Stepping aboard the 74-foot aluminium lifting keel expedition vessel in Bergen, I stroke the rugged pilothouse gently and whisper, ‘Hello, friend.’ I know that skippering Witness is going to be a stretch. More precisely, a 23ft-long stretch beyond the largest sailing yacht I have skippered until then.

Witness is a massive little ship and that added length seems like a mile.

Witness is the former Pelagic Australis, the brainchild of high-latitude sailing legend Skip Novak. At 74 feet long and weighing in at over 50 tonnes, she is built for 12 people to live in comfortably and be self-sufficient for weeks in the cold, icy climates at the ends of the world.

She carries seven tonnes of diesel and three tonnes of water. In her former life, she has sailed scientists, climbers, skiers, TV crews, and explorers to Antarctica, South Georgia, Patagonia and the Arctic, and navigated various remote islands in the middle of high seas and screaming winds.

In 2021, Greenpeace launched Witness in their colours after a major donor gave the ship to the environmental organisation. For the next three months, I would be the skipper and we were going in my favourite direction: north.

The longest stretch

The handover process takes three days and with every point on the list we go through, I get more and more relieved that I have a crew of four – two mates, an engineer, and a deckhand – who know the ship, procedures, and Greenpeace well. It is a big stretch to leave the dock after just three days with a boat full of scientists, campaigners, and crew. But it is the only way to do the job.

With a genoa, a yankee and a staysail on a manual roller furling, it’s necessary to have a plan before we unfurl the sails. It takes three to five minutes and a lot of human energy to get them in and out. The mainsail is don’t ask me why – square-topped and can’t be gybed or tacked without putting the first of four reefs in to avoid it being caught in the backstay.

So we end up always sailing with one reef. But after playing around with combinations of the three foresails, Witness proves to be a fast-moving boat and, when the following breeze kicks up to a healthy 25-30 knots, she speeds like a freight train along the Norwegian coast towards Ålesund.

‘Why have we fixed the spinnaker boom with the mousing lines? And why isn’t the running backstay on?’

My first mate Alessandra gives me a mild verbal keelhauling when the first morning light comes and it is time for a watch change.

‘Sorry. I read the 100-page long manual but could not find the correct ropes in the forepeak. The running backstays I just forgot. Too much information, and too much “bursting to sail her” feeling,’ I try to explain. She just smiles and shakes her head. Forgiven. I hope.

Out to sea

We leave Ålesund as soon as our photographer has stepped on board. We have a mission. The scientists on board, spearheaded by the always energetic Dr. Kirsten Young, are eager to launch the hydrophone, which we will be towing 350 metres behind the boat. The four hydrophones in the oil-filled tube will pick up whales and dolphins speaking to each other in the deep.

Sailing with scientists who love to share their vast knowledge gives you a new perspective on the ocean we all love. I learn that it is mostly the male sperm whales that migrate north to feed. The young and female sperms tend to stay in the warm waters below 40° of latitude.

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The blue-grey giants seek out the highly productive and deep water in the Norwegian Sea, the same stretch of water where Norway is doing what Norway does best: exploiting ocean resources for the benefit of a few and the disaster of the many.

It started with the near extinction of whales, then overfishing, then we moved on to oil and gas and followed up with fish farming that is destroying fjords, fisheries, and oceans worldwide. As the fossil fuel era is slowly fading out, the Norwegian politicians have cast their desperate eyes on the deep sea where minerals are to be found.

The deep sea is one of the few areas on the planet we know very little about. Every time scientists send ROV (unmanned submarines) down to the deep they come up with pictures of new species. In best-case scenarios, the scientists reckon we only have discovered 10 per cent of what is living down there.

Why are species we don’t know anything about so important? Whole ecosystems stand to be destroyed, and we know nothing about the consequences.

Down there in the deep might live the key ingredients for a cure for cancer and more. The area is also a huge carbon sink that we might end up destroying, further disrupting the climate. It will take tens of years for scientists to map out these ecosystems properly. And that’s way beyond the political time horizon that just stretches to the next election.

With 12 people on board, the bunks are all full, but it never feels crowded. Even the non-sailors on board have recovered nicely after 24 hours at sea. For some, it’s their first time on board a sailing boat; what a baptism  sailing over 14 days in the Norwegian Sea heading for Longyearbyen, Svalbard. We are lucky, it could have been a rough experience, with gale after gale and nowhere to hide.

The thin volcanic island of Jan Mayen lies a couple of hundred miles away, but doesn’t really provide much in the way of shelter. If a storm had come along and forced us to seek shelter, the science expedition would have been over because it would take us three to four days to find a safe haven in either Svalbard, Iceland, or back in Norway.

Shift work

I am the first and last person the scientists see every day, so they think I am always awake. On Witness, I have two mates, an engineer and a deckhand to help me run the ship. The mates and I do a four to eight-hour shift rotation, and I have the eight to 12 shift twice a day. This schedule is inherited from former skippers, and it is a luxury to sleep the whole night through. The engineer and deckhand fill in on the night shifts while the scientists run their shift system with two on deck watching for whales and listening on the hydrophones.

We cross the Arctic Circle at 66° 33’ N and celebrate with cake and round-the-clock daylight. Now there is no excuse not to keep a lookout for whales, but we all have to sleep. So the sailors also look and listen for whales on their sunny night shifts.

Witness is a full-on sailing boat capable of doing 200 nautical miles a day in the right conditions. However, even when the going is easy, it isn’t possible for us to do that. We have to push through wind and waves to get somewhere on time.

Although we are a sailing boat, we are primarily a provider of logistical services for scientists, Greenpeace campaigners, and storytellers. We are here to fight for the ocean, but ironically, this means that we cannot always sail. But we do try. Because the feeling we get when the engine goes silent and you can hear the saltwater slushing by on the other side of the eight-millimetre aluminium hull is priceless.

On this deep-sea mission, it means that we can’t sail at 4 knots when the ideal speed for the hydrophone is 6-9 knots. We have to break the silence with the engine, and we have a huge area to cover in a zig-zag pattern. So we are happy when we can roll out the sails, and focus on the ocean view when we have to roll them in again. And I keep a keen eye on the latest weather forecasts.

Sense of mission

Starlink is a total game-changer when it comes to sailing. We have two on board just in case one of them should break down in a fit. For Greenpeace, that makes good sense. After all, saving the planet is all about communication, and in today’s world, speed and availability are rules one and two.

So we send pictures, videos, and text back home to the office. Good as it is, though, connectivity is a double-edged sword. One of the reasons I sail the ocean is to get away from the world. To be in my little blue bubble of happiness – or total misery when the storm hits. Either way, it’s better than being in the office. But Starlink enables meetings in all shapes and formats with the big blue surrounding us. Meetings with people who want change.

All sailors should be concerned about deep-sea mining. The ocean already faces many threats in the form of plastic pollution, acidification, and over-fishing, to name just a few, so we just can’t afford to put more strain on it. We are all dependent on a healthy ocean and shouldn’t allow a few companies to imperil it in the name of profit, says Haldis Tjeldflaat Helle of Greenpeace Norway.

Sailing for Greenpeace means that you are constantly surrounded by highly motivated, opinionated, and knowledgeable people about how we are increasingly destroying the planet we depend on. They are fighting for the ocean and the one planet we have. And when we arrive in Longyearbyen after 10 days filled with whales singing and diving, it is 22°C in the northernmost city in the world. Of course, it’s nice with a taste of summer, but that is scary hot. It should not be this hot, but the sad fact is that the Arctic is heating up way faster than the rest of the world.

And so the next project for Witness begins as new scientists arrive and we set off to document the fast-melting glaciers on Svalbard with drones.

It’s a sad mission, but someone has to do it to push for change.

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