Nord Hus completes 7,500-mile Arctic voyage

On Sept. 13, the Nord Hus arrived in Lewisporte, Newfoundland, completing a 7,500-mile Arctic voyage that began 18 months earlier in Grand Marais, with April ice still clinging to the water.

For Lonnie Dupre, however, the journey began well before that departure.

“We got the boat even prior to that a couple years ago, and we put it together. We repainted the boat, re-outfitted the boat, put a new mast on, and got it all ready for an Arctic voyage,” Dupre told WTIP.

Pascale Marceau remembered feeling “courageous curiosity” as the boat departed.

“I kind of departed with the thought of, ‘gosh, I hope I like sailing,’ because we were launching into a pretty committing project,” Marceau said.

By July 2025, the Nord Hus had sailed 4,000 miles and entered the Arctic Circle. The boat docked in the settlement of Aasiaat, Greenland, where the crew disembarked and left it for the winter. They returned in spring 2026 to finish the journey.

Leaving the boat in Greenland for an extended period raised concerns for the crew, something Marceau described as “not standard.” It also meant the crew began the 2026 leg of the journey by reassembling the boat and getting it back in the water.

The Nord Hus also had a new permanent crew member this year. Ash Berton spent time with the crew during the previous year but joined full time for the 2026 portion of the expedition.

“I think staying on the boat for the whole summer really gave me a feeling of completeness with what we did this year,” Berton said. “It allowed me to kind of step up as we traveled north because every time we passed a landmark, we kind of got into the next challenge, and so I was able to almost grow with Lonnie and Pascal through those challenges, and I wasn’t just jumping in and feeling exceptionally overwhelmed.”

What represented a new challenge for Berton was familiar territory for Dupre, who was returning to villages he had visited while circumnavigating Greenland nearly 30 years ago. Dupre had not contacted the communities before his arrival, but he brought slides from his earlier visits and reconnected with people he had met decades before.

Those communities had changed in his absence.

“So what’s happening in Greenland right now is a lot of the smaller communities are moving to the larger communities, and some of the smaller communities are getting shut down,” Dupre said. “There’s one particular community that I was hoping to go to, but what happened was a few years ago a landslide, probably created by climate change, had slid in and took out a portion of the village, and so the village all moved to an adjacent bigger community. So I wasn’t able to connect directly at the same village.”

As the voyage continued north, the crew encountered new challenges. The Nord Hus navigated growlers — chunks of floating ice — and uncharted waters that are rarely sailed.

“As we moved slowly progressed north, it felt like your skills had to also move north,” Marceau said. “The north kind of presented new challenges. It seemed like every 100 miles we would have to refine a new skill. Either the ice was behaving differently, or the charts were even less scripted.”

The crew used Google Earth and made decisions based on the surrounding topography. They researched backup plans and prepared alternatives to avoid the most dangerous situations. Berton described the experience as a trial by fire but said the crew was intentional in its decision-making and communicated well.

“I thought that we all listened to each other and we all tried to be singly as educated as we could. So then when we could talk as a group, we could really try to make the most sound decisions for for all of our safety and for the safety of the expedition as well,” Berton said.

With the voyage complete, Dupre plans to spend some time cross-country skiing and writing while waiting for the next adventure.

For Marceau, one expedition helped prepare for the next.

“I have a major expedition going on in the spring, late March next year, where we’ll be based out at Ellesmere Island and traveling on skis across the Arctic Ocean into Greenland. And part of the one of the things we did with the Nord Hus up north this summer was we brought up some supply depots for that mission,” Marceau said.

The Nord Hus expedition awakened something in Berton.

“I think this expedition really opened up my eyes to the Arctic. This is really the first project I’ve been part of that I have called an expedition, and I have great mentors sitting right next to me that have just really given me an appetite for what I can do and for what’s achievable,” Berton said.

WTIP spoke with Berton, Marceau and Dupre following their arrival in Newfoundland. Audio of the conversation can be found below.

Josh Hinke October 8, 2026