Safety, sovereignty at risk as more sailors try to navigate Northwest Passage

But no one knows where they all are, how well they're equipped or even how many sailboats and private ships are currently bobbing on the freezing seas and in turn-on-a-dime weather.

Observers say that's unsafe and undercuts Canada's claim to control the legendary waterway between Lancaster Sound in the east and Amundsen Gulf in the west.

"These guys should all be required to report and should be keeping us notified where they are at all times. Full stop," said Rob Huebert of the University of Calgary's Centre for Strategic Studies.

Best estimates suggest that an all-time high of at least eight foreign pleasure craft - from a 40-metre privately owned research vessel to a 12-metre sailboat - are somewhere in the Northwest Passage.

That number comes from NORDREG, the Transport Canada agency that monitors Arctic Ocean traffic and is confirmed by Peter Semotiuk, a radio hobbyist in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. He's been operating an informal information service on ice conditions and weather for 15 years.

"This year was a high one," said Semotiuk.

Although foreign ships are not required to register with NORDREG, nearly all of them do, said Jean-Pierre Lehnert from Iqaluit, Nunavut. A total of about 50 ships of all kinds are now plying Arctic waters, he said.

But the smaller boats tend to just show up and take a run at waters that defeated experienced mariners for centuries.

"The adventurers, they never report to us," said Lehnert. "We hear from them when they are stuck in the ice and they need some assistance.

"Some people are very poorly prepared."

Lehnert said one 20-metre craft set sail from Iqaluit to Greenland this summer with a radio that could only reach 60 kilometres. All his office could do was ask other vessels to keep an eye out for it.

Semotiuk suggests that reports last summer of an entirely ice-free passage for nearly two months led to this year's record number of attempts by recreational sailors.

"It takes a little while for the word to get out."

He expects 2008 will be another good year to navigate the passage, although the Franklin Strait between Prince of Wales Island and the Boothia Peninsula remains ice-choked.

Records show that the number of recreational transits of the passage has been steadily increasing. Two or three vessels a season for the first years of this century spiked to five attempts last year.

Some take several years to complete the voyage and only manage it with a taxpayer-funded Coast Guard escort.

It's time to assert some control, said Huebert, who points out that even hikers heading into the backcountry of national parks have to register.

"The Arctic is a dangerous place," he said. "You and me pick up the bill when the search and rescue goes bad."

The lax regulations also undercut Canada's claims to sovereignty over the passage, which is disputed by most other countries.

"You've got these people up there that you're ultimately responsible for and you're saying, 'You don't have to tell us that you're there?' It's just an all-around bad idea."

Canada has been embarrassed by surprise visits from foreign pleasure craft in the Arctic before.

Last year, RCMP deported three Norwegians calling themselves the Wild Vikings after they got off their ship, the Berserk II, in Cambridge Bay. One was travelling on a false passport and another had been previously refused entry to Canada.

In 2006, a Romanian man tried to sneak into Canada on a motorboat, which he'd taken on an eight-day journey from Greenland to Grise Fjord on the southern tip of Ellesmere Island.

Semotiuk said his nightly radio chats with all the ships at sea suggest that so far everyone's doing fine this year.

"They seem to be taken in by (the Arctic)," he said. "It seems somehow to get into them and it seems to inspire them and they seem to be pretty wound up by it."