Round the World Sailor, Ralf Dominick talks about the Northwest Passage

Imvubu meaning Hippo going through the Northwest Passage and meeting a local. Cartoon done by Lawrence Moorcroft from the Bluff Yacht Club

Royal Natal Yacht Club hosted Ralf Dominick recently where he shared tales to a packed room of sailors

Going to listen to the charming Ralf Dominick, you are in danger of acquiring a few stamps in your passport when he passionately shares tales of his circumnavigation on his yacht Imvubu.

Commodore for the Royal Natal Yacht Club, Richard Crockett, introduced the intrepid traveller as a free spirit, setting sail with no real plan of where he was going.

Manihi Atoll

Dominick stood before us smiling, explaining, “I am going to leave out the tropics as many of you here this evening have sailed in parts of it and a number of you here have sailed in company with Imvubu so you would know if I am exaggerating or lying.”

Continuing with a twinkle in his eye, he commented, “I am going to concentrate on the journey through the Northwest Passage, and it is not because I am boasting being one of only about 150 transits through this passage, but because no one here will know if I am exaggerating slightly.”

Dominick launched Imvubu on the 19 June 2009 at the Bluff Yacht Club, he chuckles, “I got my own back at the truck drivers. I blocked the road for half a day as she was craned from the yard onto a truck and transported to the launch site.”

Departing Durban on 2 January 2010, he sailed south to Cape Town where he packed up his boat with supplies for heading across the Atlantic. Waving goodbye to family, he left Cape Town on 21 February 2010.

Having spent close on a year cruising through the magnificent Caribbean islands, with Imvubu spending three months on the hard staying safe during the hurricane season, Dominick headed north. At the end of April they made their way up the East coast of America with the goal of making it through the magical Northwest Passage.

They stopped in at Washington DC, sailing right into the heart of the capital. Exploring the cultural melting pot that is the capital, Dominick stumbled upon the Rolling Thunder Rally that has a quarter of a million Harley Davidsons cruising through the capital. “After three hours, after watching thousands of HOGs go by, I left, mainly because I had a headache from the noise!”

Next was a stop in New York City, “Since 9/11 I found the residents to be a lot kinder than in previous visits.” he stated happily.

 

“One of the best naval museums I have ever visited was located at my next stop, in Mystic Seaport located on the Mystic River. They have over 35 boats on display including an 1820 whaling ship. The Charles W. Morgan is the only surviving wooden whaling ship in America. It was a treat to visit.”

At Portland, on the coast of Maine, gearing up for the expected freezing conditions further north, another 20,000BTU of heating was added to the 5,500BTU already installed on Imvubu.

From the USA East Coast the journey continued on to Nova Scotia, Canada and onwards to Newfoundland. “A number of the small towns are slowly dying due to the moratorium on Cod fishing. In fact during the 1950’s the government had a forced resettlement program to consolidate many of these settlement. Most adults now work on the oil fields in Alberta while the youth are moving south where life is a lot easier, so in some places it felt like a ghost town.”

“I sailed through a fjord that was 200m wide and was experiencing the worst fog for many years. In the gaps we managed to see the sheer cliffs that surrounded us with tumbling waterfalls cascading into the cold water. Yet another exquisite memory!”

Ralf's favourite pic of an Iceberg. He didn't dare get to near it in-case he dislodged some of the ice.

While in Newfoundland Dominick made the decision to commit himself and his crew to the Northwest Passage:  “I must say, it was the case of right place, right time, right boat and the crew was solid!”

Newfounland Huge Fjord

In 1497, the first recorded expedition to find the mythical Northwest Passage, was undertaken by John Cabot. For the next three centuries there were many expeditions to locate this passage. During the Napoleonic wars the quest for the passage waned. However in 1819, due to reports by whalers that the ice was retreating, interest in finding the passage was renewed. The most famous failure was in 1845 when Sir John Franklin, with his two vessels the Terror and the Erebus, failed to return. Subsequent relief expeditions, launched at the behest of Lady Franklin to determine the fate of John Franklin, are credited with having discovered an impractical ice bound passage by dog sled. John Rae, an employee of the Hudson Bay Company, while on a dog sled expedition in this area is now generally credited with having discovered a navigable passage through the Franklin Strait into the Beaufort Sea.

The first vessel to actually transit the North West from Arctic Circle to Arctic Circle was Roald Amundsen in 1903. The next transit was some forty years later by a Canadian Police cutter skippered by Henry Larsen. By the end of the 2010 season the Scott Polar Research Institute at University of Cambridge had recorded 143 transits by 99 different vessel.

Dominick was approximately the 150th entry into the esteemed list that completed a transit from Arctic Circle to Arctic Circle through the Northwest Passage. Imvubu was the first South African Vessel to have completed the transit.

In 2011, the window of opportunity was better than previous years as the temperatures and ice seemed a lot kinder than in previous years, giving Imvubu and Dominick a gap of six weeks to make it through.

Dominick stopped off at St John, Newfoundland, the last significant town before getting to the other side of the world, to prepare the vessel for what lay ahead.  “There are many details to be considered such as a solution for preventing the engine cooling water intakes from freezing, preventing condensation from forming on windows, provisions for a year and of course charts for the region.”

“You might have heard of St John, the wreck of the Titanic lies some 600km south east of this town. The distress call from the Titanic was picked up at Cape Race, 140km south of St John's, where the Canadian Marconi company had built a station eight years earlier.”

“Before departing St John, I went to collect our charts that I had ordered but they hadn’t arrived. The charts were a vital ingredient for the next leg. We needed the charts! The owner of the company promised me that at the next stop at Cartwright in Labrador, he would have the charts there; they would be at the small airport. We got to the airport a few days later and went to meet the plane, but there was nothing. The pilot defensively even suggested we search the plane, there really were no charts. I contacted the airline and found that the plane that they were on had been diverted due to the weather. So asking around I found a lady who lived in the town where the plane was and her brother was unemployed, so he got in the car and drove the charts up, a return trip of 16 hours. Arriving at 1am, we gave him a cup of coffee, a thousand dollars and then sent him on his way a few hours later.”

The plan was to sail 2,000 miles northwards before turning westwards into Lancaster Sound, which marks the start of the actual passage. A 100 miles south of the turning point they sailed past a tender floating upside down. “It didn’t sit right as it clearly belonged to a yacht and there weren’t too many yachts around so we pulled it on board and contacted the coast guard. “The coastguard requested that we divert to Pond Inlet, a small hamlet in the high Arctic, to deliver the salvaged tender so that they could investigate its origins”.

Meeting the Coast Guard, meant that the planed route altered slightly with a dogleg  down to Pond Inlet, the coast guard on the other hand made sure that there was sufficient diesel fuel available for Imvubu.

On 20 August the direction altered for the first time in ten days, with Imvubu now following a path in a westerly direction. On 24 August, the South African vessel reached her highest point north, with the co-ordinates of 74°19’N, the wind was averaging 40knots and the temperature was 2.5°C.

They turned down to Cambridge Bay where they anchored to refuel. While they were ancored in the bay, Eskimos were shooting at Narwhals, small whales with a single tusk or the mystical unicorn whales. “It was a surreal Wild West situation, after refuelling with 500 litres of jet fuel, the only fuel they had in Cambridge Bay we were at anchor and had bullets whistling past us. It didn’t look like the locals were effective hunters as the bullets were almost hitting us and not the whales!”

The next encounter Dominick had with the locals was at the next settlement of Tuktoyaktuk as a guest at the local school, “I was invited to the school when the new teaches were being introduced. On one of the walls there was a huge sign in English advertising that they should eat more whales because they were good for you! The sign went into great details, talking about the fat content and what it did for you! Fascinating reading.”

Continuing, “This is where I tried whale blubber; I have to admit it wasn’t very tasty. Somewhat how one would imagine it to taste like!”, “a local Inuit hunter however gave me two freshly bagged brown speckled geese, that made a superb potjie”.

The door started slamming on the adventurer, with the pack ice moving in. He made his way through the Bering Strait sailing between Russia and across the way, the tip of America, leaving behind the Arctic Circle.  He made it to Nome, Alaska surfing in in early September, 164 miles from Siberia and just under 2,000miles from the North Pole. Nome is renowned for gold mining and Dominick met a man who generously gave him two nuggets as mementos from Alaska.

A sign post in Nome, Alaska

“I read in the Nome Times that when the cartographer was mapping the area, they hadn’t named the Cape so he simply wrote ‘? name’ down on the map. When the maps got back to the United Kingdom, the chap officially drawing them up read it as C. Nome which promptly became Cape Nome and the name stuck and that is how it has stayed!”

“Crossing the Bering sea we got hammered although it could have been much worse and made it into the safety of False Pass in the Aleutian Islands with hours to spare before the next big storm system arrived”.

When the weather cleared Imvubu pushed on, passing steaming volcanoes, “There are 36 active volcanoes in Alaska, the most anywhere in the world located in one country! As we were sailing on a relatively calm day through the Kupreanof Straits a rocket launch took place from the Kodiak Space Centre on the other side of Kodiak Island”.

The intrepid traveller sat out yet more bad weather in Yakutat Bay on the eastern side of the Gulf of Alaska, here he joined another yacht that had also transited the North West Passage and the two of them waited through gale force winds. “We followed a number of fishing vessels heading out but encountered an unexpected low pressure system with storm force winds and mountainous seas, clearly we didn’t go very far and turned around and ran for shelter.”

“In desperation I spoke to the met guys and their response was that they were unable to forecast the weather because every few hours the weather was changing dramatically.”

In the early hours of the next morning there was a slight break in the weather and Dominick decided this was the gap. Saying a quick goodbye to this fellow yachtsman, who was not at all convinced that there was a break, he left the dock and sailed further down the coast, escaping the weather in a few more coves but made it into the safety of the Alaskan Inside Passage.

“When I arrived at Juneau Alaska I could celebrate as I had made it through the Northwest Passage and got out of the high latitudes before winter set in!  Although I was now through the worst I knew there was still a hard slog ahead to make my way down the North American west coast in winter.”

“My friend got stuck in Yakutat for a further three weeks and by the time he got into the Inside Passage the season was too far advanced and he had to give up and spend the winter at Sitka.”

Showing us a number of gorgeous images, he pauses stating, “Of the thousands of photos that I took on the trip, this is my favourite. Blackstone Glacier was just exquisite.”

Asked if he was ever scared, he smiles, “I used to fly jets for fifteen years so going from a sport of flying at a speed of six miles a minute to sailing  six miles an hour, I would think I coped under the pressures that arose. And I have to say that the boat was superb in all the conditions!”

Concluding he questions, “Doesn’t anyone want to know about the fishing and the fish? The places I visited were not only picturesque but heavenly on the taste buds. I ate like royalty, everything from crayfish to salmon to cod. You name it, I sampled it. I would have to say my best fish would have to be Arctic Char which was just delectable.” 

Imvubu is currently being prepared for her next odyssey when he plans to head down south to Antarctica and then up the east coast of South America before crossing to Europe However, he is plotting to return to Alaska… in summer and not with his boat.

The inspiring story of Ralf Dominick’s lifelong dream to circumnavigate the globe plants seeds for those with itchy feet and a desire to travel to a number of incredible options that lie waiting to be discovered.