Date: Summer 2020
Position: New England
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I suppose I could be forgiven if I had taken a hard look at myself in the mirror the morning after that manic night in Boothbay Harbor and then let the Northwest Passage scheme float back out into the snowy dreamworld whence it had come. But in the days that followed, the idea stayed lodged like a splinter in my brain. And instead of creating a laundry list of excuses why I couldn’t do it—too much time away from home, too dangerous, too far, too cold—I asked myself one simple question: Was it even possible to sail a boat with a plastic hull through the Northwest Passage?
When I popped that question into Google, it spat forth an article from Yachting World magazine by the legendary circumnavigator and author Jimmy Cornell. It was a story about his 2015 east-west transit of the Northwest Passage, which Cornell described as “the Everest of sailing.” I knew that roughly six thousand people had stood on the top of the world, but how many had done the Northwest Passage? More googling turned up a list maintained by the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge.
In the summer of 2020, it included a total of 313 transits. Of these, sixty-one had done the passage more than once, with the record going to Kapitan Khlebnikov, a Russian icebreaker that had eighteen transits. What I was most interested in, of course, was the number of smaller sailboats that had made it through. I counted 136 sailing vessels of sixty feet or less that had completed the passage through the end of the 2019 season. If each of these vessels had a crew of four, this adds up to about 550 people—one for every ten who have stood atop Mount Everest.
To meet the criteria for inclusion on the list, a ship needs to cross the Arctic Circle twice—first in Davis Strait on the east side, and then in Chukchi Sea on the west or vice versa if going the other way; but an exception is made for vessels beginning their voyages north of the Arctic Circle on the west coast of Greenland. Measured in this way, the total distance of a Northwest Passage transit is only about a thousand miles, but since most of these voyages begin and end far to the south of the Arctic Circle, the total distance is usually much greater.
In order to sail a fiberglass boat through the Northwest Passage, I would invariably be hoping for the very conditions that are destroying the essence of what makes the Arctic such a singular place.
According to the institute, there are actually seven different routes that weave between the 36,500 islands of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, but only two are passable with any regularity. The rest are almost always chock-full of ice. The standard route is also the first, opened by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his six-person crew between 1903 and 1906 aboard Gjøa, a seventy-foot wooden fishing vessel. Traveling east to west, Amundsen spent three winters in the Northwest Passage, including two in a small central Arctic harbor on the south coast of King William Island that now bears the name of his ship.
Next came Henry Larsen, another Norwegian who took command of a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) motor schooner in 1940 and completed the passage from west to east in two years. In 1943, Larsen turned around and went the other way, becoming the first to transit the Northwest Passage in a single season. Over the next three decades, a handful of U.S. and Canadian Coast Guard icebreakers, buoy tenders, and research vessels made it through. But it wasn’t until 1977 that Williwaw, a custom-built forty-foot steel ketch skippered by Willy de Roos of the Netherlands, became the first private sailing yacht to complete the Northwest Passage.
The turning point came thirty years later in 2007, when the passage, or least the most passable route, was entirely ice-free for the first time in recorded history. Taking advantage of this unprecedented event, several small boats snuck through in a single season. In the years since, the massive floes of ice have never returned to historical levels and more boats have successfully made the transit than in all previous years combined.
The list doesn’t include hull type, but after more research, I discovered that at least a handful of the small vessels had fiberglass hulls, like Polar Sun’s. Most notable of these was a voyage undertaken by a thirty-year-old Rhode Island man named Matt Rutherford, who set off from Annapolis, Maryland, in June 2011 aboard a forty-year-old, twenty-seven-foot Albin Vega called St. Brendan. Rutherford sailed back into Annapolis 309 days later, after having circumnavigated the Americas by way of the Northwest Passage and Cape Horn—a twenty-seven-thousand-mile voyage that he completed unsupported, single-handed, and, amazingly, without stopping. His motto was “fortitudine vincimus” (by endurance we conquer), which he borrowed from his hero, Ernest Shackleton.
My friend Eli had taken part in a Northwest Passage attempt in 2014. It was a bad year for ice, and they didn’t make it through. They did, however, get to Erebus and Terror Bay at Beechey Island, where the Franklin expedition had spent their first winter. And they did so in a Baba 40, a classic fiberglass sailboat that was built at the same boatyard in Taiwan where Polar Sun was born. Eli put me in touch with the skipper, a retired NASA mechanical engineer named Sam Lowry, who sails out of Rockport, Maine.
I owe a lot to Sam because not only did he refrain from laughing me out of the water; he sent me his logbook, which contained a literal treasure trove of data detailing his ninety-day voyage in three-hour increments, including latitude/ longitude, water temperature, bearing, wind speed, boat speed, barometric pressure, sail plan, battery levels, engine hours, and more. Sitting down with his log and Google Earth, I was able to see exactly where he had been and when and roughly what the conditions had been like. Later, Sam would gift me all his paper charts from the Northwest Passage (worth thousands of dollars), which he hand-delivered to Polar Sun.
According to Sam, a metal hull, either steel or aluminum, was definitely the preferred choice for sailing amongst ice, but he didn’t consider a fiberglass boat to be a deal-breaker. His boat, Lillian B, had collided with a few ice floes in Dundas Harbour on Devon Island, but nothing that had done more than scrape off a bit of paint. He warned me, though, that I’d need to be super careful not to let the boat get trapped in the ice, especially in heavy seas, because the surging floes could crush a fiberglass hull like a beer can. And if your ship goes down in conditions like this, it’s not like you can climb out onto the ice or launch your life raft.
After I had done a couple months of research, it was clear that more and more small sailboats were attempting the Northwest Passage every season, mainly due to the unfortunate reality that Arctic sea ice is melting at an unprecedented rate. For the first time in history, it was possible to sail a fiberglass boat into the Northwest Passage. And while I found this encouraging, I took little joy in it.
People might debate exactly what is causing our cryosphere to melt, but no one can deny that it’s happening. According to data collected by the National Snow and Ice Data Center, the average temperature in the Arctic has risen by 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the past fifty years—an increase three times greater than in any other region on Earth. As a result of these higher temperatures, Arctic sea ice has decreased by 13 percent per decade since 1979. What is particularly worrying, if you care about things like sea level rise and polar bears, is the decline in multiyear ice, which grows thicker and rougher than new, first-year ice and provides important habitat for marine mammals. At the time of this writing, multiyear ice, which covered a third of the Arctic Ocean in 1985, has declined by 95 percent. The lowest Arctic-sea-ice extent in more than forty years of satellite tracking was in 2012, with 2020 a close second. In either of those years, you could have cruised right through the Northwest Passage without coming in contact with a single speck of ice.
If I was going to see the Arctic and record and share what I saw there before all the ice disappeared, there was no time to lose.
I knew, of course, how messed up it was that in order to sail a fiberglass boat through the Northwest Passage, I would invariably be hoping for the very conditions that are destroying the essence of what makes the Arctic such a singular place. A good year for a Northwest Passage voyage is a bad year for our planet. But I also knew that if I was going to see the Arctic and record and share what I saw there before all the ice disappeared, there was no time to lose.
It was time, then, to see if there was anyone out there who might want to do something like this with me. The story as to why there was one name, and one name only, at the top of my short list of potential partners is a long and convoluted one that begins in the mid-nineties when Ben Zartman and I lived in adjacent caves in Yosemite National Park.
I had recently graduated from college with a degree in philosophy. But none of the jobs recommended by the career-counseling office were even remotely appealing, so I chose to live in Disneyland for climbers and collect cans for my living. I’d been part of the dirtbag-climbing scene in “the ditch,” as we called it in those days, for a few years when Ben showed up one day from Ohio, having chosen the rock-climbing crucible of Yosemite Valley over college. Back then, before he got his nickname “Ben Wah,” which was later appended with “the Legend,” we used to call him “Young Ben.” I remember hearing rumors, later confirmed, that Ben’s parents were Christian missionaries and that he had grown up between postings in Mexico and Ecuador. Ben was (and still is) a teetotaler, which was rare among climbers in those days. I was the opposite, but we bonded nonetheless when he moved under a rock a little ways up the hill from mine. Later, we even dated the same woman—at different times, of course.
One evening, Ben showed up at Degnan’s Deli, aka “the center of the universe”—the gathering spot for Valley dirtbags—and declared that he was going to sail around the world. Considering that he lived under a rock and had never sailed before, this seemed a bold pronouncement. But a few days later, he threw on his pack and hitchhiked down to San Diego, where he managed to talk his way onto a sailboat heading south to Mexico.
After that first sailing trip, he would occasionally come back to Yosemite to climb between voyages, but that changed when he met a woman in a green sundress with long tan legs and silky brown hair that she tied in a bun on the back of her head. Early in their relationship, Ben and Danielle moved onto a run-down twenty-seven-foot fixer-upper sailboat on the Caloosahatchee River in Fort Myers, Florida. After a year spent refitting the vessel, they rechristened it Capella—the name of a star used in celestial navigation.
While thorough, the refit didn’t include any electronics. Ben and Danielle had recently crewed on a boat with a faulty electrical system. They had soldered new contacts and run new wires—but the boat had still nearly burned down. So Ben decided that electricity had no place at sea. Instead, Danielle and he used an all-weather oil lamp in which they inserted red and green theater gels to alert other boats to their position at night. At anchor, they hung a lamp at the top of the mast with a Fresnel lens like those used in lighthouses. A line with a piece of lead on the end served as their depth sounder, and they determined their position through dead reckoning and sighting celestial bodies with a sextant. When Capella was ready, Ben and Danielle sailed across the Gulf of Mexico to the Yucatán, down to South America, then up through the Caribbean to Maine.
While climbing sea cliffs in Acadia National Park, they learned that Danielle was pregnant. They put the boat in storage, bought a used car, and drove back to California to move in with her parents. Ben spent two years trying to sell Capella as she sat in a boatyard in Fall River, Massachusetts. But she’d been built back in 1967 and there was little interest. Then, in 2005, he heard through the grapevine that his old cave neighbor who had just returned from Pitcairn Island was looking for a sailboat.
“It’s the opportunity of a lifetime,” I told my first wife after Ben called and named the price—one dollar. The deal was done, although perhaps I should have taken a bit more time to question the price.
A few weeks later, after Ben delivered the boat, I took some experienced sailors out for her maiden cruise on the coast of Maine. As we approached a ledge in the fog near an island called Petit Manan, one of them announced that it was time to tack, a maneuver in which a sailboat turns through the wind.
“Oh, about that,” I replied. “This boat doesn’t tack.”
“What do you mean it doesn’t tack?” said my friend, an experienced sailor who had once crossed across the Pacific Ocean. “Of course, it tacks. All boats tack.” He grabbed the tiller, yelled, “Ready about,” and pushed it hard to leeward. Capella rounded up into the wind and the sails went flat. We were dead in the water, or what a sailor calls “in irons,” which can be a real problem when it happens to windward of a ledge, which is precisely where we happened to be. I had neglected to tell my friend that the boat’s centerboard—a retractable fin that protrudes from beneath the hull to stabilize the boat—had snapped off years ago in the Gulf of Mexico. Ben deemed this to be unnecessary too and never replaced it. In my naivete, I had figured that if my mentor could sail this boat six thousand miles without a centerboard, then by God, I could putter around the coast of Maine without one too. And so, while Capella blew down on those rocks, I fired up the outboard.
When it came time to set up the rig, he didn’t have enough money for an actual mast, so he bought an aluminum telephone pole and machined it into what he needed.
As I continued with my sailing apprenticeship on Capella, Ben worked on building his dream boat in Danielle’s parents’ backyard. The thirty-one-foot vessel was a heavy-displacement, full-keeled, gaff-rigged cutter called a Cape George. The project took him five years to complete, and over that time, he and Danielle had three children, all girls. In the evenings, Ben worked as a waiter in Yosemite’s Mountain Room restaurant, and he put every spare cent he made into the boat. To save money, he would visit junkyards and shooting ranges to scrounge for lead tire weights and spent bullets, which he melted down on a homemade forge and poured into his keel.
When it came time to set up the rig, he didn’t have enough money for an actual mast, so he bought an aluminum telephone pole and machined it into what he needed. In 2009, he trucked Ganymede (named after the Jovian moon) to the Sacramento River, and the Zartman family set off to sail around the world. Shortly after the launch, Ben sent me a picture that he must have taken from the dinghy. Danielle was at the helm, holding the tiller, a baby in a sling strapped to her chest. Two towheaded young girls, ages five and three, sat on the cabin top.
Instead of following the standard route west through the South Pacific, Ben led his family to Panama, where they transited the canal and caught dengue fever in Colombia. Eventually, they headed north and landed in Newport, Rhode Island. It was supposed to be a short stop to replenish their cruising kitty, but Ben found work as the captain of an eighty-foot schooner, while Danielle homeschooled the three children and did sewing and odd jobs for other boats.
I visited them not long after that, finding Ganymede tied up to a snowy dock at a marina in downtown Newport. The Zartman home bobbed in the cold water, wrapped in plastic shrink-wrap. A metal stovepipe poked through the ridge, puffing smoke into the gray February evening. Ben appeared through a small wooden door and led me down into the cabin, where Danielle, wearing a homespun cotton dress, tended a kettle bubbling away atop a cast-iron woodstove. The interior of the boat was about the size of a toolshed, and it was covered in teak and holly, every piece of which Ben had lovingly milled. The girls shared a tiny cabin aft with three bunks packed so tightly, they had to take turns getting dressed. How five people could have lived together in such a small space defied my imagination. But when I saw the cozy bunk where Ben and Danielle slept, covered by a homemade quilt, I realized that I had never seen such a perfect picture of domestic harmony.
That spring, the Zartman family finally set off for Newfoundland on the next leg of the delayed circumnavigation. They waited in St. John’s for a suitable window to strike out across the Atlantic, but the weather was rough that summer, and after watching a steady procession of low-pressure systems march across the North Atlantic, Ben and Danielle pulled the plug. Changing course, they circumnavigated Newfoundland counterclockwise and then sailed down the St. Lawrence River and through the locks into the Hudson, which carried them back to Rhode Island. Ben found more work as a captain, and in 2015, with his girls growing older and bursting at the seams of their little shared cabin aboard Ganymede, he and Danielle rented a small house and moved ashore.
In recent years, he’d been making his living as a rigger, fitting out every kind of sailboat from the gilded yachts of Boston Brahmins to the old wooden schooners that still ply the waters of coastal New England. A rig is the name that sailors use for the mast and all the wires and ropes that keep it upright and allow the sails to be hauled up and down and trimmed in and out. A rigger makes and services all of this equipment, from splicing ropes to swaging wires and securing all manner of turnbuckles, shackles, pulleys, and pad eyes.
All of this it to say that Ben is, hands down, one of the most solid and resourceful men I’ve ever met: whip-smart, calm under pressure, a real-life MacGyver if there ever was one. And for these reasons and more, he would have been my dream partner for the Northwest Passage. But at the same time, I also knew that there was almost no chance that he’d have been willing to leave his family and work commitments for a four-month sailing voyage in the Arctic. He’d never been away from his family for more than two weeks at a time, and even if Danielle had thought that his sailing the Northwest Passage with me was a good idea, he wouldn’t have done it. I was sure. I admired him for that—and wished I had bit more of whatever that was in myself.
My chest felt strangely tight when I finally phoned him in November of 2020. The words poured out of me like a waterfall as I pitched that the two of us, plus a couple more crew members we’d find later on, would set sail from southern Maine in early June of 2022. Canada had shut down all travel to the Arctic due to the COVID pandemic and no one thought there was any chance it would open that following summer, so I figured 2022 would be the soonest we could go. The good news was that this would give us a year and a half to prep the boat and hopefully find some sponsors. The route I’d plotted would take us to the west of Newfoundland through the Strait of Belle Isle, and then across Davis Strait to Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. From there, we’d intersect with Amundsen’s route, work our way north with the help of the Greenland Current, and then shoot west across Baffin Bay into Lancaster Sound.
If we made it through James Ross Strait, which is about halfway through and almost always the ice crux, by mid-to-late August, we’d have another month or so to reel off the final twenty-three hundred miles through the heart of the central Arctic, culminating in a long slog west across the North Slope of Alaska. If we pushed hard and the ice gods smiled on us, I reckoned we could make it to Nome, which lies just south of the Bering Strait, before the autumn storm season, when the Sea of Japan starts pumping one low pressure system after another into the Bering and Chukchi Seas.
Overall, I reckoned the roughly sixty-three-hundred-mile voyage would take us about four months, and I broke it into four sections: Maine to Nuuk, Greenland (two thousand miles); Nuuk to Pond Inlet on Baffin Island (eleven hundred miles); Pond to Gjoa Haven on King William Island (nine hundred miles); and then a final slog from Gjoa to Nome across the North Slope of Alaska (twenty-three hundred miles). I’d heard that it was usually necessary to do a fair bit of motoring amongst the ice in the heart of the passage, but I hoped to sail the majority of the time. Besides, the distances between ports and fuel stops were so great that Polar Sun couldn’t carry enough fuel to motor the whole way, so we’d be forced by necessity to sail as much as possible.
Ben didn’t say much as I blabbed away. When I finally wrapped up my pitch and asked him what he thought, there was a long pregnant silence as I waited for him to blow me out of the water.
“Hey, if anyone can pull this off, you’re the guy,” he finally said.
Whoa! This was not the response I had expected.
As to his own participation, he was noncommittal. He said something about work and family and how hard it would be to get that much time away. I had expected this, and it made perfect sense. I told him as much.
I hung up feeling good that he’d given me his vote of confidence, but I could tell by his response that he was definitely not going to be joining me. So I never followed up. Instead, I pitched a few other sailing friends on the idea. Everyone was intrigued, but no one could commit. They all had regular jobs, bosses, mortgages, partners/spouses, children, and pets that they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) leave behind. A couple of them said that if I could break the voyage into smaller legs involving less time and fly them in and out, maybe they could take part. But it was almost impossible to figure out when I’d be where or if I’d even get there. And the flights into micro airports such as those in villages like Ilulissat, Pond Inlet, and Cambridge Bay were eye-wateringly expensive. I had worked up a rough budget, and just between boat upgrades, food, and fuel, it quickly surpassed $75,000.
I’ve been on a lot of expeditions over the years and, somehow, have always found someone to foot the bill. In exchange, I’ve written articles, posed for photos, appeared in films and on television, and tested new products. While climbing Great Trango Tower in Pakistan, I’d even posted live daily updates to the Internet. But as Ben had pointed out during our call, “This isn’t climbing, dude. The big sailing companies are only interested in stuff like the Volvo Ocean Race and the Vendée Globe.” What they were not interested in, he said, was some random scrappy dreamer trying to sail his old boat through the Northwest Passage.
So there I was: with no funding, no crew, and a boat badly in need of expensive upgrades. By the time spring of 2021 rolled around, I told Hampton that the voyage was off. She’d been remarkably supportive of my crazy plan from the moment I first shared it with her, but I finally decided that I had wasted enough time pushing on this string. She didn’t say it outright, but I sensed that she was relieved I was abandoning the project.
But then, almost as if Ben had sensed through the ether that I had given up, I got a text from him. When are you going to call me back about the Northwest Passage it read. We should talk.
I called immediately.
“I talked to Danielle,” he said. “She gave me her blessing to go to the Arctic with you.”
“What? Are you serious?”
“Yes,” he continued. “And I have no contingencies. Even if you don’t get any sponsors and I have to pay my own way, I’m in. All I ask is that you buy me a plane ticket home from wherever we end up.”
“Deal,” I said, deciding not to mention that a few minutes earlier, the whole endeavor had been dead in the water.
We talked for a while about the trip, mostly about what the boat would need to get up to snuff for Arctic duty. I didn’t mention it explicitly, but in a roundabout way I let it be known that I would be the captain and he the first mate—despite the fact that he was the more experienced sailor. It was my baby and my boat, and shouldering this ultimate responsibility was a hugely important piece of the puzzle for me. Ben confirmed that he had assumed as much and signing on as the first mate worked well for him. Right before he hung up, he said that he needed something like this in his life to look forward to. Then he added, “I just don’t think I’m cut out for chicken farming.”
After the call, I practically ran out of my office to find Hampton. She was in our living room sitting by the woodstove. What followed was a typical exchange for us. I’d come charging into the room, all full of piss and vinegar, to share the latest development in my current mad scheme.
“Ben’s in,” I declared.
Hampton looked up from her computer. “And what are we talking about?”
“The Northwest Passage. Looks like it’s on.”
She raised her eyebrows. When she’s deep in thought, she tends to chew on the inside of her cheek. She started doing that now.
“Have you ever done anything with Ben?” she finally asked. “How well do you even know this guy?”
“Oh, I know him super well,” I replied. “And he’s an incredible mariner.”
“I don’t doubt he is,” said Hampton, “but do you know him well enough to spend four months on a small boat with him?”
I told her most emphatically that I sure did. Yes sirree.
Hampton pensively chewed her cheek a bit more, which got me thinking too. Back in the day in Yosemite, had I ever actually roped up with Ben? I racked my brain but couldn’t think of anything we’d ever done together. Our relationship was that of mentor and mentee, which boiled down to a series of phone calls and emails that were almost entirely sailing related. The last time I’d seen him in person was nine years earlier. But it was Ben Wah, my old cave buddy from Yosemite. The two of us were like peanut butter and jelly, right? What could possibly go wrong?
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From Into the Ice: The Northwest Passage, the Polar Sun, and a 175-Year-Old Mystery by Mark Synnott. Copyright © 2025. Available from Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
