In the two and a half weeks since my last post, Polar Sun has been navigating the crux of the Northwest Passage. At first, we made good progress, heading north from Pond Inlet up Navy Board Inlet, then west down Lancaster Sound to Beechey Island, where the Franklin expedition spent the winter of 1845-46. After a few scrapes with ice in Barrow Strait, we found ourselves flying south down Peel Sound between Somerset Island and Prince of Wales Island. Little did we know at the time that we were about 24 hours too late. The day before, our Swiss friend Draco had slipped through some 5/10th ice in James Ross Strait. But now a storm was brewing and the window was closing. We needed to find shelter, so we tucked into a place called Pasley Bay. It was a decision we would live to bitterly regret. If you look closely in this photo, you can barely see Polar Sun and Sloop Taya (an American/French boat that also anchored in Pasley) in the lower right corner. I’m not sure exactly when this photo was taken by @renan_ozturk, but this is what it looks like when you are trapped by ice in the Northwest Passage. Every day for ten days, the ice situation got a little worse, and we found ourselves battling around the clock to keep Polar Sun from being crushed or run aground by the ice. During one particularly dicey maneuver, the bow went up onto a floe and when it slid off, the wind grabbed the boat and turned it 180 degrees. We found ourselves facing the wrong way, surrounded by ice, in dangerously shallow water. According to the depth sounder, we were on the bottom. On Friday, August 26th, I awoke to find that the ice had filled in the last sliver of open water. Luckily, we had tied to a small grounded ice berg which had prevented us from being pushed onto shore by slabs of ice that were six feet thick. The temperature was well below freezing and a thin sheen of ice covered the open water between the floes. "Winter is coming," said Jacob. I didn't reply, but in my head I was thinking, 'Holy shit. I can’t believe we are actually getting frozen in for the winter, just like Franklin.' To be continued...