My dream of sailing to Baffin Island was realized yesterday when we tied Polar Sun up to the brand new public wharf in Pond Inlet after a six day, 680-mile crossing of Baffin Bay. I don’t think it’s possible to describe, at least not in an Instagram caption, how good it felt to close the loop on a dream I’ve been nurturing since I was 26, hanging on the side of Polar Sun Spire, looking out over Sam Ford Fjord and imagining how cool it would be to visit this magnificent place in a small boat. The plan had been to pull into Sam Ford Fjord and sail beneath Polar Sun Spire, but the breakup of the ice on the east coast is at least two weeks late. Unfortunately we had to pass it by. This also meant that we weren’t able to pick up our friends @sarahmcnairlandry and @erikboomer, who have been exploring in the area for the past several weeks. (They are now executing their backup plan and hiking overland back to Clyde River.) When we finally made it up and over the middle pack, which you can see in photos 2 and 3, we got hit with a 20 knot headwind that stayed on us for the rest of the passage. Close hauled, we sailed in and out of fog banks in heavy chop, sometimes amongst a worrying amount of ice. @zartman_rigging, @renanOzturk and @rudy.le can attest to how it was for them, but for me personally it was a character building experience. When the sheer-sided walls hemming the Buchan Gulf materialized out of the gloom on day six, a hearty cheer, heard by no one besides us, rang through the cold clear air. That night, we battled our way through ten miles of pack ice to a tenuous anchorage in the lee of Cape Antrobus on Nova Zembla Island. In the morning, as we sat in the cockpit drinking coffee, Polar Sun was visited by a pod of belugas, which seemed to pay no heed to the strange boat from Maine. We have one more day here in Pond to catch up on our correspondence and get Polar Sun ready for the trials ahead. There is still a lot of ice ahead of us in the Northwest Passage, so we will take it one day at a time. As an old friend once told me, “You can’t have a great adventure unless the outcome is totally unknown.” 📸 @renan_ozturk #TheArcticMystery @natgeo