Ice Bears and Kotick

Publisher: Seafarer books, £9:95
Publication Date: 2007

The title could well have a comma after the"Ice" but "Ice bears" also refers to polar bears - it is subtitled "Rowing on top of the world",and there is a fair share of ice and even visits from a polar bear. Kotick is the name of the 17 foot open boat that Peter and his friend Shaggy - both Royal Marines - rowed and sailed to make the first open-boat circumnavigation of Spitsbergen, an Arctic island the same size as Northern Scotland. The boat was an Oselvar,built at Os near Bergen. These boats date from Viking times and are light and swift built with 3 broad planks and a solid thwart with a hole for stepping the mast. Kotick was a "faering" which means 4-oared with a square mainsail and balloon jib. The mast was unstepped and stowed inboard when they were both rowing unless they were "motor-sailing", a term they used when one rowed and the other tended the sails. All this happened 16 years ago and Peter who has had a varied and adventurous life since then, has only just written the story. It makes fascinating reading, how they stowed all their gear, mast and sails and how a powerful rifle was most important to scare off bears and, as last resort, to shoot if attacked.. They erected trip wires to set off flares when asleep on the shore or ice but sometimes they slept alternatively in the bottom of the boat while just one rowed. There was no darkness in the Arctic summer so the days routine was arbitrary. It was predicted that the circumnavigation -1,100 Kms and 30 days - would fail owing to ice but they cleverly overcame all these hazards. Two-thirds was spent rowing and one-third under sail. Most intriguing were the descriptions of stowage, navigation, sailing, avoidance of ice and bears, and description of the environment but also of the interaction between Peter and Shaggy. My only very minor niggle is that there are rather a lot of rhetorical questions. There are 12 pages of beautiful colour photos and the text is interspersed with line drawings, all of which make it a very reasonable buy for a small paperback of 240 pages. I think this adventure will appeal to a wide readership and I can thoroughly recommend it. - Norman Tricks