Route Map   Weather Map   Daily Journal         Q & A   Special Reports   Education Section           The Game		Dear Mom.... Much love, Doug Log Date: July 27, 1998 Author: Doug Cabot Lat/Lon: 66 51 N 53 34 W Location: Anchored off the island of Umanarssuqssuaq by the abandoned village of Umanarssuk. Click on the pictures below to view enlargements. NOTE: The following is a letter I wrote to my mom last night. Today, I decided that I'd post it on the Web site for guaranteed rush delivery. It's very true that Tristan Jones would never have published such a thing - but to those who think it's tacky, I say "tough." I only hope that she doesn't begrudge the additional eyes that might find it here. 7/26/98 Dear Mom, As it begins to pour outside, at 9:30 PM, I am snug in my tent. I keep glancing apprehensively at the tent walls for signs of the water which sounds so loud and close. So far so good. Wow! It's really coming down now. This letter is really just to say "Hi." It can't be as newsworthy as it might have been only a few years ago, before the Web, e-mail, and whatnot. Nor is it even as reliable. To send it, I'll have to hope that someone on Snorri has a Greenland stamp still kicking around, and that I can then find some passerby in a boat willing to take it to town for me to mail it. We are waiting to make the crossing, and it looks like we'll be waiting for a few more days, given our weather information. At this point the other pieces are all in place: the rudder (after much shaping and testing, we have two that work well and are not too large), the ice (clear enough on Baffin Island, at least its southernmost shores), and the part for the satellite phone which had to get flown in from Norway at the last minute. We use the phone rig strictly as a modem. Web/e-mail sending is not safety-critical, but having this way to communicate allows us to keep friends, family, and our sponsor, Lands' End, happy. Our spare computer and sat phone. The sat phone antenna is in the lid of the phone case.   We are in radio contact nightly with a German guy named Herb who lives in Toronto, and we await only his expert weather analysis to call for steady winds from the north. Herb's hobby is delivering direct, custom-tailored forecasts to boats all over the Atlantic - and even the Mediterranean. He speaks to people every night, one boat after the other, for a few minutes each. Interesting. Dean getting a weather report from Herb under a tarp out of the drizzle   We spent nearly a week in Sisimiut, which was fun but a little too long, as you've probably read on the Web site. Following our departure from there, we waited in one nearby spot for three days until the sat phone part got delivered. Three middle-aged Danish men in matching survival suits and riding matching oversized jet skis brought it to us. They were led by Finn, whom until then I had thought of as merely the quietly helpful guy from the Foto-Radio shop in town. These three guys take a long trip every year on these machines, and soon they will set out for Thule, which is way up there. I have to say, there's something romantic about their "Arctic Easy Ocean Rider" hobby. It's great for three guys with grey eyebrows, but those things are awfully loud and stinky, too. Another crew of modern-day Vikings come to the sat phone part rescue   We, on the other hand, rowed very slowly and quietly this morning, only about two miles, just to be somewhere different. We came to an ex-town called Umanarssuk, our second abandoned village so far this summer. This one is smaller than the first, which was a spooky place near Nuuk, and it is less abandoned. A handful of camping groups have set up tents among the widely spaced tumbledown houses; and there is even one newer summer cabin. It is a beautiful place and I'm sure the main reason nobody lives here anymore is that it fell victim to the Danish government's forced relocation/centralization scheme of the '50s and '60s. I expect we will hunker down here until Wednesday or Friday or whenever we get the green light from Herb. My anxiousness to make this crossing, and just to have something more to do than fill time with reading, writing, walks, cooking (tomorrow's my day), and sundry projects, drains some of the bliss from what would otherwise be a great setup. At our tasks on an earlier part of the journey Pastimes become time-passers. But it's not so bad, as long as I take it day by day. Yesterday, I made a lovely little needle case out of some choice caribou antler. I am steaming through Dostoevsky's Demons, which is dense and manic and exotic and engaging. I also have a stern little carving, "The Universal Man," that I'm coaxing out of a piece of mahogany. Tomorrow after lunch I plan to hike the three or four miles to the end of this island (for that's what it is), climbing up to its highest point (some 400 meters) on the way. There should be several ponds to choose from for a nice scrub and dunk. This really is the life. If I get impatient, it only reflects how great is the portion of action and movement and spectacle and, well, adventure, that I've come to expect. But I do not kid myself: every moment is extraordinary. Just this afternoon, as Rob and Hodding and I walked through the ruins, I said, "This has got to be one of the most exotic places I will ever get to: an abandoned village in Greenland." This year's VV1000 crew; that's me at the top on the right   And so far, the crew is getting along very well. Even the littlest flare-ups get processed exhaustively by the group. It's a laid-back bunch this year, with a lot of character thrown in. As ever, part of me is unsure of how well I connect with and am accepted by this group; and, as ever, I am for the most part satisfied that I'm doing just fine. By the time you get this I should be at least to Baffin, maybe as far as Labrador. One last thing to observe, that cannot get old, is that I miss you, and I think you're a great person and a great mom. I hope that all is fine with you. I send you: Much love, Doug P.S. A book I read which I found slightly overwrought, but basically very rich and interesting is, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, by Francis Spufford. Worth a look. Top of page