Aug 16 and 17
Up at six and off across Ungava Bay, with a following light west wind. The small rocky cove where we spent the night was so barren but nicely protected. As we left, Finley spotted three brown smudges; when they moved we realized the were musk ox. They’re enormous!

The next 36 hours was great by everyone’s reckoning. We had a smooth overnight passage across the top of Ungava Bay (150 miles), with a following and variable wind that meant equal parts sailing and motoring. We took a slight detour to do a drive-by of a barren island (Akpotak) right in the middle. The northern edge had towering vertical cliffs exposing a clearly sedimentary origin, completely different from where we’d been and where we were going (granite and gneiss) and they stood proudly facing the ocean like the white cliffs of Dover.  As we approached, the density of murres increased dramatically until we were surrounded by virtual clouds of birds flying and swimming all around the boat. There are bird cliffs on the island but we didn’t have time to seek them out. Thick-billed murres were described variously the crew as flying penguins or flying footballs: wide in the middle, pointed at each end, with short wings that are used for both flying and swimming, which they seemed equally likely to do when the boat approached. To be more exact, they didn’t seem to be able to make up their mind; they flapped their way across the water, bouncing from wave to wave on splayed webbed feet, then suddenly giving up and diving out of sight.

Saturday morning brought sunrise over the northern tip of Labrador. Instead of going around it, we chose to go through it by a renowned shortcut — a passage called McClelan Strait. which is simply a narrow cut right through the mountains from Ungava Bay to the Atlantic. It’s about six miles long and enclosed by sharply sloping rock cliffs rounded by the last glacier, as improbable as the Panama Canal but natural.  Since Ungava Bay and Atlantic side tides are out of sync, enormous currents race through the strait most of the time. We headed for the opening at the supposed right time and found standing waves made by currents running against us. It was as if someone had opened the floodgates on a dam. So we killed some time and ran through when the current was more favorable. It was miraculously sunny and clear. The cliffs, a lively mixture of metamorphic rock types, woven over with lichens and mosses, were almost hypnotic in their variety-in-sameness. No trees —  nothing in the way of a direct experience of endless bedrock.  It’s a special, dramatic passage; we were all speechless with wonder for the better part of two hours.

Now we’re anchored in a bay on the Atlantic side. I tried my plankton net and microscope, finding modest numbers of copepods and small comb jellies. All this in water that’s at 38° F. Tomorrow we’ll go looking for the remains of a secret German weather station that a U-boat secretly established during WWII. They thought no one would find it up here. They were almost right.