Hello again, I am back with photos of the second sea lift of the year! This one contains our personal goods as well as stuff for the hamlet of Igloolik and the Co-Op. We hope they brought in enough materials to start rebuilding after the Co-Op Fire earlier this year. Only having one grocery store in a town of 2,000 people sucks.

How Do You Order A Sea Lift?

For us, the process starts in March, when we get together a list of things we want. Soon after we call a company in Ottawa known as Grocery-Getters. We send them an itemized list of everything we want and they head out to the local Walmart, Costco, etc and purchase it all.

After they get our groceries they take it to a company called TSC where they drop it off at a warehouse. This is where TSC crates it up on a pallet. They build a plywood crate around your order and then ship it, along with all the others, to Montreal where it gets loaded onto a large ship heading our direction.

Once the boat is loaded in Montreal it sets sail and starts to head out the St. Lawrence seaway and around Labrador on its long trip up north. Most boats are loaded up for stops in 5-7 communities. Ours is usually one of the last to get loaded/unloaded on our leg of the north. I'm not sure if it's because of our position in Foxe bay or if it's because of our population. We are the second-largest community in Nunavut, but that's not saying much. Iqaluit, our capital, is about 8-10k and the largest community.

What are all these white bags filled with?

Short answer? The Co-Op Fire

The bags are filled with ash, soil, and broken-down rubble from the Igloolik Co-Op fire that leveled the entire structure in mid-January. Behind the bags are a bunch of large oil barrels filled with the same material. Once the ship has been emptied and cargo shuffled around all these bags will be loaded up and sent south. It may seem a bit funny to send waste and ash back south, but the north is ill-equipped to deal with ecological waste on this scale. To keep it here would mean it would almost certainly make its way back into the circle of life via wind and water. But down in southern Canada they have facilities that can better deal with the waste and keep it out of the ecosystem.

The loss of the Co-Op has been quite a burden on the community, but the company has not forgotten our small community. A disused church has graciously allowed the Co-Op to set up a dry goods store that has been in operation for around 6 months now, and their convenience store on the west side of town has been greatly expanded and kept well stocked with more long-term goods, compared to the normal smattering of instant meals, pop, chips, bread, and milk. The community of Igloolik is eagerly awaiting the rebuilding of the Co-Op.

Hopefully, we get a Tim Hortons!

And now, a peek into our sea lift and pantry.

Now, we immediately got swarmed with kids when I started hammering off the front of our crate, so I wasn't able to get the best photos of our sealift. I apologize and will try better next year. So I tell the kids to go away, but they don't care. They see flats of Soda on the bottom of the crate and they're going to help empty this box in the hopes of getting some of that sweet sugar water. On top of everything in the crate is large 18 kilogram bags of dog food and these little tykes are forming a fireman chain hauling this food to the front door. Little bastards were so fast that they started bringing stuff into our mudroom and one of them swiped the keys to our quad! 😡 Anyway, I only found that out today.

So, with the help of the kids we had our box emptied in about 5 minutes and they scattered to the other various boxes being opened in the hopes of getting some free loot from those people. They left before I could even offer payment of pops... forgetting what got them working so hard in the first place. 😅 Once I got everything into the house I started to go through the things, laying them out in organized piles for my wife to take inventory of. It turns out quite a bit was missing.

These shelves should be overflowing. We were absolutely gutted to find out that the grocery company failed to get (and inform us of) several highly sought after items on our list. Missing above, is about 10 kilograms of pasta, 30 kilograms of rice, 4 kilograms of chicken stock, a ton of various canned vegetables (what we have in soup, times 2) and a short list of other things that I fail to remember.

Below, in this photo, we are missing about 6 kilo of Epsom Salt, 2 large things of laundry detergent, Paper Towel, and a half dozen other frivolous, but expensive or rare in the north items. Needless to say, we were a tad disappointed and left wondering if we paid for all these goods. Unfortunately, my wife was not a stickler for making sure the shippers emailed us all the receipts for we have to play the e-mail game. Yay! Just what you want to do after your one and only shipment of the year.

On the plus side, the doggos did get all their food.

And we got all our pop for the year! No more $5 cans of pop from the store! And Garbage bags! Oh my god, you do not know how much it sucks to run out of garbage bags at the same time as the store and having to resort to shopping bags for kitchen trash. Maybe you do and you know our pain. I was disappointed that they weren't the super thick ones they got us last year, but any port in a storm, right?

All in all this sealift rates as a 5.5/10 experience. The missing groceries are going to be a burden that we will have to make up for with much more expensive alternatives, but it was still worth it due to our savings on dog food alone. For a bit of perspective, if we were to buy all our dog food from the local store, that would run us about $2,500-$3,000 for the year. Our entire crate of all the groceries, the dog food, and shipping cost about $3,200.