In late August, we posted about how the 99-year-old four-masted steel bark Sedov set off to transit the Arctic by the Northern Sea Route to reach her home port of Kaliningrad.  She has now almost completed the voyage, passing the southern tip of archipelago Novaya Zemlya and is expected in Murmansk in the course of the week.

Remarkably, the passage was almost entirely ice-free. “We expected that we at least would have encountered some finely-crushed ice in the Vilkitsky Strait and the Longa Strait,” ship captain Novikov told newspaper Neft.

“But we have sailed across practically the whole Northern Sea in open waters, and we have not run into any crushed sea-ice, nor icebergs,” he explains.

Sedov is one of the world’s largest sailing ships in operation and operates as a sail-training vessel. It is almost 118 meters long and is manned by a crew of about 220 people.

The Barents Observer notes that the Arctic voyage takes place only few months before the ship turns 100 years. The bark was launched in 1921 in Kiel, Germany. It sailed under the named “Magdalene Vinnen II“ and “Kommodore Johnsen“ before it in 1945 was taken over by Soviet authorities and renamed Sedov after Russian Arctic explorer Georgy Sedov.