DUNVEGAN, Alta. – A dream to sail around the world from the Peace River in northern Alberta began May 24 for buffalo producer Ben Gray.
On a sunny Tuesday afternoon, Gray and his crew untied the Idlewild, a 57 foot boat he helped design. They left from the bridge at Dunvegan and headed north to the Arctic.
Gray will spend most of the summer navigating the boat along the rivers and lakes of northern Canada, through the ice flows of the Arctic Ocean and then east to Greenland.
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“For us, we like the north. Going on a long water trip is always a unique and interesting project. If
we could mix it with the north and adding the opportunity to depart from our home port here in Dunvegan, close to our friends and our ranch and
where I was born and the extra challenges of the portages, that’s good.
“We’ve mixed it all together and added the around-the-world just to make sure we cover the bases,” said Gray, about two hours before he left Dunvegan.
One of the first challenges will be getting the boat down the Peace River, which is known for its fluctuating water depth and sandbars. A week before leaving, Gray and others who are travelling for parts of the trip charted the waters of the Peace River to the Vermilion Chutes, north of Fort Vermilion, to find the deepest water.
A jet boat will travel ahead of the Idlewild during the first part of the trip to help retrace the deep-water route. The boat sits about five feet in the water due to a set of wheels added for portage purposes.
The Vermilion Chutes are a 16 kilometre set of rapids about 80 km north of Fort Vermilion. The only trail is a narrow canoe portage route. Gray has hired natives from the nearby community of Fox Lake to help him with the portage. The next one occurs at the Slave River Rapids, a 21 km stretch near Fort Smith on the Alberta and Northwest Territories border. After that portage, he will remove the wheels.
“It’s a compromise, attaching the wheels to the boat so we can pull it out and put it in at will. It makes the boat sluggish, of course, in the water, but it’ll work,” said Gray, who added that finding a way around the rapids was just one of the challenges in planning the trip.
Designing a boat that could travel both the Peace River and the Pacific Ocean took a lot of arguing with the Vancouver boat builders.
“The yacht designers, it takes a lot of arguing and persistence to get them to make the kind of compromises that are necessary for the challenge we have.
“You end up with a boat that’s compromised a bit – not in safety, but it rides rougher and so if you’re inclined to get sick, you get sick quicker and more often,” said Gray, who spent the past winter sailing the boat along the Pacific coast between Vancouver and San Francisco.
He started designing the boat in 1981 and began to build it a year later, but that year his oilfield business went bankrupt and the idea was shelved. He started again in the oilfield and sold out in 1989 to ranch for 15 years near Silver Valley in the Peace River area of northern Alberta.
In 2002, he sold the bison herd and this spring sold his land and moved to Grande Prairie.
“A trip like this you can’t do it unless you’re retired or you have an exceptional amount of money. We were fortunate to be able to put it together and make it work,” said Gray. He sold a drilling patent to finance the project.
It cost about $375,000 to build the boat and another $100,000 in travelling and “other stuff” before the trip began. He estimates it will cost another $100,000 before he gets home.
“It’s a ton of money in my books.”
Throughout the planning, Gray said he has had plenty of support from family and friends. His son, Kevin, will travel the whole way with him. Another son, Brad, will travel as far as Greenland. His daughter and her children will travel on parts of the Mackenzie River.
Gray said his wife, Alice, doesn’t want to travel on the boat much, but will meet the crew in the Canary Islands and Australia.
“She’s really supportive.”
Gray has encouraged others to hop on and off along the way. John Laninga, a fellow bison producer from Silver Valley, joined the crew at Dunvegan and hopes to stay on board until Fort Providence on Great Slave Lake in the N.W.T.
“This is special,” said Laninga. “I like the history of the Peace. It’s our neck of the woods. It’s pretty inaccessible virgin country. It hasn’t changed in 100 years.”
He will be aboard when the boat enters Saskat-chewan at Lake Athabasca to see the northern sand dunes.
“There’s more to life than growing oats,” he said. “It’s a tremendous adventure.” However, he admitted he doesn’t want to sail across the Pacific.
Bison producer Burnem Grant of Tomslake, B.C., may join the trip from the mouth of the Mackenzie River to Nome, Alaska and back.
Grant wasn’t always keen on the idea. When Gray first talked about it, Grant could only focus on everything that could go wrong.
“All my questions were on the negative side,” he recalled. He wondered why Gray didn’t sail around the world from Vancouver instead of starting in northern Alberta.
“Ben said to me ‘no one has sailed around the world and started in Alberta’,” said Grant, who has marked out the world route on his globe at home.
“The more I look at it, the more interesting it gets. Now I think it’s great and I wish I was more involved. The desire to go through the passage grows more each day.”
It’s this kind of interest in the Arctic that Gray hopes to ignite as people follow his journey on his internet site, which can be found at www.producer.com by typing “world trip” in the go box.
“I hope it creates interest to other people to travel to the north. The North is closer than Mexico and more interesting and yet it’s not promoted as much and more people should enjoy it.”
The most common reaction to his plan is wonderment, said Gray. Few people seem able to look beyond the obstacles.
He expects many challenges, including navigation through Arctic ice floes.
“Once we get to the ice, there’s two things: it has to thaw enough, and the wind can’t keep pushing the old ice in. That would get you regardless of how warm it is.
“Most of those things we can’t do too much about except we have to be on the alert. If there’s a little crack in the ice, we try to get as much mileage as we can and keep pushing,” said Gray, who has studied maps of Arctic ice for 25 years.
He also expects daily triumphs, whether it’s watching a bear swim the river or watching his grandchildren enjoy the trip through the Arctic.
“It still gets back to people. When the grandkids will come along on the Mackenzie and they’re excited about what they see, that’s a highlight. When your friends are along and they’re enjoying themselves, that’s a highlight.”
