9th – Extra large drinks needed

I woke up with the wakeup call and panicked for a few moments until I had confirmed that there had been no northern lights sighting during the night. I obviously didn’t miss out on anything, then.

Sunrise.

After breakfast the crew readied a landing at Blomsterbugten where we would have a walk and see some lakes and such. The way it works when travelling like this in the Arctic is that the bridge (crew/staff) scouts the area for polar bears, and when they OK it a few guides go into zodiacs, do some scouting along the coast and while they do that a boat with several guides go to land, scout about on shore and set a perimeter.

Everything was going as planned until the scouting party reached the shore – a quick glance to the side and they turned back to the ship. As the ship doesn’t have a bear radar they are limited by line of view, so when a bear lies behind a mound and only raises its head when people come within a minute’s walk, things can quickly change.

At the time of writing a few weeks ago a polar bear was shot which (naturally) got quite a lot of attention worldwide. What seemed to have happened (no official statement had been released yet) was that a group of guides went through all the necessary motions to secure a landing site, but as opposed to our situation they didn’t see the bear until it was too late.

So the walk got cancelled and changed to a zodiac cruise. All zodiacs were quickly lowered into the water and everyone got loaded into them as quickly as possible. As I had been part of one of the first groups going out, we were puttering about in the water looking at icebergs just waiting to get permission to go to the bear. When we were all ready we lined up in an orderly fashion and slowly passed by the bear getting a much closer look than any of the other sightings. Having passed it I got ready to put my camera away but it turned out we just circled around and passed another time. We ended up passing by 3 times before the bear got tired of the attention and got up and lumbered away.

They look small at a distance but put a zodiac in front and they turn out to be quite large.

Structure in ice.

Relaxing and enjoying the day.

Getting up and you get a sense of how large and powerful they are.

There's always time for a yawn.

More ice.

During lunch we went deeper into the fjord, passing beautiful small and large icebergs on the way until we reached the end and could see the Gerard de Geer Glacier. Having no point of reference it gets really difficult to estimate distances; some thought we were 500 meters away, being aware that distances are hard to estimate I guessed a generous 2km but it turned out we were about 3 nautical miles away.

Arctic fish?

Gerard de Geer Glacier.

We went out on another zodiac cruise in the afternoon where some of us were lucky enough to see a musk ox relatively close by the water and not running away. That was really nice! Other than that we sailed around and got to see some beautiful ice, the biggest berg app. 45 meters tall, calculated volume was 500.000-600.000m³.

Musk ox up (relatively) close.

Blue colours.

Difference in colour and structure in an iceberg.

45 meters tall.

Coming back to the ship once again we had dinner followed by live music in the bar by the crew band The Monkey Eating Eagles. In the mean time we are relocating once again, further south to Segelsällskapet, and with the nightly northern lights watch. Regarding the latter I don’t have much optimism due it being being overcast.