The Northwest Passage

This is the hardest water in the atlas. The route runs west from Pond Inlet, on Baffin Island, to Cambridge Bay, on Victoria Island, through channels that trapped and killed Franklin's entire crew in the 1840s and that Roald Amundsen alone got a vessel all the way through, over three Arctic winters. A superyacht now has roughly four to six weeks each August and September in which the ice usually — not always — opens enough to try, and almost nobody tries alone: an ice pilot (a mariner qualified specifically to read moving sea ice, separate from the yacht's own master) reads the daily charts alongside the bridge, the hull needs an ice class (a structural rating for operating in sea ice) matched to what that ice pilot expects to meet, and a genuine transit is usually backed by a second, heavier vessel carrying the fuel, spares and helicopter the yacht itself has no room for. One 45-metre explorer got through 3,500 nautical miles of it with no ice class at all and won a trophy for the nerve; that this was exceptional, not standard practice, is rather the point. What is on the other side of that arithmetic is real: three headstones on a gravel beach at Beechey Island, a harbour at Gjoa Haven that has not changed shape since Amundsen wintered in it, and water that by local reckoning holds three-quarters of the world's narwhal.

“Three headstones on a gravel beach are the only marker the Passage has ever beaten anyone — everyone who has gone through since has had a great deal more help than Franklin did.”

Signature anchorages

The route this dossier covers, west from Baffin Island to Victoria Island — four working calls, two historic straits between them, and long stretches where the only other sign of life is a bear on the ice.

• Pond Inlet (Mittimatalik) & Tallurutiup ImangaThe eastern gateway: up Eclipse Sound and Navy Board Inlet into Lancaster Sound, mouth of Tallurutiup Imanga, Canada's largest protected marine area at 108,000 square kilometres and reckoned to hold three-quarters of the world's narwhal. Anchor off the hamlet in Eclipse Sound — fair holding, open to a long easterly fetch — with Sirmilik National Park's bird cliffs on Bylot Island across the water.
• Beechey Island, Devon IslandFranklin's winter camp of 1845–46, and the loneliest headstones in this atlas: three of his crew, plus a fourth searcher buried in 1854, under a National Historic Site designation that also covers the wreck of HMS Breadalbane, crushed by ice a short way offshore in 1853 and now one of the best-preserved wooden wrecks in the sea. A fully exposed roadstead — no shelter at all — where landing depends entirely on the weather holding.
• Bellot Strait & Fort RossEighteen nautical miles of tide-reversed water separating Somerset Island from the Boothia Peninsula, currents to 8 knots that switch direction along each shore; transit at slack water only, there is no anchorage inside the strait itself. Fort Ross, the Hudson's Bay Company's last Arctic post, built in 1937 and abandoned in 1948 after eleven ice-bound years, stands empty on the north shore.
• Gjoa Haven (Uqsuqtuuq), King William IslandAmundsen's own verdict — “the finest little harbour in the world” — after he wintered Gjøa here for two full years, 1903–05; the shelter that let him do it remains the best natural anchorage on the route. The Netsilik hamlet ashore holds the Nattilik Heritage Centre and the Northwest Passage Territorial Park; Inuit knowledge led searchers to HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, both within a long day's run of here.
• Simpson Strait & Queen Maud GulfThe shallow, current-braided water Amundsen threaded in place of the direct route through Victoria Strait that trapped and killed Franklin's crews — narrow, poorly charted in places, and still the passage of choice for exactly that reason. No settlements and no shelter beyond whatever the coastline happens to offer.
• Cambridge Bay (Iqaluktuuttiaq), Victoria IslandThe busiest single stop on the Passage for transiting vessels, and home to the Canadian High Arctic Research Station, a $250-million campus opened in 2019. The dock is built for the annual sealift barges rather than yachts; anchor in the roadstead off the hamlet — good holding in most conditions — with Arctic Islands Lodge and the Kitikmeot region's administrative offices ashore.

The scene

Exploration history, not nightlife — this water's fixtures are graves, wrecks and a protected sea rather than beach clubs.

Table & stay ashore

Three hamlets, three hotels — this is not a coast with restaurants to book. Each is the whole of what is ashore, and each is worth knowing before you arrive rather than after.

The passage, sketched

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