The Other Side of the Ice: One Family's Treacherous Journey Negotiating the N Paperback – Illustrated, 22 September 2015

Being from New Bedford, MA, a city whose life is inextricably intertwined with the sea, I was drawn to this story for it's ocean going adventure--navigating the Northwest Passage in the modern age. But it was much more than that. The author of this story reunited his estranged grown children on this voyage to the Arctic, which may have well been a voyage into space. Thrust together in the close confines of their small Nordhavn powerboat, they relied solely on each other's strength and teamwork to survive the five month journey.The visual imagery is beautiful, vast, and empty. Thousands of miles of ice, without trees, people, or the comforting sights of home. It is a tale filled with polar bears, storms, and ice. Lots of ice.It's easy to think that the Passage should be old hat by now. We are equipped with satellite communication, GPS, radar, (fairly) accurate forecasting of weather conditions and ice flows, etc.... But, if that were the case, we would have started using it as a modern shipping lane long ago. The author of this story and his crew survive, of course. (He is on twitter after all--@TheobaldSprague). Their survival was not ensured when they begin, however. They made mistakes, as anyone would without the benefit of hindsight. They navigated a 57 foot boat through the most treacherous seas on earth. And they re-ignited a genuine feeling of family within themselves.This a story of frontiers, self-reliance, love, humanity, and adventure.My summers would fill a book as well, but not one I'd want to read. I want to re-read this one.

This book is written in such a frank open and honest way, I found it a compelling read that I just could not put down. It takes you through the preparation, crew selection, and hardware for the trip, including the logistic, financial and emotional mountains that very often derail expeditions like this one. The author describes in vivid detail the self doubt and constant guilt he feels that he could be taking his children to their death on this trip. Particularly when things start to go wrong. In amongst the stress of the expedition itself lurks constant interpersonal issues between the crew that both drive them apart and ultimately bring them closer together.

“The Other Side of the Ice: One Family’s Treacherous Journey Negotiating the Northwest Passage” was a compelling (riveting, engrossing, gripping) book; I only put it down to sleep. The author, Sprague Theobald, among his other talents, is an accomplished seaman. His dream was to traverse the Northwest Passage in his 57-foot fiberglass trawler (it looked like a large pleasure boat to me) with five crewmates (three of which were his young adult children). They started their 8,500-mile journey at the end of July 2009 leaving from Newport, RI, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Nuk, Greenland, through the Baffin Sea and into the Northwest Passage (north of Canada) or, as the crew described, “the other side of the moon.” From there, it got really hairy with ice packs, 50-knot winds, and 8-foot seas as they traversed the Beaufort, Chukchi, and Bering Seas into the Gulf of Alaska and ending in Seattle in early November. Along the way were polar bears, isolation, fear, exhaustion, mechanical crises, beauty, physical pain (we never learned what happened to his nemesis—his injured little toe), financial stressors, and personality clashes. The 1845 tragically lost Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage was often on his mind. More than an extreme travelogue, it reads like a combination of a National Geographic exploration story, full of details of the landscapes he witnessed, and a personal diary of his relationship with his formerly estranged children. The book is the basis for the 2013 Emmy-winning documentary that I haven’t yet seen but need to. I highly recommend reading this book. Sprague Theobald is a 1970 graduate of Langley High School in McLean. Go Saxons.

If you are an avid reader of nonfiction maritime adventures (as I am) or someone who aspires to buy a passage-capable trawler and take an extended journey (as I do) then this is a very interesting and worthwhile read. It lacks a strong narrative but is chock full of insight into the reality of day-to-day life under the kind of adverse conditions one might expect from such a bold and dangerous undertaking as traversing the Inside Passage in a small boat. And certainly one of the heroes is the boat itself - the Nordhavn 57 - a wondrous workhorse of a trawler that took it all in stride. It was actually bickering among the crew (group dynamics!) far more than the inevitable (and surprisingly infrequent) equipment malfunction - or the ice itself - that nearly sunk this incredible expedition.

It's the summer of 2009. Sprague Theobald, a filmmaker and expert sailor, decides it's time to do something interesting with his life. Hmmm...What to do? What to do? O, why not take an 8,500-mile danger-filled trek across the Northwest Passage in a 57-foot boat? This happens to be one of the most treacherous trips a sailor can take, one that few have had the audacity to take, much less survive. I think knowing this alone would make the decision for me. Stay home. Watch the Discovery Channel. Not so for Sprague.Why would anyone want to go out on a limb financially to take a trip on frigid, hostile, faraway seas? Were there no warning bells? Does this man have no fear?From the minute I opened The Other Side of the Ice, I couldn't put it down. Sometimes it reads like a captain's log, but this captain is awake to many levels of experience. He offers a rich chronicle of life on the edge, physical, emotional and spiritual. It's not enough that he runs out of money before casting off, but he and his crew of estranged family members are dogged by white-knuckle storms, hidden icebergs, broken satellite connections, fog, hungry polar bears, underwater rocks, freezing water, ice floes and faulty equipment. Against the backdrop of profound arctic beauty, interspersed with fond reminiscences of the past, forging through impassable frozen bays, the crew deals with physical ailments, being lost, exhausted, discouraged, sibling tension and self-doubt and exceeds the limits of each other's patience.This is truly a unique, self-effacing, compelling memoir of transcendence through a life lived fully. I've ordered the movie!