Initially we chose a fjord about 40 nautical miles from Sisimiut, on the west coast of Greenland. Far enough to feel properly alone, close enough that if something went really wrong, help was theoretically possible.

But pushing into the bay in November we soon found out that we’d arrived too late. As we tried to make our way to our planned spot deeper in the fjord, the ice was already too thick. Slushy ice was constantly blocking our engine's cooling system, and even worse, the banging sound of Lumi's hull hitting ice was brutal. We were worried about the rudder, the propeller, everything.

We gave up partway in and had to settle for a spot that wasn’t our first choice. And we quickly found that to be a mistake.

The ice quickly settled around us, but three days after we froze in, a massive storm hit. The temperature jumped up ten degrees overnight. The ice we were frozen into started moving, and we started moving with it.

At 2 a.m. the ice had released us and we were drifting together with football-field sized floes of ice. If the wind changed, we'd be crushed. We fired up the engine and slalomed our way through the ice to open water, with the full moon luckily lighting up the landscape, and then sailed back to Sisimiut to regroup.

After the ice froze solid we actually felt safe and started our daily routine. We melted snow for water, experimented with baking bread (we still aren’t good at that) and read a great amount of books.

Everyone asks about cabin fever, but we never felt trapped. It's easy for us to give each other space even in the tight quarters of the boat, because we luckily have completely different sleep schedules. Sohvi has a few hours of “me time” each morning, while Juho has his each night.

We went for daily walks with our newly adopted Greenland dog Nova, who we’d picked up in Sisimiut. She was completely in her element, but we didn’t plan for her to be just company. Nova was also supposed to be our early warning system for polar bears. But we soon learned that she preferred to sleep inside the boat at our feet, rather than out on the sea ice.

The ice doesn't stay quiet. It changes every single day. It moves with the tides, up and down, about every six hours. In our small bay pressure ridges built up and collapse and cracks shot accross the fjord.

Static ice is not too dangerous, but moving ice can easily damage a boat’s hull, and that was of course our biggest fear. The Kalaallit have travelled on the sea ice (on snowmobiles, dogsleds and on foot) and around it (on kayaks and boats) for generations and understand ice in ways we could never learn from a book. Where do the winds blow from when the ice breaks up in the spring? Which bays freeze first and melt last? These were some of the questions that we had in mind and talked about with the people of Sisimiut before committing to our location.

After the polar night we saw the sun again on Valentine's Day. It had returned to our latitude earlier, but the steep mountains on the other side of the fjord had kept its rays from us.

We didn’t really feel like we had suffered from the darkness. We loved cozying up inside the boat and spending long evenings drinking hot chocolate. But when the sun came back we realized how much we'd missed it. The gentle warmth felt incredible and now our solar panels were back to producing electricity as well.

When the ice started breaking up we actually felt reluctant. We knew it’d soon be time to leave and our time in the ice had felt like home. All winter we'd been in our own bubble, and except for the chatter provided by our satellite Internet connection, we’d mostly been disconnected from the world's realities.

We had prepared well; enough food, diesel and spare parts to last us 7 months. We hadn’t been living in deprivation, but by the end we were down to basics: pasta, canned tuna, tomato sauce, canned fruit, and whatever fish we could catch when ice fishing.

As spring progressed, a dark crack appeared at the ice edge. The next day it had disappeared and the ice edge's shape had changed: a huge section of ice had vanished. The open water kept creeping closer, and at the beginning of June 2025, after 181 days in our bay, our boat Lumi was finally floating free again.