8/12/26: Going Nowhere

Today started as a very relaxed day at Port Burwell. We were looking to head through the McLelan Strait today, which meant we wanted to leave around 4:00 pm with no real plans before then. With our free time we decided to go for a longer walk around the island that made the western side of Port Burwell. The island was well populated by birds of prey and caribou. We even made it to a snowfield where Helene and Nathan had a snowball fight, and I held back knowing how the teams would work out. As we made our way back into Port Burwell, we ran into the boat of Inuit we had seen the day prior, from which a little boy pointed behind us and said, "There's a polar bear behind you." Unsurprisingly we whirled around behind us in a bit of a fright, but seeing nothing we realized that this might be a classic schoolyard trick for Inuit children. This thought relaxed us for a moment before two adults warned us of the same, which prompted us to quickly get back to the boat and launch the drone to look for the bear. We never found it and still aren't sure if it was there or not. We had made it to 4:00 though, so we set off for McLelan Strait. The thought behind the timing for traversing the strait is that you want to head into the opposing current as soon as it's slack enough for you to make headway against to maintain as much steerage as possible with the minimum steerage speed. We unintentionally played this very safe to the point where we came to a complete standstill in 7 knots of current. The current eventually did lessen though, and the strait was extremely pretty, with a narrow channel of very deep water between shores made of 1,000 ft tall cliffs. Once we made it through the strait, we settled in for sailing through the night on our way to Saglek Fjord.