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goboatingnow · 13-10-2021, 11:33

Quote:

Originally Posted by hpeer

Norton,
Yes on “best”. I was thinking of the contemporary exploration crowd.

Apparently he was just average in the family.

I will look for that movie, I have heard of it but not seen it.

Re: Shackelton

From my reading he was quite the gigalo, getting funding to keep him away from the Wife.

While Incan’t recall his name Shackeltons Captain is a man of high regard. He had a tough draw.

Worsley, he’s the unsung hero and the man that navigated the James Craig successfully

SeanPatrick · 13-10-2021, 15:11

*James Caird

Erik de Jong · 10-02-2022, 12:30

Interesting subject that has me intrigued for many years. The differences between the Endurance and the Fram are mind boggling. The first was just a tough ship that was never built for expeditions like that. It was all that was at hand and was affordable for the expedition. The Fram was purpose built and was actually a very poor performing boat as all other aspects were pretty much neglected to guarantee success of the intended expedition. The key design ingredient of the Fram is that the hull shape is a wedge and is such that the horizontal pressure from the ice makes the boat pop on top of it. The more pressure there is, the higher the boat comes to sit. Eventually the boat will be laying completely on top of the ice and be out of harms way. The structure of the hull needs to be such that the pressure vs uplift ratio can be withstood.

Endurance on the other hand was built in a conventional way with vertical topsides. Only the bow and stern section were flared enough to generate some uplift. But with ice pressure concentrated on the side shell that locks the boat in place, there is no way that enough lift can be generated to get the boat on top of the ice. Thus the pressure can built up, and there is no hull structure capable of withstanding full ice pressure in open ocean. The Nansen approach was scientific and had proper funding and time to get a ship purpose built. The Endurance was literally a boat that was available at the time they wanted to leave.

The idea of Nansen to attempt this drift came from the Jeannette disaster. The Jeannette got trapped in the ice near Wrangel Island in the Russian Arctic and got crushed after two years of drifting in the ice. A small part of the crew made it back to land, but most perished. about 3 years later, some of the wreckage was found on the East Coast of Greenland. This confirmed Nansen (and others) theory that there is a transpolar ocean current in the Arctic ocean and that it goes roughly from the Bering Strait to the Denmark strait. Nansen needed a ship that would survive ice pressure and that could comfortably hold a crew to drift for 3 to 5 years. Being a scientist himself he of course made it a scientific expedition. They did collect invaluable baseline data about the Arctic that is still used today as reference material.

Fast forward a fat hundred years and there is 'Tara' (Ex 'Antarctica', ex 'Seamaster'). A 36m french sailing ship that was built for the exact same purpose as Nansen. In 2006 it set off to do the same drift, repeat the same experiments and a bunch more. Instead of the 3 years it took the Fram, Tara was out in about a year and a half, mostly due to the fact that almost 75% of the ice volume in the Arctic has already disappeared, making the distance shorter and the ice move faster on the currents because of less resistance on the shore lines of Greenland and Canada.

Last year an icebreaker from the university of Bremen did a one year drift as well to collect data in the north.

As of today, 4 crewed vessels have done an arctic drift (or Nansen drift) as well as one unmanned boat. A Russian icebreaker with engine failure was abandoned in the 80ies(i believe) in the Russian Arctic and was picked up again off the caost of East Greenland the next year.

We just started the construction of a drift capable sailing vessel as well. 25m long, and perhaps we will set off to do something similar as Fram and Tara. The nearby future will tell more

On the first page of this thread was a picture of Tranquilo, a Bestevear frozen in the ice on Ellesmere Island. That is however a 'regular' sailboat that was built to winter in cold places. These kind of boats cannot withstand ice pressure in open ocean. Wintering in the arctic on such boats is only possible when anchored in a sheltered bay without ice movement and pretty much any boat is capable of doing such a wintering. Two totally different ways of wintering a boat in the ice that have very different demands of the hull shape and the hull structure.