Historical comparisons of Arctic sailing conditions are clueless. The reason why people can slip through the NWP in a narrow window of time is because of technology.
even in their steel-hulled vessel, they faced the frequent worry of running into ice floes and bergs that could damage or trap their boat.
The thickest ice they encountered was in the Beaufort Sea, along the coast of Alaska, where at one point Pekka was forced to radio a helicopter, flying off a nearby oil drilling platform, for some eye-in-the-sky advice about the most navigable path forward.
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