Make that a double

STILL ABOARD CCGS AMUNDSEN—“The flight from Inuvik has been cancelled. All those people who were scheduled to leave will still have to vacate their rooms. Please see me about finding some place to sleep.”

That was the unwelcome inaugural announcement by Dave Barber, the new chief scientist on the Amundsen research icebreaker.

The ever-efficient Amundsen office staff did find me — and the half-dozen others also marooned here — a place to lay our heads for the night.

But it could be more than one night. The forecast is for the poor weather to continue, after three weeks of nothing but sunny skies.

Such delays are par for the course in the Arctic. As well, we were a day late getting here three weeks ago because of mechanical problems with the charter flight that brought a crew change and a new team of scientists to Inuvik.

So the Arctic is simply getting that day back. Luckily it’s bar night on the Amundsen, and I believe new stock arrived on one of the two charter flights that did make it in earlier today.

 

A steady hand on the wheel

AT THE HELM CCGS AMUNDSEN—For 20 exhilarating and anxious minutes yesterday, I got to steer a 6,000-tonne icebreaker knifing through the Arctic ice floes.

Photo by Amundsen captain Lise Marchand

Peter at wheel -- Star science reporter Peter Calamai stares ahead intently as he tries to steer the icebreaker Amundsen on a steady course.

Like most things that you watch experts do, it was nowhere as easy as it looks.

The anxiety was mostly on my part. The Amundsen’s captain Lise Marchand, who was taking my photograph, remained her usual placid and reassuring self.

The real helmsman on that watch, Vincent Gagnon, stood beside for a few moments to emphasize some of the trickier points of the job but soon wandered off.

Then it was an aging reporter alone against the hostile frozen Arctic Ocean.

(So long as you forget about the captain, quartermaster and another bridge officer, not to mention Vincent and his replacement Eve Guilbault who later took back the wheel.)

For anyone who knew what they were doing, this would have been a cakewalk. The Amundsen was retracing a path it has broken earlier in the day through relatively thin ice. We were making a mere 2.6 knots (“slow ahead”) to give scientists and crew time to clean up from a messy coring of bottom sediments. No one wanted that mud tracked back to our home berth in the ice. There was very little wind.

All the amateur helmsman had to do was keep the Amundsen centred in the already broken track. It’s not as easy as it sounds.

Remember the old joke about stopping the Queen Elizabeth II liner? Start before you know you have to.

Well it’s true with a 98-metre-long vessel as well, even one that’s just puttering along well below the potential top speed.. When you turn the wheel everything happens in slow motion.

PHOTO BY AMUNDSEN CAPTAIN LISE MARCHAND

Vincent Gagnon, one of the Amundsen's real helmsman, keeps his gaze on the ice while Star science reporter Peter Calamai looks down to check the ship's bearing on an engraved brass scale on the wheel.

The problem is that it keeps on working. I can’t remember whether the correct term is understeer or oversteer but you crank the wheel 20 degrees to port and the bow of the ship just keeps going straight ahead. Then, slowly the whole mass starts to swing left. Before you realize it, however, you’ve pointed one of the Canadian Coast Guard’s Class Three icebreakers right into an endless vista of unbroken ice. Maybe not that thick ice, but an awful lot of it.

Crank back frantically to starboard and wait anxiously for the response. Again, in slow motion, the bow swings back towards straight ahead … and then keeps on swinging, so now the ship is crunching along the right-hand margin of the path cleared that morning.

So for the first 10  minutes or so, the Amundsen slalomed its way south of Banks Island in the Western Arctic. If any of the other crew or scientists not on the bridge noticed, they were kind enough not to say anything.

Once the vessel was going more or less in a straight line, I got cocky and began chatting about photographic gear with Captain Marchand who, like me, shoots with a Nikon D200 single lens reflex camera.

The ice floes had other ideas. Something nudged the side of the ship (or maybe one propeller whacked a frozen chunk) and suddenly we were doing a marine imitation of a dog walking, at a five-degree angle off the perpendicular.

I’m fairly sure of that statistic because the person at the helm faces a panorama of electronic information displays, at least three showing the ship’s bearing. That bearing is also engraved on brass circles down at the centre of the wheel. Strangely I found myself looking more at that old-fashioned display more often than the modern LED readouts.

After 20 minutes I asked Eve Guilbault to please take over the task. Already my shoulders complained about keeping them tensed and my eyes ached.

Real Coast Guard wheelpersons may have to keep their concentration at a peak for an entire four-hour watch and often operate in the foulest weather. Whatever they’re paid, they earn every penny. And more.

 

No steam in sight

INSIDE THE CCGS AMUNDSEN–This venerable icebreaker is just as impressive below deck as it is above. More, if you are the one misfit from a family of engineers.

First, a confession. As an ancient mariner pointed out in an email, I have been guilty of anachronism when writing about the Amundsen “steaming” away.

As a descent into this ship’s bowels demonstrated today, there’s no steam involved in propelling her. In fact, the Amundsen was “green” decades before the current vogue, with the twin 14-tonne propellers driven by two DC electric motors.

Because the two shafts are turned by induction, there’s no gear box and nothing to damage if the 5-metre-wide propellers whack a piece of ice, although substantial nicks have been discovered when the ship was in dry dock.

That electricity is generated from two, four or as many as six V-16 main engines which run on marine diesel fuel. And before that old salt starts typing again, yes the diesel-electrics put out AC power which is then converted to DC.

That’s merely the icing from a fascinating 90 minutes spent with chief engineer Stéphane Dufour, who is responsible for everything mechanical on the ship, from the morning shower water to the power needed to advance at a steady three knots through metre-thick ice.

Growing up, Stéphane thought about becoming a doctor. But a friend mentioned the Coast Guard and by the first “sea phase” experience at the Coast Guard College, the 17-year-old had found his calling.

“It’s what I thought I was going to be doing as a kid but with bolts and not people,” he says.

Doctoring a 98-metre vessel takes four other engineers, six “oilers” and an electrician to together provide 24-hour monitoring of the ship’s vital signs.

Even when the Amundsen is immobile in the ice, like now, it burns between 5,000 and 6,000 litres of diesel a day in a smaller V-8 ship’s service engine for the electricity, heat, fresh water, and sewage system needed for this combined floating hotel and peripatetic research centre.

When the Amundsen is struggling in tough ice – as a week ago – daily fuel consumption can soar above 30,000 litres with all six V-16 main engines throbbing and a second V-8 service engine also running. On one day in early January the ship gulped 40,000 litres, a rate that even tanks holding 2.7 million litres can’t sustain when the next fill-up isn’t until mid-June.   

There’s also a third V-8 for redundancy plus a smaller diesel engine above the water line, so if the ship is holed and taking on water below there will still be emergency power.

As the photograph from the engine room shows, the scale of this hidden machinery is Brobdingnagian compared to the miniaturized instruments in the laboratories above deck.

That scale is one reason that it takes a half-hour to get the engines purring if the ship is in open water. When the ship has been chilled in an icy vise, however, the engineers like 90 minutes to bring the lubricating oil temperature gradually up to the optimal 70 C. In practice, the ship will run at Dead Slow for some time while that load helps warm up the engines.

A shame I can’t call it “getting up steam.”

PETER CALAMAI/TORONTO STAR

Amundsen's chief engineer Stéphane Dufor walks between a V-16 main engine and a V-8 service engine below deck in the icebreaker.

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.

 

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.

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

A lesson in vulnerability

 

PETER CALAMAI/TORONTO STAR

The initial wave of evacuees from the Amundsen huddle on the ice in a General Alarm drill. Several score more would join after checking lifeboats and manhandling the ship's helicopter out of its hanger.

ABOARD CCGS AMUNDSEN–The claxon sounded its seven short and one long blasts right on schedule at 2 in the afternoon. If it had been a real General Alarm someone would likely have slung me over their shoulder and bundled me rapidly off the Amundsen icebreaker.

But since it was merely a drill the Coast Guard crew and scientists indulgently allowed the old-guy reporter to edge down the ship’s gangway, picking my way so slowly you’d have thought that the humongous Baffin boots (guaranteed to minus 60 C) came with stiletto heels.

I tried rationalizing that the ship was riding higher in the ice – and therefore the gangway was at a much steeper angle -- than when I managed the same feat far less tentatively in 2004.

And later, Captain Lise Marchand kindly agreed that the Amundsen was light on fuel and would ride higher. But she also agreed, with a smile, with my analysis that four more years and 20 extra pounds probably did not help my ability to quickly evacuate a ship supposedly threatened by a fire.

Another lesson which the drill brought home is the vulnerability of the cozy ship that is home to 40 scientists and roughly the same number of crew. When you’re onboard it’s a self-contained community offering warm beds, three hot meals a day, both satellite and closed-circuit TV, Internet access, lounges, a workout room (claustrophobic through it may be) and your name printed on a card outside the cabin door.

But when four score individuals are huddled on the ice for almost an hour, guarded against polar bears by several men with guns and against the cold only by their parkas and Baffin boots, you appreciate just how fragile is the bubble that protects us from hypothermia, frost bite and possibly death.

The nearest help is at least a hour-and-a-half flying time away and the planes that would come usually hold about 15 passengers.

If there were a real fire, lives would depend on whether the ship’s personnel could put it out quickly. If not, the crew would have to get the emergency supplies down to the ice right away. And an overweight, arthritic 64-year-old would have to move a lot faster.

Filling the cupboards

PETER CALAMAI PHOTO

Fresh supplies are hoisted aboard the Amundsen icebreaker after being ferried by snowmobiles from a shuttle of small planes landing on an airstrip prepared on the ice.

ABOARD CCGS AMUNDSEN–When the nearest store is a 90-minute flight away, it can be a big job ensuring that the cupboards don’t become bare.

In an impressive display of logistics an entire tractor-trailer of vital supplies was airlifted here today from Inuvik, which is a 90-minute flight each way across the frozen vastness of the Arctic Ocean.

Call it the Nelson Head Airlift, echoing the famous Berlin Airlift of 1948-49.

A grey smudge on the horizon, Nelson Head is the closest point of land to where the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Amundsen is frozen into the western Arctic ice south of Banks Island.

The low cliffs are the first break in expanse of white and snow for the pilots from Aklak Air in Inuvik who ferried much-needed supplies to the Amundsen, the first major resupply since the ship left Quebec in July on an Arctic scientific odyssey that will last until the fall of 2009.

These supplies had started their journey in Quebec, loaded onto a semi which drove to Inuvik. Then the boxes had to be hand-loaded on and off the small twin-engine planes like the DeHavilland Twin Otter, a famed workhorse, and the newer Bandeirante from Brazil’s Embraer.

Once the laden planes arrived at the landing strips groomed from the ice here, a shuttle of snowmobiles pulling sleds whisked through minus 40C air (with the wind chill) to bring the supplies alongside the ship where they were winched aboard.

Every few hours the ship’s public address system would blare with calls for volunteers to help in unloading stacks of boxes, containing everything from engine room essentials to canned goods. Human chain gangs shifted the supplies down flights of stairs from the outside deck.

The airlift had already transferred 150 crew and scientists on and off the Amundsen on Friday, plus about 5,000 pounds of scientific equipment that arrived on a charter flight.

Today another 20,000 pounds was safely and efficiently brought on board.

The astonishing aspect for any homeowner who has an garage, attic and basement stuffed with surplus junk is that those boxes have already mostly disappeared, their contents cunningly stowed away in the nooks and crannies of a vessel that is only 98 metres long from bow to stern.

The contents of a few more cartons may well disappear tonight, one of three nights a week when the ship’s small bar opens for a few hours.

Finally aboard

ABOARD CCGS AMUNDSEN–Twelve hours, two airplanes, and a chilly snowmobile ride after leaving Winnipeg, I finally clawed my way up the steeply inclined gangplank of the Coast Guard icebreaker Amundsen, a floating science laboratory.

PETER CALAMAI PHOTO Boarding the Amundsen is usually done by nosing it into some solid ice and clearing a serviceable runway nearby, as seen in the upper right of this photo from 2004.

It felt good to be back. In the winter of 2004, I’d spent almost two weeks aboard the same ship when it was deliberately frozen into the ice of the Beaufort Sea.

But now the Amundsen is roaming the open waters around the southern tip of Banks Island, the first time any Canadian ship has been mobile in the Arctic Ocean in the wintertime. (Maybe ANY ship, although you’re never quite sure about the Russians.)

For the next three weeks I’ll be roaming with it.

First priority is to reacquaint myself with the ship’s confusing internal geography, where everything always seems to be up or down a set of stairs from where you’re starting out. I have, however, figured out where cafeteria is located – in the stern on level six. And I’m headed there now for dinner.

There’s nothing like travel for building up an appetite.