Reality TV stars crossing Northwest Passage on jet skis forced to cancel Arctic trek after costly rescue
Two fanciful expeditions to cross the Northwest Passage — one on jet skis, the other in a rowboat — have been turned back after crews found that their path through the Canadian Arctic was blocked by ice.
A group of Americans filming a reality TV show radioed for assistance from the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Sir Wilfrid Laurier after getting pinned by Arctic conditions on Sept. 3.
“The group had encountered ice, high winds, cool temperatures and felt they were not safe and were at risk if they did not request rescue/evacuation assistance. No injuries reported,” said Rachelle Smith, regional manager of communications for Fisheries and Oceans Canada, told the Iqaluit-based Nunatsiaq News.
The seven men, filming a show called Dangerous Waters, are circumnavigating the globe on personal watercraft. This season, the goal was to cross the Northwest Passage, round the southern tip of Greenland and finish off by pulling into London, England.
Instead, they were bogged down by plummeting temperatures, a polar bear ripping apart one of their tents and the ocean freezing underneath them.
“We wake up in the morning and we’re locked in the ice. The ice has moved in, it’s completely around all the jet skis and the boat,” expedition leader Steve Moll said last week.
The men were rescued in the Franklin Strait, a body of water named for British explorer Sir John Franklin, whose entire 1845 expedition was lost while trying to navigate the area.
The cost of their rescue easily approached six figures, but the crew have as yet made no overtures to repay the sum, although they did vow to return.
Six days previously, the Last First expedition, a group of four Vancouver men trying to cross the Arctic in a rowboat, were forced to cancel their trip 1,128 km short of their goal after similarly encountering rough weather and passages choked with ice.
Ironically, one of the main goals of the expedition had been to demonstrate how ice-free the arctic had become.
“Some critics have suggested that our truncated journey speaks to the contrary but nothing could be further from the truth,” wrote expedition member Kevin Vallely in a Sept. 7 article for the Vancouver Sun.
“Our slow progress due to high winds and erratic weather demonstrates the difficulties of rowing in an Arctic environment, not the existence or non-existence of climate change.”
