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.

Waiting in Winnipeg

The most predictable aspect of travel in the Arctic is that it's unpredictable. So often is travel there and back.

A bleary-eyed group of Arctic researchers turned up at 4 a.m. Thursday at a commercial hanger here in Winnipeg only to learn that their charter flight – scheduled to depart at 5 a.m. – was still at its starting point in Quebec with mechanical problems.

The aircraft is ferrying a change of crew and scientists to the Coast Guard ship Amundsen, which is providing a floating laboratory for a year-long investigation of vanishing sea ice around Banks Island in the western Arctic.

The plane is now expected to arrive here no earlier than 4 a.m. Friday. The 24-hour delay gives the dozen scientists joining the flight here time to deal with another perennial problem of research in the Arctic – two much cargo for the available space.

Fortified by coffee and freshly baked pastries, University of Manitoba professor Tim Papakyriakou, chief scientist for this leg of the expedition, began sorting out the cargo problem with his colleagues.

I snuck back to the room I had just vacated in an airport hotel. Fortunately it was still available, since all other hotel rooms in Winnipeg are taken because of the Brier curling championship here this week. Maybe I’ll be able to take in the Alberta-Ontario matchup before the flight leaves?