Tag Archives: Svalbard

Day 1 – Practice Day: Wal’R’Us

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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!

Into the wild blue yonder

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Friday 29 August 2025 – What the taxi came to pick us up for was actually the principal reason we have come to this most northerly place – an expedition cruise in the Arctic Sea. Everything you’ve read so far has been a prelude to this (and a most enjoyable one it’s been, too); but today sees the start of eight days aboard R/V Kinfish.

She is a small vessel, originally a search and rescue ship and then used for research, now repurposed for expedition cruises. There are just six cabins for 12 guests, so it will be a small but (we hope) perfectly-formed group of people moseying around the Svalbard archipelago, and possibly the Arctic pack ice, in search of scenery, wildlife and (for many of the passengers) video content.

Like our Antarctic trip, this is an expedition cruise, involving scrambling about on Arctic Tundra and Zodiacs. Proper rubber boots were mandated, so we kept a 3pm appointment at a shed near the hotel

to pick up some appropriate footwear. We boarded just before 4pm, and went through the usual things that are a preamble to the week. Departure;

meeting the crew, who number 10, and the other guests;

Stewardess Anni does the necessary

being shown around and briefed about the ship

Chief engineer Morten briefs us on the vessel

The bridge: captain Jesper on the left

and about the possibilities of the week ahead.

Expedition leader Kuba briefing the group

We have an interesting group; there are two couples from Italy – Doina and Denis, who have spent time on a Kinfish expedition before and are labelled “specialist leaders” for their video and photographic expertise, and Agnese and Carlo, who are friends of theirs; a UK couple, Gill and Russell, who have also been on Kinfish before; Rolf, the Swedish father of the boat’s owner, Robin, and his wife Agneta; Annie, Robin’s sister and her boyfriend, Rex; and a young Norwegian couple, Ane and Haavard, who are experienced sailors but who are, like us, new to Arctic expeditions. They are all younger than us. Just wanted you to know this.

Unsurprisingly, given the photo- and videographer quotient of the group, there has been evidence so far of some reasonably sophisticated gear being used; I get the impression that these guys may well help enhance the photographic possibilities of the voyage.

Briefings over, it was time to congregate for dinner.  We had mentioned to (another) Anni, our stewardess, that we didn’t drink wine any more and she obligingly provided G&T based on a local gin.

Dinner was prepared by Roger, the (Swedish) chef and fairly swiftly dispensed with, because the plan was to head to the north-west of Spitsbergen island, a place called Smeerenburg, the site of early whaling in Svalbard. The passage was likely, we were told, to be a little bumpy, hence wanting to get dinner eaten in relative calm before heading into open water – after bolting the chairs to the deck in case it got really rough.

This is the view from our porthole, to give you an idea of what this open water meant.

And so passed the first few hours of our expedition. The expedition leader, Kuba*, has warned us (as Pippa did when we were in the Antarctic) that we have to be flexible and patient as plans change to take into account weather and other conditions.  All other things being equal, we will arrive oop narth tomorrow morning at about 8.30 and attempt a landing after breakfast starting at about 10am.  Let’s see how that develops, shall we?

 

* Kuba’s name is Jakob. He is German but was born in Poland. The name Jacob is spelt Jakub in Poland, and the diminutive is Kuba.

Intermission,  or maybe Pre-mission

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Friday 29 August 2025 – The very final bit of this trip, Phase IIIb, starts soon and may see me absent from the connected world for a few days. Before we disappear off the radar, though, here are a few photos from our final day in Longyearbyen, for we didn’t just lounge about drinking coffee, oh dear me no. We went for a walk. Obviously.

Just down from the hotel is a statue of a miner entitled “Gruvebusen”, which is a local colloquialism for, would you believe, miner.

Given today’s much cloudier conditions, the light was much better suited to a photo of him than either of the previous days.

As one would expect from somewhere with a unique location and history, as well as somewhere Nordic, there are a couple of museums at the northern end of town,  so we walked down towards them, pausing at a viewpoint to, erm, look at the view. There was a cruise ship in which had a familiar outline.

It was reminiscent of the boat we’d visited the Kimberley coast in Australia, which was a cruise on Le Laperouse, a Ponant boat. Sure enough, on more detailed examination, this turned out also to be a Ponant boat, called Le Commandant Charcot. That resonated with our time at the other end of the world, actually;  we had come across the name of Jean Charcot as an explorer in Antarctica, and I hadn’t realised that he fossicked around up here, as well. 

The first of the two museums we visited was the North Pole Expedition Museum.

What I hadn’t realised before going in was the extent to which the race to reach the north pole was done in the air – airships and balloons were the vehicle of choice. People had claimed to have walked across the ice to the pole, for example Robert Peary in 1909, but these claims were disputed, and the first verified successful expedition was not until 1968. Amundsen successfully flew an airship over the pole in 1926 – after his successful expedition to the south pole. He was then involved in a rescue attempt for someone else’s failed expedition, during which he disappeared and neither he nor his remains were ever seen again. Not a lot of people know that.

The exhibition was full of information

but a bit low-key. Round the corner is the Svalbard Museum, which is very much bigger and better laid out, with huge amounts of information about the archipelago – history, geography, culture, politics, everything. A very impressive piece of work,

and giving me probably the only picture I’ll get of an arctic fox.

We walked back up through the town, and stopped off at the Radisson hotel to investigate a Small World story. An ex-colleague with whom I’d kept in contact via Facebook had noticed that we were in Svalbard and told me that her stepdaughter was working there, which is a pretty amazing coincidence. So we were able to meet Ruth, who was running the bar in the world’s most northerly pub.

She had come to Longyearbyen on a 9-month contract, and, like many, was still here two years later, really enjoying her life and also having success as an artist and illustrator (that’s her work on the blackboard, for example). It was a lovely encounter, and all the better for being entirely serendipitous.

All we had to do then was to buy some more tea, just in case Phase IIIb couldn’t provide, and make our way back to the hotel to await pickup to be taken to its start point. We passed the final statue that we would see in Longyearbyen, another nod to its mining history

before the taxi came to take us away.

These are final hasty notes before leaving Longyearbyen, and i don’t know when I’ll be able to update you on the progress of Phase IIIb. But bear with me for any errors in the above and I’ll write again when I can.