Northabout Heads North Again

Regular readers may recall our coverage of the plucky little yacht Northabout’s circumnavigation of the Arctic in 2016? We are delighted to be able to inform you that (s)he is intent on heading back to the Northwest Passage once again next year, intending to travel from east to west this time around.

Meanwhile this year the plan is to visit the west coast of Greenland before returning to Jersey for the winter. Here’s how the news was announced on the local television channel here in South West England:

Northabout is the means of transport employed by Tobias Carter and Sophie Simonin of the Unu Mondo expedition as they attempt to “Enrich the Knowledge of the Arctic World with Scientific Projects” amongst other things:

Unu Mondo is a 4 months sailing expedition into the Arctic aimed to gather scientific data and testimonies from local communities to better anticipate climate change and promote concrete actions.

Leaving from Saint-Malo, France it will reach Greenland (2020) then Alaska through the famous Northwest Passage (2021), stopping on the road in the villages of the West coast of Greenland and will culminate in a documentary.

Unu Mondo team is composed of 2 skippers, a handful of scientists and a pinch of audiovisual professionals.

According to the timeline on the expedition web site Tobias and Sophie originally intended to set sail from France at the end of May. However plans seem to have changed, in part because Sophie recently tested positive for Covid-19. According to the Unu Mondo Facebook page Northabout actually set off for the Arctic from Roscoff on July 7th. Here’s the Unu Mondo Expedition’s latest bilingual video update, which amongst other things reveals Northabout’s somewhat cramped interior:

[Edit – July 14th]

Currently Northabout has reached the middle of the North Atlantic, as revealed by the Unu Mondo live tracking map:

[Edit – July 21st]

The Unu Mondo Expedition team have reached Prince Christian Sound, just north of Cape Farewell in Southern Greenland:

Northabout was last there in October 2016. Here’s what the scenery looks like:

When Northabout was still 400 nautical miles from Greenland the team released a Météo France drifting weather buoy into the North Atlantic:

Watch this space!

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