3,000 km snorkel sojourn
Sedna Epic Expedition will see all-female team go from Pond Inlet to Inuvik
Stewart Burnett
Northern News Services
Monday, January 30, 2017
INUVIK
Years of work and two very cold summer swims through the Northwest Passage will end in Inuvik in 2019.
The Sedna Epic Expedition, which is a team of women who will be snorkelling the Northwest Passage and reaching out to young female Inuit women along the way, will be starting its journey in Pond Inlet in 2018 and finishing the next summer in Inuvik.
"It's going to be a long journey," said Veronica Ryl, emergency paramedic with the team, at a presentation at the Aurora Research Institute on Jan. 20. The whole trip is about 3,000 km and the team has been working up to it since 2014.
"We obviously have to do (the snorkelling) in the summer when the ice is broken up," said Ryl. "There's a pretty narrow window in which we can actually snorkel through."
The main objective of the trip is to raise awareness about the disappearance of sea ice. The team will also be engaging with communities along the way and has already held educational events in Iqaluit.
Sedna, an all-women team, has also partnered with the Greenland Shark Research Institute to tag and study Greenland sharks. That's Ryl's favourite part.
"They've been in our waters for a long time and folks have been hunting them for many, many years but the first documented encounter with Greenland sharks was in 1994 with National Geographic," she said.
They're the longest-living vertebrate species on the planet, living up to 500 years old. They're also considered a delicacy in Iceland.
Not a whole lot is known about them, said Ryl, especially their locations and living patterns.
Last Summer, the Sedna team was in Iqaluit to practise diving and engage with local youth about the marine ecosystem.
The team set up an aquarium of local finds for children to investigate and also took out youth and elders for snorkelling sessions.
"It's been pretty empowering to work with the Inuit female youth," said Ryl.
The reason the expedition is such a multi-year project is that it's a monumental logistical challenge, Ryl said.
"Organizing something like this, even going up to Iqaluit this summer was so hard to organize, just with the partnerships and sponsorships, getting all the women organized, having every single plan execute to what we had our vision set out to be is quite difficult," she said. "It takes a lot of planning."
The team will be splitting the snorkel relay over two summers next year and in 2019.
In the meantime, they will be doing outreach projects with communities and interacting with students in Northern schools.
