Saturday 30 August 2025 – When someone says they’ve had a rough night, it’s normally a metaphorical statement. In our case, it was literally a rough night. Not horrendous – neither of us getting seasick or being ejected unexpectedly from our beds – but certainly not smooth. It was enough to make some of the guests seasick, one of them quite severely, poor lass. We were told later that the swell was 1.5 – 1.7 metres, which doesn’t sound much, but this is a small boat, there was quite a lot of roll in the boat’s movement, and our cabin was creaking loudly because of the swell, so sleep was a welcome but only occasional distraction from the rigours of the night.
Nonetheless, we sprang out of bed at the crack of 7am with a song on our lips, for we were now in calm conditions, and the weather for the day looked promising.
After breakfast, having popped out on to the deck to appreciate the scenery,
and OK, yes, to find out how cold it was as well (answer – not – maybe 4°C), we reacquainted ourselves with the joys of trying to remember in which order to deal with trousers, warm shirts and other layers, hats, lifejackets, flotation suits, bloody great big heavy boots, cameras and so forth:- “Practice Day”.
I’d quite forgotten how much fun this could be.
The weather was lovely, the seas were calm, and so boarding the Zodiacs was as unruffled as the sea. The plan had changed overnight, and our first excursion was to be a Zodiac cruise rather than a landing, so Gunnar had gone out early to scout for any potentially interesting sights
and we set out shortly after he returned, with all the guests fitting nicely on to two Zodiacs, with Kuba and Gunnar as the guides.
The scenery (landscape? seascape? icescape?) was lovely.
The scenery illustrates why the island (and once the whole archipelago now known as Svalbard) is called Spitzbergen. First sighted by Dutchman Willem Barentsz in 1596, Spitzbergen is Dutch for “pointy hills”.
We’d noticed before that ice is not white, as one might think from staring at it in a G&T, but can have a variety of colours; a wonderful shade of blue is common.
Kuba, our guide, plucked some ice from the waters by way of demonstration.
All the ice in the water has come from the glaciers that fringe it. Its appearance – how opaque it is – depends on how much air is in it – the deeper the bit of glacier that spawned the lump, the more compression of the snow, the less air remaining. Another factor is that ice tends to reflect blue light better than any of the other colours, so fresh ice – just uncovered, say, by bits of the glacier falling away – shows this blue colour for a while before the sun melts the surface, and “suncrust” forms, with a whiter colour. Because our conditions were so sunny and warm, there was quite some glacier calving going on – we could hear the crashes as chunks of glacier fell into the sea, even if we never saw it with our own eyes, so there was plenty of the gorgeous blue ice to be seen and photographed.
Kuba also pointed out some other glacial calling cards, like the striations in the rock caused by the ice grinding other rock against it.
One can occasionally see shards of rock still embedded in the ice,
and moraine hills,
mounds of rock and stones pushed in front of the glacier as it flows. When it recedes, it leaves the mounds behind. Kuba gave us one extraordinary nugget: Long Island, by New York City, is a moraine hill, created by the Wisconsin Glaciation between 50,000 and 150,000 years ago. It was this glaciation which also created the Great Lakes, if Wikipedia is to be believed (and I see no reason why not).
Scenery was the main attraction of the morning’s cruise, but we did see some birdlife as well. Arctic terns,
Glaucous gulls
and Arctic Skuas
were occasionally to be seen. We also found something that’s not quite a treasure but which is much sought-after by the Kinfish crew. It’s called “black ice”, and I suppose it’s similar to the stuff that causes road accidents in the UK, but here
it’s simply ice that’s from so deep in a glacier that it’s had all the air compressed out of it, leaving it completely clear and almost invisible in the water. It is therefore suitable for putting in cocktails. Kinfish doesn’t make any of its own ice – it’s all plucked from the sea.
Returning from the Zodiac cruise, we got further confirmation, were it needed, of the level of civilisation of the organisation behind this cruise.
Twinings finest Earl Grey in (we trust) unlimited quantities.
After lunch, during which the ship repositioned itself a bit, we had a second excursion – a landing, this time, at Smeerenburg on Spitsbergen Island (the largest in the Svalbard archipelago) with just a short walk on exiting the Zodiacs. It wasn’t difficult to spot the wildlife we were hoping to encounter;
walruses, relaxing on the shore nearby. Simple as it might have been to identify the quarry, the process of getting near them was not straightforward. Firstly, Kuba had to go ashore first to scout out the landscape and make sure that there were no polar bears around.
Then he had to brief us on the behaviour most likely to get us the photos we wanted;
basically, a cautious and quiet advance from downwind of the walruses. Their sight is poor, but their sense of smell is keen (though obviously they can’t smell themselves – they stink!) and it would not have taken much, possibly, to scare them off into the water. So, we advanced slowly and quietly across the flotsam-strewn ground
towards where you can see the walruses right on the shoreline in the picture above.
There were a couple in the water as well.
but the ones on land seemed not to be worried by our approach.
We were in luck; quite often the walruses just basically lie inert, but we got some great pictures because these were somewhat active, mainly jockeying for position among themselves, it seemed.
I also got some video of their interactions.
Kuba explained that their food is mussels – they use their whiskers to help detect the shellfish on the sea floor and simply suck the creatures out from their shells . Apparently, one scientific expedition found a dead walrus and opened it up. They found 70kg of mussels inside the stomach – and not one single mussel shell.
We were able to get really quite close to the walruses;
30 metres is the minimum distance allowed by Norwegian regulation, apparently, and Kuba had a rangefinder with him to enforce that.
There was some birdlife as well – some (we’re reasonably sure) Red-throated Divers
and some delightful Arctic Terns fishing nearby.
There was also a historical remnant to be seen.
This is all that’s left of a “blubber oven” – there would have been several over the land at one stage – a construction to heat the cauldrons wherein walrus and whale blubber were boiled down to the oil which was so vital to life in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries – as we learned in Antarctica, whale oil was just as much a utility for heating and lighting then as electricity is to us these days.
We’d been very lucky to have benign conditions for our first day of expeditions, allowing us to practise all the various things we had to bear in mind as we left the ship. We’d got some great photos, too. The relative calm of the conditions allowed Kuba to hatch a plan that takes us much further north and can potentially lead to some exciting opportunities for close encounters with other wildlife – if our luck holds. Stay tuned to find out whether it did!
