that sweat in drilling hundreds of holes and for the thousands and thousands of litres of fuel expended, we’d moved forward about a ship-length.

But we know now that we won’t be stuck here indefinitely, The ship can be moved by some combination of such devices as flooding the ice with warm water, shifting ballast or  fuel between tanks and – in the extreme – transforming ice floes into Swiss cheese.

So the scientists met tonight to map out a campaign of experiments that will draw on their brain power as much as the last two days have drawn on muscle power.

Icebreaker crew running out of options

ABOARD CCGS AMUNDSEN – The ice around the Amundsen is beginning to resemble wooden beams riddled by shipworms or, for you land-lubbers, Swiss Cheese.

Yet despite scores more perforations drilled this morning in the floe, the Amundsen is still stuck fast.

So crew and scientists are again wrestling with the heavy, stinky, gas-powered augers to drill more holes through the nearly metre-thick ice along the ship’s port side.

And Captain Lise Marchand has another trick to try to dislodge the vessel from the icy vise that grasped it late yesterday. In the next hour or so, the Amundsen’s engineers will begin pumping 50,000 litres of fuel from starboard tanks to the uppermost tanks on the port side.

This added weight should increase the leverage action of the tilted ship, with the encased keel acting like a fulcrum.

If that doesn’t free the Amundsen, it’s not clear at this point what other options are available. Cutting the ship free by hand isn’t possible because the ice at the bow end is far thicker than the biggest chainsaws on board.

Larger hand saws do exist, relics of the days when ice was taken from lakes and rivers across the country for refrigeration. In my hometown of Brantford, Ont. such saws were used every spring to cut “keys” in the frozen Grand River to reduce the risks of flooding,

It’s hardy feasible to do that for a 98-metre ship, especially when it seems only one of the giant manual ice saws is still on board. Stay tuned.

 

Photo by Peter Calamai

Amundsen still a prisoner of the ice

Another day and we’re still stuck in the ice. For more than an hour last night (it might have been closer to two but I went to bed), the Amundsen’s propellers pushed and pulled to no avail with all six engines running flat out.

So within the last few minutes the Amundsen crew (with some scientists helping) began using gas-powered augers to perforate the ice along the port side, from the bow back about a quarter of the ship’s length.

The icebreaker had come to rest yesterday leaning slightly to port (the left side, facing forward) so the thinking is that there’s more weight on that side and maybe a good chance of the ice weakening once its structural integrity has been compromised by the drill holes.

Meanwhile many of the researchers onboard are getting noticeably antsy. They’ve worked up all the samples that had been gathered previously, carried out maintenance on their onboard detectors and equipment brought in from the ice and even read that scientific paper that had long awaited their attention. They want to start collecting ice and water and algae and air and chemical contaminants plus all those environmental measurements unique to the Amundsen Gulf at this time of year.

If the ship doesn’t get unstuck today, this could become our new berth for quite some time. I suspect that would be just fine with many of the scientists.

A polar version of aerating the green

As in golf, so it is with icebreakers: the putting is the really tricky part.

After getting unstuck from last night’s stopping point, the Amundsen had the equivalent of two booming drives down the Arctic fairway today and a fabulous approach shot to the green.

But then we found our ship was stymied. The final destination, our version of the cup in golf, was only a few hundred metres away. But between the ship and the hole loomed a long pressure ridge. And running up to that ridge the ship stuck solid, like having your golf ball land in a deep divot.

So the crew began the polar version of aerating the green. With two crew members holding opposite sides of gas-powered augers that are head high and heavy and awkward, teams drilled a chain of boreholes along the starboard side of the ship. (It should be noted that some hardier scientists also drilled, such as Stig Falk-Petersen from the Norwegian Polar Institute).

From the relative comfort of the ship’s main deck, the operation looked something like adding perforations to the edge of a stamp.

The theory is that the perforations weaken the vise-like grip along that side. With its icy girdle loosened, the Amundsen will be able to tug itself free. We could back up and hook the ship around into another spot.

The engines have now been running full throttle for almost a half-hour and there’s been no movement. I’ll let you know how this works out.

Photo by Peter Calamai