Polar bears, icebergs and a galley for one: One Australian's northwest passage

Adventure runs in Ross Davey's blood.

The Australian says he's a distant relative of famed explorer Sir John Franklin — the same Franklin who led the doomed 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage.

Davey is a yacht chef who recently parlayed his culinary skills into a ticket on a 14-metre sailboat through the same fabled passage. He used Facebook pages dedicated to that sort of thing to make it happen.

"It's a kind of a hidden world," he said. "I wasn't aware of the Facebook page until a crew member on the boat I was working on said, 'Oh, you should try this.'"

It didn't cost him the tens of thousands of dollars many pay to book a berth on a cruise ship. Instead, he paid for his own food for the months long journey (about $1,000), and agreed to work as the boat's chef for the duration in a galley built for one.

Like being inside a documentary

"The scenery was unbelievable," Davey said. "What an amazing part of the world. The mind boggled. You didn't want to go below decks even though you were freezing because the scenery was so beautiful — you thought you might miss out on something."

A highlight of the trip was when he was called up onto the deck by the captain to witness a singular Arctic moment.

"There's a polar bear on an iceberg eating a seal," Davey said. "Your head just kind of explodes — you grab your camera and you run forward and start taking photos."

Davey said moments like this made him feel like he was living inside a documentary: "You're standing there watching … and you're 10 metres away from a polar bear eating a seal."

Winter's coming

But their Arctic expedition almost came undone. One evening — not while Davey was on watch, he said — their vessel ran into an iceberg.

"It's not an adventure until something goes wrong," he said.

The iceberg strike damaged the boat's propeller, bending it out of shape. The crew still had their sails, so they began a slow three-day journey to Pond Inlet in the hopes they'd be able to make a repair there.

The ship's captain was able to make repairs thanks to the use of local workshop, but every day off their journey brought them a day closer to winter.

"It was obviously a very tense thing," Davey said. "If the boat had been stuck there and we couldn't move … it would have been a big problem. We would have had to try to get the boat out of the water for … the winter that was coming."

Until the repair was complete (it involved super-heating the propeller with a large blow torch and banging it back into some semblance of its former self) and the boat back in the water, there was no guarantee they could continue.

Retracing doomed expedition

Striking the iceberg added a detour of about a week-and-a-half to their journey, but it didn't end it. Neither did a later failure of the boat's transmission in Lancaster Sound, which meant a detour to Resolute, and a further week's delay.

Still, the unexpected complications were a reminder that the Northwest Passage remains a serious undertaking even with the aids of modern marine travel.

When Davey planned his own journey through the Northwest Passage, he didn't have his connection in mind.

But during the journey, Davey said he would stand on deck at times and think of his distant relative's doomed voyage more than 170 years ago.

"Imagine doing this without radar," he said. "Imagine you're doing it without GPS. Imagine doing without an autopilot, imagine doing without supermarkets — because there were supermarkets every two weeks [along the way]."

"It was quite interesting trying to put my mind back all those years and the idea of going into an unchartered territory."

"I enjoyed retracing his steps."