Finley H. Perry Jr., of Hopkinton, Massachusetts, has been awarded the Far Horizons Award for 2024. The Club’s premier sailing honor for a member, this award recognizes the sailing achievements of someone who has embarked upon a cruise or series of cruises that demonstrate the broader objectives of the Club, including the adventurous use of the sea.
After a couple decades cruising from Maine to Newfoundland in his 1949 Hinckley Sou’wester 34, Perry started looking for bigger challenges. In 1998, he purchased an Aage Nielsen 46 named Elskov and sailed her from Maine to Denmark, and up the coast of Norway to Tromsø. He sailed to Spitzbergen in 2003, reaching 80 degrees north latitude, then crossed to Iceland, southern Greenland, and Labrador.
In 2006, Perry cruised the west coast of Greenland, past Disko Bay to Uummannaq Fjord at 71 north latitude, then crossed Davis Strait and explored uncharted Hoare Bay on the Cumberland Peninsula of east Baffin Island. Baffin was “remote, wild, and cold thanks to a south-flowing current” with sea ice to contend with in its offing. The charts were nothing more than small-scale tracings of aerial photographs with no inshore soundings.
Another notable voyage, in 2013, covered 3,000 miles from Baddeck, Nova Scotia, into Hudson Strait as far as Kinngait (formerly Cape Dorset) at the southwest tip of Baffin Island. The area had been explored, and places named, by Martin Frobisher, John Davis, Henry Hudson, and a few others searching for a northwest passage to Asia in the late 1500s and early 1600s, but has been little visited in the years since—a feature that made it an attractive destination for Perry.
One tricky anchorage on Baffin Island, Balcom Inlet, was entered using sailing instructions from a whaling ship that had stopped there some 200 years ago. The area has 30-foot tides and the sailing directions stated: “Near low water heavy seas against the outgoing tidal stream break to the bottom.”
After Cape Dorset, Perry continued on to several remote, uncharted islands about which he wrote: “Ever fearful of the unknown we are exploring. Ever expecting impenetrable fogs, wicked and foul currents, strong winds, exposed anchorages, and extreme tides. We have found all this, but in manageable proportions equivalent to our meager skills and thinly spread so as to have us dealing with only one or another from time to time, but not all at once.”
Interspersed with the above voyages were numerous cruises around Newfoundland and to the Torngat Mountains region of Labrador.
Perry takes great personal interest in the geology, flora and fauna, and the native people in all the areas he has cruised. He is well versed in the history and culture of Canadian Arctic people and recognizes that he is a guest in their land, treating them with respect and kindness.
