The photos on this webpage were taken in 1981 when I worked for Can-Dive Oceaneering in the Davis Strait. The images are of Baffin Island and Brevort Island, a small island off Baffin Island. This location is also where the US had built one of the DEW Line stations during the cold war time. When I was there in 1981, it was abandoned and disarray from looting. We walked up the hill to the DEW Line station to inspect what was there. We counted 5 – 671 Jimmy Diesel generators on the station. There was a 3/4 inch copper wire running down from the station laying on the land to the sea, quite a distance. It was the ground wire for the station. Ground rods could not be driven into the permafrost, so this was their grounding method. A friend of mine, Mike Johnston, told me he had been there several years later to do some filming. The US had put the DEW Line station back into operation before he was there.
Our submersible crew from the Ben Ocean Lancer was stationed here on standby for one week during production testing on the drillship. It was boring since we couldn’t even do any maintenance on the sub or dive equipment, so we did some hikes around the camp. It was a little stressful since there were polar bears in the area. A polar bear was spotted from a helicopter earlier in the month. The camp had two bear watchdogs on location. They were from Labrador, and I’m not sure what the actual breed is, but they were pretty friendly and playful. They never barked, just growled.
It was entertaining to watch an old Dakota plane, fully loaded, run down the airstrip and not lift off but fly off the end. At the end was a very, very high cliff that dropped to the ocean. One hike was from the clifftop to the big oil tank at the seaside. The dogs came with us on this hike.