Leo Goolden won plaudits for sailing his Folkboat
solo from the UK to Antigua last year. Now he has
gone north, as skipper of an 86-year-old ketch
STORY LEO GOOLDEN
GREENLAND BOUND
ONBOARD
I
t had been a long voyage from Antigua, with just a
couple of short stops, but as we saw the first
outlines of the Greenlandic coast appearing in the
early morning light, we all felt something special,
and no, it was not just the cold.
I am still not sure how it happened, but I found
myself working as skipper of the 95ft (29m) Baglietto
ketch Sincerity (1929). It was a small step up in size
and responsibility from my own boat, the 25ft
Folkboat Lorema, which I sailed from the UK to
Antigua last year (CB325). To say I felt out of my
depth was an understatement.
However, our motley crew (from Antigua, France,
Australia, Germany, Canada, the UK and Norway) had
managed to sail Sincerity 3,000 miles north from the
West Indies, via Bermuda and Nova Scotia, throughlightning storms, icebergs and thick fog, and I was
beginning to feel just a little bit less clueless than before.
None of us had ever been so far north, but as a bloated
yellow moon rose over the snow-capped mountains to
welcome us, and a pod of whales added their watery
trumpets to the calm of the Labrador Sea, we all felt
excited and honoured to be visiting this far-flung land.
After such a dramatic approach, our landfall in the
tiny capital city Nuuk was anticlimactic. Charming in
parts, with multicoloured houses and wooden churches,
it was peppered with apartment blocks put up during a
period of modernisation in the 1950s and suffers for it.
We had a couple of days before Sincerity’s charter
guests arrived, so decks were scrubbed, lines whipped,
sails stitched and crystal glasses and crockery were dug
out from dark corners and placed nervously on the