8/11/26: Ashore!

I woke up early today to bake my bread that had been proofing overnight for breakfast. We had a longer day in front of us because we planned to leave the Button Islands and needed to leave at high tide in order to reach our shorelines and have favorable current across the Gray Strait. I was slow on getting my bread in the oven, and so after a porridge breakfast Helene and Nathan left to go untie the shorelines without me despite my protests that I was almost done 10 minutes before I actually was. I finished getting my bread in the oven and got on deck just in time to watch Helene and Nathan leaving the boat without me to go untie the shorelines. Feeling abandoned, I walked to the other side of the boat from where everyone was looking at Helene and Nathan untie our lines to look at the other side of our inlet, only to see a polar bear, much larger than the last, charging down the cliff opposing the one Nathan and Helene were on about 20 meters from them, looking dead set on making it to the water and swimming across to give them a proper goodbye. Following Nathan's example three days prior, I yelled "BEAR" and watched as everyone first whipped around to me and then to the bear I was pointing at as Helene and Nathan then made a mad dash for the dinghy to scamper back to where they had left me. Once the bear made it to the shore, Helene and Nathan were already on their way back to the boat, so it decided to lie down and have a nap within 5 meters of our shoreline we needed to untie in order to leave. This put us in a bit of a bind, as if we missed our roughly hour-long time window to untie our lines, we would have to spend another day on Button Island. Faced with this, we all pried our eyes off the bear and made our way down below in hopes that without something to look at, the bear would get bored and wander off. After about 30 minutes, the bear did exactly that, walking a workable but not comfortable distance away from our shorelines before our shore team, this time with me included, made an effort to again go untie our shorelines. This time we were successful and were able to leave our beautiful little refuge that we sadly never got to take a step out of. From the Button Islands we sailed for Port Burwell, roughly two hours away. While underway, I conducted some interviews with Helene and Nathan as the fog had come back in and there wasn't much to see. When we arrived in Port Burwell, there were some Inuit caribou hunters just finishing up their hunt in the anchorage, so we said hello and waited a minute while they left. Once they left, we again took out our shorelines, and this time I placed the rock cables and took my first wobbly steps ashore in 11 days. I had a sense of intoxication as the excitement washed over me and I stumbled around on my sea legs. I did eventually catch my balance enough to walk up the rocky shore and place our rock cables around a decent rock and look back in satisfaction, seeing Pelagic from the shore. Eager not to repeat our mistake of waiting a day to go ashore on the Button Islands, this time we seized the moment and disembarked immediately, weapons in hand, to go and do our firearms training. We set up a piece of plywood we found amid the abandoned structures on the shore with a hastily spray-painted target and gave everyone three shots of the .375 Magnum rifle, and the 12-gauge shotgun. After our firearms training, we set off to actually stretch our legs and investigated the abandoned settlement. As we rounded the bluff to see the proper Port Burwell settlement, we were surprised that the abandoned village was a mix of very dilapidated plywood housing and much more recently abandoned buildings, which Skip said "stunk of science." The newer buildings looked like trailer homes, but were all snow white and extremely well insulated. From them branched a network of cables that connected to various arrays of antennas and satellite dishes, which we very roughly deduced to all be related to weather science. After exploring the research area and the abandoned town, we walked up the nearby mountains to stretch our legs before heading back for a dinner that, for the first time in a while, felt earned.