Off Alaska: A Race Through the Arctic Ice

By Michael Moritz

Even at night the aluminum sky gleams to every corner. To the south, a light swivels its beam around lonely Alaska, 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle and barely 1,400 miles from the North Pole. Five hundred yards to the north, an iceberg, bleached turquoise by the cold and shaped like a baby's cradle, rocks along. There is no driftwood or trash in the freezing Beaufort Sea. Nature all but forbade man to sail in this place, and Captain Walt Kardonsky knows it.

The skipper of the 9,000-hp. oceangoing tug Cavalier and his crew of seven are part of a convoy of tugs and barges making the hazardous trip from the Pacific Northwest to the oilfields around Prudhoe Bay in Alaska. Once a year, for up to six weeks, the Arctic ice pack crumbles away from the Alaskan coast, giving the oil companies their only chance to transport equipment too large to be carried by airplane or truck from Anchorage, more than 600 miles to the south. In 1975, when the entire fleet was trapped in the ice, the scheduled opening of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline was threatened. This year Atlantic Richfield's Arco unit is relying on the convoy to deliver machinery needed to begin drilling on the Kuparuk oilfield, 40 miles west of Prudhoe Bay. If it does not arrive safely, the lower 48 states will lose | the 80,000 bbl. of oil per day that the field I should yield from early in 1982.

Each of the seven red-funneled tugs belonging to San Francisco's Crowley Maritime Corp. is towing two barges. The loads are the heaviest and tallest ever. From a distance, the grumbling 136-ft.-long tugs look as if they are pulling an entire city across the top of the world. Welded to the deck of one of the barges is a ten-story-high compressor building that will be used to help reinject gas beneath the ground. It looks like a modest cathedral and is trailed by a second barge carrying a fully assembled drilling complex that will house a web of pipes rising from 36 different wells. Cargo aboard the 14 barges is worth around $170 million, and the oil companies are paying about $10 million to transport it.

Embarking from Seattle, the Cavalier plows north through the stomach-turning swells of the Gulf of Alaska and the whipping gales of Bristol Bay. It squirts through the Bering Strait and after two weeks reaches the most perilous leg of the 3,200-mile journey: the 270-mile trip from Wainwright on the western flanks of northern Alaska to Prudhoe Bay. Here the tugs putter along at four to five knots, creeping above shoals that, in places, lie only 5 ft. beneath hulls still weighted down with 100,000 gal. of diesel fuel. Kardonsky, 56, looks up from his charts with a shy grin: "Sometimes it's so shallow your ulcers start chewing each other."

He has been at the helm for more than 24 hr., trying to stay in "good water." His eyes dart with worry as the Cavalier passes points that were mapped with sailors' lives: Icy Cape, Skull Cliff, Deadman's Island. Legs braced, he peers at the radar as Second Mate Rod Doe, 22, calls out compass bearings. Haifa mile in front, another tug, Navigator, comes across shallow water and its tow chains drag along the bottom, kicking up swirling brown puffs of gravel and mud. Minutes later, when Cavalier's tow chains drag, the entire boat shudders and bucks like a horse suddenly reined tight. The crew grimaces, for the rough sand and gravel can grind even 2 1/4 -in. steel tow wires into whiskers.

A gentle tweak of a steel wheel not much bigger than a silver dollar points Cavalier's snout in a fresh direction with the ease of a Cadillac swinging into a country-club driveway. Wooden helms are fast becoming museum pieces, like so many vestiges of wind-sailing days. Crews no longer wash then-clothes in deck buckets, they toss them in washers and dryers. Gone are the iceboxes and worries about the food spoiling.

But the crew is wary of modern navigational instruments, preferring to depend on triangles, protractors and geometry lessons of old. The hydraulic steering mechanism, for example, allows Cavalier to be guided by automatic pilot, but no one trusts it for work hi shallow waters. Says Seaman Aaron Hairston, 33: "If you had an accident while you were on autopilot, you'd never be able to look at the water in your bathtub again." To the crew, the white-boxed computer, which winks out positions and readings from information beamed by a satellite, is a dunce. More often than not compass beats machine.

More threatening than the shallow Arctic waters is the ice; it can punch holes in sturdy tugs and treat barges like pincushions. The passing floes can make a landsman as giddy as a child finding shapes hi clouds. He sees ironing boards and beached seaplanes and dolphin tails and animals that guard the doors of ancient Egyptian tombs. But to the Cavalier's crew, there is nothing fanciful about these floating hulks. The ice is fragile from the summer, and if the tug sails too close, its wake can make the bergs crack or explode. Depending on the density of the floes, Kardonsky will take anywhere from a day to three weeks to sail between Wainwright and Prudhoe Bay.

No sooner had Cavalier and the rest of the fleet left Seattle than Sparky Borgert, 62, who once sailed with Kardonsky, rattled off a corrugated iron runway at Point Barrow and began tracking the shifting ice from a small plane. As Crowley Maritime's "chief iceman," Borgert decides when to allow the convoy to sail through the floes: "We've got to have an avenue wide enough that we feel confident the barges won't get destroyed. Then we'll get 'em running like scared rabbits." Every day (and usually twice a day) for more than two weeks, Borgert has been combing the coast from a low-flying Beechcraft.

"The ice changes so quickly it's impossible to predict," he observes. "I used to use notebooks and refer to them, but they're useless. For this job you've got to be here.

There ain't no other goddam way."

From the air, the ice looks like a blotchy suburban sprawl, etched in shades of caramel and cream, blue and black. Borgert peers down trying to gauge the ice's age, its strength and its intentions. "That blue ice," he chuckles, "that's harder than a whore's heart, boy." The shore ice floats past Barrow faster than a man can trot, and the pack can press ridges and hummocks 70 ft. high. Says he: "If you want to see something that scares the hell out of you, it's mobile ice moving at four or five knots and coming at you like a 16-ft. plowshare." But the prowling plowshares are at a safe distance this time, and Borgert tells Kardonsky to press on for Prudhoe Bay. The Cavalier arrives at its destination 26 hr. after it left Wainwright.

Along with the rest of the tugs and barges, the Cavalier anchors with her nose running into the wind. For a couple of weeks the crew will lounge and fish from the deck, staring at water so cold that, as oldtimers joke, the only reason for wearing a life preserver is to help rescuers spot the body. Meanwhile, on a gravel causeway 1 1/2 miles away, workers prepare to unload Kardonsky's steel cathedral. Welders will separate the buildings from the barge decks. Transferred to the sort of crawlers that carry space rockets to launch pads, the buildings will creep to their final homes on the tundra amid frozen swamps, grazing caribou and flaming jets of gas.

Most of the tug crews will wait anxiously for the now-empty barges to be rehitched so that they can set sail for Seattle. But for Kardonsky, the most experienced skipper in the fleet, a more savage task remains. The Cavalier has to tow one last load of equipment to Prudhoe Bay. The tug will return to Wainwright, hook up with a bargeload of pipes from Japan and once more swing east. Feeling the menacing bite of the chill September air, the crew will be praying harder than usual that the Arctic not mistake Kardonsky's nerve for defiance. --By Michael Moritz

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