Spring Sail
Westfjordland. Aurora Arktika
The ski season collapsed early in southern Australia and footy is about done. If you are not spring sailing in far north Queensland, then boat preparation and equipment auditing is well underway for an October season opening.
This week we feature sailor, skier and professional photographer Mark Ashkanasy. Mark is well known in Melbourne as a dinghy sailor and art photographer, working as Bill Henson’s production assistant for many years. He also recovers, re-photographs and edits old pictures for book and catalogue production. They arrive in his studio piled into brown bags in a variety of formats from old postcards, chemist kodaks glued in family albums or early professional silver gelatin prints.
Mark was the graphic energy behind two sailing books. Bert Ferris wrote ‘The Long Hard Beat. A history of the Royal Melbourne Yacht Squadron’ in 2017. Bert and Mark collaborated on the layout and selection of drawings and photos. Again, working with author Chris Davey, Mark re-produced all the images for ‘APYC 150 Years on the Lake’ published in 1921.
Between books Mark had time for some adventure that combined all his interests. Even with retreating snow around the globe, there’s still skiing in Westfjordlands on the NW peninsula of Iceland. While not the voyage of St Brendan, Mark photographs and writes about his recent Icelandic sail-ski adventure.
Westfjordland. Mark Ashkanasy
I’ve long been an admirer of the Apollo 11 moon mission and 2019 was especially important. It was 50 years since I was sitting on the wooden floor of the school art room watching a scratchy B&W television. Neil Armstrong came down that ladder and stepped on the moon declaring; ‘That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for Manny Klein’. See Editor’s note.
The anniversary left me with a strong desire to also take a giant leap. Clearly, I’d missed the space race, but I knew what to do. A few years ago, I’d reconnected with John Falkiner, an old skiing friend from Mt Buller. John is an Australian but Swiss based mountain guide and telemark legend. He talked of his global ski adventures from Lebanon to Japan and New Zealand to the Olympus mountains in Greece. Then he snuck in Iceland. I didn’t give it much thought at the time.
But the penny suddenly dropped. Moon-spaceship-boat-Iceland. I skyped John in Switzerland and not long after we hung up, he had the boat booked. All I had to do was organise a group of eight friends to fill the bunks and find good ski-touring gear. Where we were going there were no lifts. To ski downhill, we first needed to climb uphill. The party came together easily and my fitness started to match John’s specification with some struggle. I cornered a pair of K2 Wayback 88 skis with ultra-light Marker Kingpin bindings. Perfect for backcountry touring.
The northern spring came quickly and we all assembled on the dock at Isafjordur, a small fishing port in the Westfjordlands. We climbed aboard the AURORA ARKTIKA, a 20m steel-hulled, winterized, ocean-going sailing ketch that was to be our ski lodge for the next week. It did indeed have all the comforts of a chalet. Accommodation for fourteen in bunk style cabins, a commercial kitchen and hydronic heating in the rooms. We even had a drying room even if it doubled as the engine room.
Sailing from Isafjordur across the passage opening to the North Atlantic took only half a day. Here the finger-like slopes and ridges reach out into the ocean with flat hill tops rising to about over 650 metres. These would be our quest. Sailing the ARKTIKA takes some effort, with the old-style sails and wooden blocks needing many hands to hoist and heave the cold ropes. Under the direction of first mate Annukka, we had her cutting through the Icelandic waters at about 7knots in a 14knot wind ...a wonderful surge of power.
Breakfast and lunch were self-serve, but dinner was prepared by the ship’s owner and skipper, Siggy Jonsson. This was mostly baked fish or lamb in varying guises. On our second day at sea, we lucked out and caught some cod. We added mussels from the shore that Annukka had collected and the two cooked up a seafood storm.
Approaching places from the sea rather than land gives a unique perspective. Transport to and from the ship was in a three metre Zodiac. In two loads we’d all be ashore. It was an odd feeling to walk over a volcanic shoreline in ski boots, covered in seaweed and mussels. After reaching the snow line, we started our long trek up the mountain. We’d usually take around three or four hours of steady skinning to reach the top. The final 100 metres, sometimes almost vertical, was often the toughest as we boot-packed the steeper icy sections to make a safe path.
As we climbed, the ARKTIKA would sail around to the other side of the fjord to meet us after our ski down to the shoreline. We’d then be back in the Zodiac for a well-earned Viking labelled Einstok or Lava smoked beer and a rest before dinner.
By our second evening it all came together for me. Westfjordland welcomed a clear sky and spring temperatures around -7 degrees centigrade. Perfect northern lights weather. By 11pm the light show started and we were all rugged up on deck in awe. Was this how it felt for those early explorers and our men on the moon?
Editor’s Note
There’s no MAGA style conspiracy here, even though many have disputed the muffled ‘mankind’. The re-working of Neil Armstrong’s famous words need explanation. It’s a Seinfeldian acknowledgement to the scientists that made it all possible. The post-war American space program culminated with multiple Apollo landings on the moon. The work to get there was 25 years of top-secret collaboration led by exceptional German and Jewish scientists. 125 German rocket engineers were brought out of Europe after the war under a secret program code-named Operation Paperclip. The most famous was Wernher von Braun, a member of the Nazi party who drove the highly destructive V2 rocket program. He and Abraham Silverstein, an American fuel propulsion expert, led the NASA research programs only 10 years after the Holocaust. Moral judgements were perhaps partially veiled by intellectual and scientific respect and a common goal to better human knowledge in space.