Sailing the Arctic as the Ice Melts
At home in the UK, eight months after she set sail to become the first person to circumnavigate the Arctic Circle alone in a single season, Ella Hibbert is still trying to reflect on the good things, rather than focus on what she didn't achieve.
“I had a preconceived notion of what this summer was going to be, and when expectation and reality don’t match, it can lead to quite severe disappointment,” Ella says. “But it was successful in its own ways.”
Becoming the first British woman to sail the Northwest Passage solo is no small feat—especially after dealing with an electrical fire and running aground along the way.
“It was magic,” Ella says of sailing away from Portsmouth in May on Yeva, her 38-foot Bruce Roberts Ketch. Around 60 people showed up on the dock for a heartwarming send-off, and her parents followed her out a short way in a RIB.
A few weeks into her trip and running on just four hours of sleep a day, racked up in 20-minute increments, Ella encountered a storm off the east coast of Iceland. Teetering on the edge in 40-knot gusts, waves delivered lateral blows, rolling the boat sharply and creating a dangerous situation. The helm spun itself loose and the woodruff key vanished, Ella had to go on deck to retrieve it.
“I thought I’d be quick enough that I could leave the hatch open, grab the thing, and come back inside,” she says.
But that wasn’t the case. As soon as she got to the cockpit, for the first time, a wave came over the back of the boat and flooded it like a bathtub.
The ice-cold water back flooded the heater’s exhaust and ran down the companionway hatch, leaving the interior walls wet. Back inside the boat, trying to dry off and warm up, Ella could hear the water flushing down into the bilges and being pumped out. Miraculously, she did find the key on deck and rebuilt the helm, getting Yeva back on course.
A few days later, some of the electronics that had gotten wet sparked a fire under the floorboards. Ella was left without a heater on a damp, cold boat, with a damaged AIS and an unreliable VHF, for three weeks before she arrived in Greenland.
“I was just kicking myself, because it was such a rookie thing to do,” says Ella. “It can be hard to think clearly when something is going wrong. If I’d just been a little slower in thinking through what I was doing, it may have ended differently.”
Between Iceland and Greenland, Ella’s spirit was buoyed by seeing humpbacks and pilot whales daily, but she also encountered more severe storms, with waves reaching nearly six metres. When she finally rounded southern Greenland, she tacked back towards the mainland and became enveloped in fog. Acutely aware of the ice and icebergs in the water around her, she didn’t sleep for about 24 hours. 
Ella’s intention was to complete her circumnavigation nonstop, but she had to stop in Nuuk, Greenland, to make repairs. There, she spent ten long days learning to solder and crimp wires and to integrate what she’d already experienced.
“I felt a lot more prepared by the time I left Greenland to do the Northwest Passage,” she says.
Having made the stop in Nuuk meant that Ella was able to visit local communities, since it was no longer a non-stop voyage.
“Local kids would come over on their bicycles to have a look around the boat, and then show me around their villages,” she says.
Slowing down and stopping more often also meant witnessing more wildlife—polar bears with a cub, her first orca in the wild, and as many as 20 seals daily.
While the majority of the sea ice Ella witnessed throughout her journey was in the Northwest Passage; she estimates that no more than 10% of the passage was actually affected by it. The first time a ship completed Victoria Strait, a narrow channel that forms part of the passage, was in September 1967 with an icebreaker.
“It’s really quite upsetting to see it open that much already,” she says. “I basically sailed through it with one eye on a book and one out the window.”
Fortunately, Ella didn’t encounter any further issues with equipment; however, that doesn’t mean the rest of her trip was without incident.
Outside of Tuktoyaktuk, Canada, Yeva ran aground.
“I’ve never run a boat aground in my entire career,” she says. “It was a genuinely scary thing to happen because there’s nothing you can do; there was no way to avoid it.”
Ella was aware of the shallows, an area about 60 miles by 30 miles with a plateau that sits only about 1.5 to 3 metres below the water, and she knew that with Yeva’s draft of 1.75 metres, there was a very narrow margin of error while sailing through.
The night before, Ella and Yeva weathered the most severe storm the region had experienced in 45 years.
“We had 70 knot winds blowing through,” she says. “The town I was staying in flooded, including the dock I was tied to.”
Whether the sandbanks shifted as a result of the storm or over time and simply weren’t reflected in the outdated charts available for the Arctic is hard to know. But either way, they were no longer where Ella expected them to be.
While expecting to avoid one, Yeva instead ended up on top of it. Luckily, she bounced free without damage, and Ella called the Canadian Coast Guard for assistance. They arrived in a shallower-draft boat and, with Ella following 100 metres behind, they used their depth finder to lead Yeva out.
“The Coast Guard suggested we should name the bit where I ran aground, Ella's Bank,” she says. “I'm not sure that's the legacy I want.”
Ella now had to make a decision. She was further behind schedule than expected, and if she continued, she risked being in Russian waters when her permit expired. She was denied an extension, and resubmitting all the paperwork while the ice was already closing in wasn’t viable.
“When Russia said, ‘we strongly advise that you don't due to the conditions,’ the decision was kind of made for me,” she says.
The day Ella dropped out of the Arctic Circle and kept heading south, she felt the deepest disappointment, but serendipity intervened. With a hurricane coming at her and seemingly nowhere to hide from it, Ella finally spotted St. Paul Island—a town of 334 people with a dock.
The community took Ella under their wing, put her up in a little house, and built a custom stand for her boat to stay over the winter.
“It is the most incredible place, and something that would never have happened if everything else before it had happened as I’d wanted it to,” Ella says.
For now, Ella is on land, sharing her experience through talks at yacht clubs, boat shows, corporations, and schools. The circumnavigation remains unfinished—but not undone. Next season, she will return to Yeva on St. Paul Island and continue east, completing the first single-handed circumnavigation of the Arctic Ocean not in a single season, but with the perspective earned by slowing down.