Seattle-based Coast Guard cutter’s journey through the Arctic: No ‘ice liberty’ in changing waters

They call it “ice-free,” a tradition during the Coast Guard’s maritime missions in arctic waters. At a thick ice floe, the crew can disembark from the ship’s borders for a brief moment of freedom. Some play touch football or bring hockey gear for the occasion. Others just take a walk.

This year, no suitable ice was found during the Coast Guard Cutter Healy’s north voyage off Alaska and Canada. So the event was canceled.

“Many of the floes had melt pools with holes like Swiss cheese,” said Captain Kenneth Boda, commander of the Seattle-based icebreaker. “We couldn’t get the right plaice.”

Boda spoke on the phone during a call to port in Boston. The ship is deep in a marathon voyage that began on July 10 when the 420-foot ship left its berth at the Coast Guard base in downtown Seattle and sailed into Arctic waters off Alaska. After jogging south, Healy headed north again and through the Northwest Passage to the Atlantic.

This was in part a training mission for the 85 crew members, a task that became even more important as the Coast Guard prepares to bolster the U.S. Arctic presence with three new icebreakers due to be stationed in Seattle later this decade.

Some of the crew are only 18 years old and started this cruise fresh from boot camp.

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“The best way to train is to just get there and do it,” said Boda. “To see where they started and where they are today is just amazing.”

The ship also hosted a rotating cast of scientists researching different parts of an arctic marine environment that underwent epic changes as temperatures rose.

The Healy has traveled frequently in the Arctic of Alaska, but this was the first time the ship has crossed the Northwest Passage since 2005, which consists of several different routes that – as sea ice has receded over the past few decades – have become more accessible.

In the Prince of Wales Strait, a narrow stretch of water that separates two islands in Canada’s Northwest Territories, Boda said stretches of coast collapsed due to the thawing of permafrost. Boda said the crew were largely able to find open water rather than breaking ice.

“We were surprised at the state of the ice,” said Boda. “All that heavy stuff, we could maneuver around.”

Scientists aboard the ship included Larry Mayer, director of the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire, who spent many years mapping the Arctic seabed.

He said mapping in the Northwest Passage this year included many flat areas where the ground had been thinned by icebergs for many decades. Further east there were deeper gorges formed by glaciers that had since retreated.

Mayer said there was significantly more ice this year than a few years ago, but it was mostly young ice, not the perennial, thick clods that were often seen on summer cruises earlier.

Scientists also reported significantly more ice than in previous years on another Arctic research cruise that ventured around 500 miles north of the north coast of Alaska. It was thicker and stretched further south.

That wasn’t much in historical terms, but it was surprising when compared to the recent steady breakup of the ice pack, ”said Bernard Coakley, a geophysical scientist from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who was aboard the ship Sikuliaq during a six-week Arctic voyage that ended in late September 30 in Nome.

Measurement of the melt

This was Mayer’s 10th cruise aboard the Healy, so he has a lot of experience with what can go right and wrong on the ship. He said morale was high this year and the food on the galley – which was a disappointment in a few years – was rated as the best ever.

“It was really a pleasure. There are often vegans at a science party these days, and they always had a vegan option, ”he said.

Mayer and other scientists who boarded in Seward, Alaska, were leaving Healy when the ship reached Nuuk, a town of about 17,000 on the southwest coast of glacial Greenland.

Newcomers included Robert Pickart, a scientist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who has studied how warm water can be channeled through underwater troughs to accelerate the melting of tidal glaciers. He is also investigating what happens to the Greenland glacier melt when it enters the sea.

The fate of Greenland’s glaciers is a key concern of climate researchers, as their melting rate will help determine how quickly sea levels rise. And large amounts of glacial freshwater melt could cause a severe slowdown or even the collapse of an ocean current system – the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation – that helps shape the earth’s climate.

Pickart said he worked closely with the Healy crew to position the ship in key locations in Baffin Bay, where in some areas the coastal waters were filled with hundreds of icebergs.

“It’s really important that we understand this spread (glacial melt) at high latitudes,” said Pickart. “This is a big deal.”

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Arctic shipwreck found

During the voyage, the Healy crew crossed some of the waters that were sailed more than a century ago by the namesake of their ship, “Hell Roaring” Mike Healy, from 1886 to 1895 captain of the US Revenue Cutter Bear with a wooden hull.

Healy, who was born into slavery, is a legendary figure in US maritime history. The first African-American person to command a U.S. government ship, he undertook annual patrols off Alaska covering 15,000 to 20,000 miles.

Healy was a kind of maritime sheriff who, according to a US Coast Guard story, acted as “judge, doctor and policeman for Alaskan natives, merchant seamen and whaling crews,” and the bear on a historic 1884 rescue of starving survivors of an Arctic expedition under the command of Army 1st Lt. Adolphus Greely.

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After Healy, who was fighting alcoholism, left Bear, this ship continued to patrol the Arctic for many years and later served in World War I and II. After decommissioning, the Bear sank at sea in 1963 while being towed from Nova Scotia to Philadelphia, where it was to be converted into a port museum and restaurant.

The bear’s final resting place has been the subject of decades of searching. In August, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association Ocean Exploration, in collaboration with the Coast Guard, located and photographed a wreck that was “reasonably certain” to be the bear, according to a statement released by NOAA last week.

Boda has a copy of a Healy biography. And on September 22nd, Healy’s birthday, he read a passage over the ship’s loudspeaker in memory of the ship’s namesake.

It was by this time that Boda had learned of the discovery of the bear’s seabed wreck, identified through photos of a remote-controlled underwater vehicle that detailed features such as a specific pattern of steel brackets on the bow.

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When the Healy entered Boston Harbor last week, Coast Guard and NOAA officials had arranged a formal announcement of the discovery of the bear at the docks, using the Healy as a backdrop.

After leaving Boston, the Healy returned to sea, heading for Baltimore on the way to a Panama Canal passage and a final jogging stretch north of the west coast to Seattle. The goal is to return by November 20th, just before Thanksgiving.