42 hours after departing Hobart, I was in Reykjavik in Iceland, feeling a little tired of sitting in a plane.
The couple of days spent in Iceland before I caught a plane to Greenland gave me time to pick up the ammunition I would need for the shotgun and get myself repacked and organised.
The flight to Kulusuk airport is only a couple of hours but it places you into another world. Mountains stretch on forever, with as many icebergs, glaciers and remoteness as you could wish for.
I had organised to be picked up by a boat for the hour-long trip from Kulusuk Island across to Ammassalik Island where my trip would begin. On the way across, the boatman told me about a recent polar bear encounter. That made eight reports of polar bears in the area in the last month.
Although I had brought with me a very effective tripwire alarm setup and I would have a 12 gauge shotgun with high powered solid slugs, the thought of sleeping alone in a tent with the possibility of a bear encounter was rapidly losing its appeal. I resolved to use huts where possible.
An iceberg floats past the Blue Hut.
The first part of the trip involved getting the kayak and all of my gear onto a small freighter that services the six settlements scattered around the region and transferring to the tiny settlement (population: 290) of Kuummiut, 50 kilometres further north.
After a blustery trip with 30- to 40-knot freezing winds slicing down from the mountains, my kayak and gear were deposited on the wharf at Kuummiut. Cars and trucks are virtually non-existent in these settlements so I had to organise getting the kayak moved by front-end loader on a pallet to the nearest beach so I would be able to launch the next day.
The next morning dawned fine, frosty and calm, and I packed my gear into the kayak and looked forward to getting onto the water. Paddling out of Kuummiut harbour, I turned the bow of the kayak north into the spectacular Torsukattak Fjord. This fjord has a very shallow stretch a few kilometres on and it is necessary to wait for high tide to get through. I reached the shallows early and had an hour or so to wait. Time for a bit of target practice with the gun. I shot off three normal high-powered cartridges then slipped one of the solid slugs in, just to see if there was much difference. BOOM! Geez. What a kick. What a bang.
Feeling somewhat more confident in the gun, I packed everything away and threaded my way through the slowly filling shallows to the deeper water on the other side.
My destination that day was The Blue Hut, a tiny, one-roomed hut located at the confluence of the Torsukatak, Ikateq and Ikaseq Fjords. A spectacular location, but I knew that the weather was forecast to deteriorate, so this tiny hut was home for at least a couple of days…
…The story continues in Wild issue 148, available now. Subscribe today.