A New Zealand woman has successfully co-skippered a yacht through the notoriously difficult Northwest Passage.
Veronica Lysaght and her husband Nigel Jollands navigated their yacht, the 60-foot aluminium-hulled Novara, through the passage which connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Speaking to Morning Report, Lysaght said the pair had started planning the trip in 2019.
“My husband Nigel had always dreamed of sailing back to New Zealand and I kind of wasn’t that keen.”
But a family tragedy made Lysaght reassess her life.
“My sister died in 2019, so I kind of got the bull by the horns and said well, life is for living.
“We were living in London and he [Lysaght’s husband] said he wanted to go home with a purpose, and I wanted to go home an interesting way.”
The ‘interesting way’ was to navigate the Northwest Passage, and after a few years of planning the trip began to take shape.
The route went from Greenland, across the Davis Strait, along Baffin Island and then through Lancaster Sound side and then through to Fort Ross, where the historic Hudson Bay Company depot was, through the Bellot Strait and then through the Amundsen Gulf.
Lysaght said the ice had all but disappeared from the Eastern Arctic.
“It’s quite strange because climate change is meaning that more ice is melting”, she said, but the Western Arctic was “quite blocked”.
There was an ice pilot on board, who was the former owner of the yacht, but they did run into ice during the journey which led to one scary moment.
However Lysaght said she was confident in her boat which had been ice strengthened.
She said it wasn’t until they were heading further north into the Arctic circle she realised she would be the first New Zealand woman to co-skipper her boat through the passage.
Lysaght and her husband are currently in the Bering Strait, and have spent a few days on land in Nome, Alaska, and will winter the boat in Homer or Kodiak.
The trip back to New Zealand started in 2023 and is on a mission to help coastal communities adapt to climate change.
