For 10 days, Nanaimo boat builder and former teacher Erkan Gursoy was stuck in Alaskan ice on his 12-metre sailboat with his only companions a regular supply of curious polar bears.
“It took two days to get the ice breaker to him,” said Renay Gursoy on Monday of her 67-year-old husband.
“He was almost 10 days in the ice and there were numerous visits from polar bears, five or six different visits. He kept banging on a big empty barrel and it worked really well.
“But it wasn’t much fun sleeping. They didn’t get on the boat, but he said they were about 30 feet away.”
Gursoy was rescued on Saturday by the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Healy — it was diverted from a National Science Foundation-funded research mission in the Arctic — after his single-mast aluminum boat Altan Girl became trapped in ice northeast of Barrow, the northernmost city in the U.S.
Gursoy was attempting to sail solo to Eastern Canada through the Northwest Passage.
The Healy eventually reached the sailboat after cutting a 19-kilometre path through the ice, and then led it to open water.
A helicopter couldn’t reach him because of weather conditions and low visibility. Gursoy is now waiting in Barrow for better weather and restocking supplies.
“There’s a big storm coming in so luckily he got into anchor,” said Renay Gursoy, noting that it took four hours to get the tow line onto Altan Girl. “He was in constant danger, because the ice was packing and moving so far north. It was constant fog and basically all his rigging was iced up.
“His boat could have sunk. The winds were going to shift again and the ice would have packed and perforated the hull and that would have been it.
“But he’s says he’s fine. We build boats as a profession, and (Altan Girl) is one of his own designs and it seems to have stood up to the test. One of the pontoons on the side has been bent in.”
Will he continue the trip?
“We haven’t had that discussion yet,” said Gursoy. “I have a feeling he will because he wants to go right through the Northwest Passage.”
She said her husband could be home in three or four months if he heads back, or a couple of years if he continues on to Europe. “I’ll meet up with him over there. I think he’d like to write a book about this adventure.”
Veronica Colbath, spokeswoman for the U.S. Coast Guard, Alaska, said Monday that after getting the distress call, the coast guard kept in contact with him “to ensure that it didn’t become a dangerous situation.”
She said fog was a problem and that reports of an approaching Arctic storm made it a dangerous situation for Gursoy.
“There was a lot of fog and that made it difficult to see what was happening. The ice was continually shifting.”
She said that when the coast guard got the initial call, Gursoy was 25 miles out of Barrow, but “when the rescue occurred he had drifted 40 miles east of Barrow.
“It’s dangerous when you’re in a position where you can’t control your vessel and the environment around you is constantly changing. That definitely poses a threat.”
Colbath said that other than a jammed propeller shaft, the boat was seaworthy and had plenty of supplies and equipment on board.
