Cruising through the ice

It's midwinter here in the UK so I thought my next video should be of a cruise up the river Tamar (the boundary between Devon and Cornwall - not the one in Tasmania!) Only joking - this was actually filmed in July, and we were on a trip up Tracey Arm, just south of Juneau, Alaska, to view the glaciers. There are several glaciers in the fjord, although most cruisers - quite sensibly, as you will see - only go to the first, small one. But we wanted to go all the way to the huge Sawyer Glacier, and thus went in a small, specially reinforced trip boat, rather than in the Downeast 38 monohull we were sailing from Alaska to Oregon. Dark blue ice originates as snow falling on the glacier and getting compressed, so air has been forced out. I understand the colour change from transparent ice is for basically the same reason that the deep ocean is also dark blue. As always a high (up to 7000ft), steep shore means deep water, and some parts are very deep. At one point we came alongside a rocky outcrop, near enough to touch it, yet I saw the echosounder still read over 900ft! Without experience you'd really struggle to make safe progress through ice. But it's quite straightforward if you do it every day. The helmsman would choose a nice, flat, smooth-sided floe and use it as a battering ram to force a way through, keeping the smooth floe jammed against the bow, thus protecting it. Eventually the floe would fall off and he'd start again. So it was a very zig zag route, in part looking for gaps in the ice and in part looking for suitable ram-floes. He needed a good clear view ahead, so excited tourists on the foredeck didn't help! Occasionally we came to gaps of clear water, presumably due to changing winds and current, but then our way would be blocked again by more ice. In the end though, we came to a stop, as the ice got just too thick to push away. The glacier wall is hundreds of feet high, so it's hard to tell how close we got, but I suspect we were further away than it seemed. Sadly since our visit global warming has seen the Tracey Arm glaciers retreat and indeed they no longer exit into the sea.