After the climb in beautiful conditions on Wednesday (23 July), we had a day of rain and we stayed put apart from a short local walk. Nigel and Dave went and fixed the door of the hut and we wrote in the visitors books to wish that future residents would keep it clean.

On the following morning the weather was better and we motored round to Depot Fjord where we anchored off a very attractive beach under a huge peak. Unfortunately the plan to replenish the water tanks here (it now being 9 days since we filled up in Reykjavik) was thwarted by the surf rolling on the beach and after one abortive attempt by Dave, Mike and Al to get ashore in the dinghy enthusiastically equipped with 4 empty water cans, the project was abandoned. Unfortunately, the swell that caused the surf also produced a very rolly night.

The next day (Saturday 26 July) we made another attempt to collect water, this time driving the dinghy to a waterfall just up the fjord.  The aggressive nature of the waterfall combined with the ongoing 2 foot rise and fall made this a very challenging task that was readily forsaken once we had managed to fill 4 containers (approx 80 litres). Having given up on water collection we then motored down a narrow fjord running south west that we had been up in 2022. On the north side of this is an abandoned USAF base called Blue East. Mike stayed on board whilst the other four went ashore to see this interesting industrial archaeology. This was also the first sight of any humans that we had had. An Inuit family had gone ashore in their boat and there was also a yacht that had anchored near us (Eldorado) They also had a shore party and told us they had left Kulusuk 5 days previously – the consensus was that they were Eastern European or perhaps Russian, although the yacht was registered as a sail training vessel from the Netherlands. The other notable feature of this shore trip was the prolific and unpleasant black flies. They did not bite but they seemed to get everywhere and were extremely irritating.

We continued southwest across another large fjord, passing a small Inuit settlement (Kuummiut) to a north facing bay called Marie Havn. This had beautiful surroundings (indeed as most of our anchorages have had) but was not technically a great anchorage as the shallow bottom and gentle slope of the beach ensured that we had to anchor well out from the land. The other drawback of this overnight stay was the intense mosquito population. It was a wonderful sunny evening that under normal circumstances would have had us all in the cockpit but the mosquito swarms effectively precluded that. Although they did not bite too viciously and , if anything, seemed rather indolent and lethargic they were still pretty unpleasant.

The first task on Sunday was to continue with replenishment of the water tanks. This was considerable easier than the last attempt although somewhat hampered by the mosquitoes and by the distance from Umiak to the stream. Nevertheless, we had soon established a routine and the tanks were quickly filled.

We were aware that on Monday there was a gale warning for the Tasiilaq area with forecast winds from the North East so felt that Marie Havn was not the sensible location for that. The map had a sledging route through the mountains to an equivalent bay on the south of the peninsula we were on. It was therefore felt we should move to there…Dave, Ian and Nigel walked there (see separate blog) and Mike and Alastair drove Umiak round to another delightful bay where we had a reverse problem from the previous evening in that it was a very deep anchorage and we had to anchor in 20 metres.

Al