Tag Archives: Tourism

Day 4 – Wet Out

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Tuesday 2 September 2025 – In his evening briefing yesterday, Kuba had told us about Bråsvellbreen, which, at 160km, is the longest glacier cliff edge in northern Europe.  We would cruise from Kvitøya along the length of this cliff edge.

(It shows as rocky in places in the image above, but it’s all glacier, actually.)  To whet our appetites, he pointed us at a photo on the wall of the bar.

As a devoted reader of this blog, you’ll of course remember that Jane and I had seen something similar before, in Antarctica – the enormous tabular glacier A23a. At the time*, at 3,800 sq km – twice the size of Greater London – it would have had edges approximately 200km in  length and up to 40m in height, so even longer than this glacier cliff. That was spectacular, and so we wondered how the two would compare.

At first, the prospects of even seeing it looked a bit on the scant side, as it was very foggy.

You can see the small icebergs that have calved off the cliff. So Jesper had to navigate with care once we got to the cliff.

When I took a brisk walk outside, you could see the huge wall of ice disappearing into the distant fog.

Like A23a, it had ice caves, as the sea melted it from beneath.

I took a hyperlapse of our progress alongside the glacier, which I hope gives some idea of the scene.

Kuba announced that those that wanted could go up the mast to get a look from a higher viewpoint.  To do this, one needed to get harnessed up

A.B. Malte helps Rolf into the harness

and good cold weather gear was recommended.  Initially, I declined the opportunity, but Jane didn’t.

Having made the decision not to go up, immediately after I took these photos of Jane, I looked to starboard and saw this,

at which point I changed my mind about climbing the mast, as it now seemed like a really good idea. To be honest, I was underdressed for the endeavour,

but it was worth the relative faff of getting the harness on and climbing up.  Between us, Jane and I got some great photos.

As we reached towards the end of the glacial cliff, Kuba announced that we all had an opportunity for an experience we would not forget.

A polar plunge.

Yes, an opportunity to leave a perfectly safe, warm boat and jump into water at a temperature that science describes as “fucking freezing”. Astonishingly, several of the guests were up for this. Less astonishingly, Jane and I were not among them. We watched as the preparations were made: some you would expect, like towels for afterwards

And drinks to warm the lunatics participants;

some less expected, but perfectly sensible given the environment – an armed guard keeping watch.

Lunatics Potential participants gathered to check out the possibilities

And, amazingly, still decided to jump in. One of them, Doina, even did it twice because Denis, her expert videographer boyfriend, didn’t get the footage he wanted first time around!

Rolf went first
Even Roger the Chef joined in!

Magnificent idiocy, rewarded by a shot of Fernet Branca and a re-heat session in the ship’s new sauna. Jane and I (not the only non-participants, I hasten to add) went for a cup of tea to calm down.

There had been a plan for a landing a little further in to the archipelago, but the fog kyboshed that one; it’s not safe to go ashore if you can’t first establish that there are no dangerous creatures around. So we cruised on. Kuba arranged a viewing of a film called “Polar Bears on the Field of Bones”, an extraordinary documentary made single-handedly by Nikita Ovsyanikov, a lunatic researcher who spent several consecutive summers among polar bears on Wrangel Island with only a large stick as a defensive weapon.

Plan B was a Zodiac cruise in Alkefjellet, with the attraction of majestic scenery, some bird life and possibly even arctic foxes, and with dinner brought forward to 6pm so we could go out at 7.30pm into the light arctic evening for the cruise.

The cruise started in a very unusual manner – the skipper grounded the boat. Intentionally, I mean.  We’d been warned, and so thought it might be great to go on to the bow and join the throng who would doubtless be there to record this unusual event.

Actually, a couple of people did eventually join us as, out of the mist, the land loomed

and loomed a bit more.

In due course we grounded, very gently, into the sandy shallows, with quite a spectacular view over the cove – and the mist lifted obligingly.

We went out on the Zodiacs along the coast, past basalt cliffs which are the nesting site, in the right season, for tens of thousands of guillemots, both of the common and Brünnich’s persuasion. The cliffs are perfect in providing nesting sites for the birds.  By this time of year most have left, having hatched and fledged their young, leaving only a cliff face full of guillemot shit.

The red on the snow, by the way, is not what you might think – it’s actually algae which flourish here.

There were still some guillemots here, some solitary,

others in gangs,

and some still with chicks who haven’t yet left the safety of their perch.

Leaving the nesting site is perilous for the chicks, because of kittiwakes and glaucous gulls swarming in the cliffs above in great numbers,

making a great racket and waiting for the chance to pounce on a chick in the water if it appears to be in difficulties.  We actually witnessed one poor chick being taken by a gull, and saw another gull being chased away by an adult guillemot – a surprise to me, since the gulls are big bully bastards compared with the smaller birds.

As well as guillemots on the cliffs, there were several in the water

making a wonderful noise (sorry, not my classiest video, here).

I had a go at taking some shots of the birds in flight

and coming in to land on the water, something they don’t do very elegantly.

They also appear to be able to move across the surface quite rapidly in a manner similar to penguins porpoising.  I think that’s what’s happening here…

Either that, or it couldn’t quite get airborne – they’re not the world’s most natural fliers.

In places the lower reaches of the guillemot cliffs change from sheer rock to gentler grassy slopes,

inhabited by a different sort of wildlife.

There’s an arctic fox in the picture above.  Yes, there is. There, look.

We had been told that this area had good potential for sighting them, but I hadn’t held out much hope; I guess I was influenced by Jakob in Dovrefjell, who said that they were very rare and shy. Not in this area of Spitzbergen, they aren’t – we saw at least half a dozen of them over the next hour or so, and I was delighted; they’re such pretty creatures. They were in a variety of coats as they morphed from their summer grey into their winter white.

They’re elegant and catlike in their movement – lovely to watch.

They too are on the lookout for any scraps, which might include vulnerable chicks falling from the nesting ledges onto the slopes rather than directly into the sea; this one has made a catch.

The general scenery was pretty striking, too.

On top of one of the towers was a rock formation that looked like a polar bear, watching us.

Right at the end of the Zodiac cruise was a very dramatic glacier.

The scene reveals some interesting geology, too (for those that notice this stuff). On the right-hand side, there’s a very marked demarcation line between basalt (the upper layer) and marble (the lower layer). Basalt is an igneous rock, typically volcanic in origin; marble is sedimentary (my dear Watson). How the one came to lay on top of the other is a mystery to me.

So, this was a pretty varied day, and included some pretty creatures. I was really delighted to see the foxes – an unexpected pleasure. We were very lucky to see them in such numbers, apparently.

The morrow holds in store some opportunities to see some more great scenery, but who knows what the weather will bring? Stay tuned to find out.

 

 

* The BBC has a post describing A23a roughly as we saw it. It once weighed a trillion tons. But its situation is now very different. Because it is now free floating, it is breaking up, according to The News. It’s now half the size it was, at 1,770 sq. km.

Day 3 – White Out

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Monday 1 September 2025 – We mere mortals had no internet whilst we were in the pack ice, but the boat did have a limited connectivity for the crew’s use. Kuba used it to check that our destination had no forecast problems with wind or swell.  We had a long way to go, to get to the easternmost island in the archipelago, Kvitøya – the White Island.

In order to save bandwidth, though, he didn’t check the several hundred nautical miles of sea between our amazingly calm patch and our destination. This, it turned out, was not calm sailing.  In Kuba’s defence, there wasn’t anything he could have done about it – we had to cross it, whatever – but I think he felt a bit bad that he hadn’t checked it out so he could at least warn us.

So, it was a noisy night in our cabin.  In calm conditions, we get engine noise and the sound of the sea outside our porthole.  If there is swell, the cabin creaks really quite loudly as, I suppose, it flexes with the boat. I found the noise interrupted my sleep somewhat, but the motion of the boat, which was mainly pitching, didn’t seem too bad as I lay in my bed. On trying to get up for the morning’s ablutions, though, it was clear that it was a heavy swell.  Taking a shower involved clutching on to the handrails thoughtfully provided for the purpose, and was best done quickly, rather than thoroughly. But we both managed to get ourselves cleaned up and headed up to breakfast.

Which was eerily quiet.  Quite a lot of the guests, and even some of the crew, had been taken quite badly seasick. One of the Italian lasses, bless her, was really, really ill, so the night must have been wretched for her.

It was going to take all morning to reach Kvitøya, so people settled down to deal with the swell as best they could. I spent the morning reliving and writing up our fantastic, fantastic polar bear encounter of the day before, only now and then having to be careful not to be pitched out of my chair in the bar as the boat rolled.

The activity planned for the day was a Zodiac cruise off the east coast of the island, and thus it was at 2pm that we set out, into the much calmer waters that Kuba had expected.  It was a bit chilly and windy – maybe a couple of degrees above freezing – but otherwise a civilised environment for an outing.

Kvitøya is a very flat island, almost entirely covered in a single glacier.

Technically, the island is a desert – there is no vegetation.  The bits that are not glacier are rock. Nonetheless, it is home to some polar bears, who have learned to fast during the summer before going out on to the winter ice to stock up on seals in preparation for the following summer fast (as opposed to the one we saw yesterday, who had clearly been able to find enough food to sustain him through the summer’s wandering over the pack ice).

There was, therefore, a possibility that we might see a bear.  It was more likely that we would see walruses, though, and see them we did, on the rocky shores of the island.

Some of them were just sleeping.

Others were doing the jockeying for position thing that we saw in Smeerenburg.

Some were in the water, as well.

As we were watching, as if acting on a signal, those on one of the rocky outcrops suddenly dashed into the water.

At first we wondered whether they had panicked at something, but then it became clear that they were curious about us in our Zodiacs, as they were heading our way. Kuba said that, because very few, if any, other boats will have visited so far east, it was possible that we were the first humans they’d seen for a while, so they were curious.

One of them had lost a tusk, somehow, as Jane’s photo shows.

There are regulations about the minimum distance that one must keep away from wildlife, so we retreated somewhat.  This was partly due to the regulations, and also partly because walruses are much faster and more agile in the water than on land, and might even be aggressive; Kuba has heard of instances of Zodiacs being punctured in walrus encounters.

We cruised around a headland, and a fogbow – a double fogbow, egad! – developed.

We went to check out an iceberg that was nearby,

and I got the chance to try out some more artistic angles for photography.

There being no visible polar bear, but rather increasing fog, after about 90 minutes we headed back to Kinfish, back past the walruses.  I was pleased to get one shot of them which included a calf

which you can see is a dark colour and, of course, has yet to grow the tusks that would appear as it matured.

During the late afternoon and evening, the skipper took Kinfish to the north coast; there was talk of seeking out a monument to Salomon August Andrée, the Swedish balloon pilot who perished in an attempt to fly over the north pole. It was an untested, virtually unsteerable, somewhat leaky hydrogen balloon, but Andrée persisted anyway, taking off from Svalbard in July 1897. Imagine his surprise! when the balloon crashed, after only two days. It landed on pack ice, and he and the two accompanying him, Knut Frænkel and Nils Strindberg, although unhurt, faced a horrendous journey on foot to safety. They didn’t make it, but ended up, exhausted, on Kvitøya, the most remote and least hospitable island in the Svalbard archipelago, where they established a camp (which wasn’t discovered until 1930). They eventually died there. At the time, this exploit was fêted in Sweden as a matter of patriotic pride, but through the lens of time he is now regarded less favourably. He was an idiot, even more than Shackleton, who was bad enough, God knows; but at least Shackleton rescued his men.

We never reached the monument, apart from anything else because we had a couple of wildlife encounters.  Firstly, Jesper saw a walrus on an ice floe.  As we gently crept towards it, we could make it out more clearly.

It was actually a mother nursing her calf, something that Kuba said he’d never witnessed before.  As we drifted past, the mother and calf eyed us incuriously

but then went back to the more serious business.

The other encounter was courtesy of the eagle-eyed Gunnar, who saw something on the shore that he said was a bear and others thought was maybe a rock.

I was on the bridge at the time, and so used the Big Lens, which showed that

Gunnar was right.

Again, Jesper steered us cautiously towards the bear. We were – literally – in uncharted waters, and he used the boat’s systems to contribute to the world’s understanding of the bay.

You can see the course he plotted to get us as close to the bear as was allowed by Norwegian regulations – 300 metres. This enabled me to get this photo of the bear sleeping peacefully on a nest of seaweed.

I suppose I should be pleased, but the shot above is an illusion, really.  I have heavily cropped into the image further above, which was the real scene, as taken at the furthest reach of my 560mm lens. With the naked eye, one could make out the bear, but little else – binoculars were needed to understand any detail.

[Photographic nerd rant alert]

I can understand the desire to keep wildlife, and particularly a species with a declining population like polar bears, well away from interaction with toxic humanity, but I have to say that, from the point of view of a photographer, the Norwegian regulations – minimum distance 300m – remove much of the joy from such an encounter. The Big Lens has a 560mm focal length, making it the equivalent of about a 12 or 13X magnification telescope, and the photo I got could not be printed bigger than 6″ x 4″ – not even a postcard home, really. That’s what £3,000 of photo kit can manage. To get significantly better would cost an extra couple of grand. OK, I appreciate that I was privileged even to see the bear, but I am one of the sad band of people for whom if something can’t be photographed, it might as well never have happened.

[End of rant]

How come we could get so close to the polar bear yesterday?  As I explained then, it is because we were in international waters, where these Norwegian restrictions don’t apply, and it’s down to individual captains and guides as to what is safe both for wildlife and humans. I’m still fizzing with joy about the great encounter we had yesterday.  If my interactions with polar bears had been limited to today’s distances, I would have been bitterly disappointed. It makes me doubly grateful to the captain, crew and guides, as well as to the gods of chance, to have had yesterday’s opportunity.

Tomorrow, we head south west, past the longest glacier cliff edge in northern Europe. Should be exciting!

Day 2 – Follow the bear

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Sunday 31 August 2025 – The plan was very exciting – head north to the pack ice to see if we could spot any wildlife action there.  This involved going a long way north to where the latest forecast gave us hope to find pack ice.

The skipper, Jesper, put the hammer down and we ploughed northwards through the night, out of Norwegian territorial waters and the reach of any kind of internet connectivity. The plan was to arrive at the ice at around 10am, so, after breakfast we went up to the bridge to check out the scene.

We’d certainly made it far north – north of 82°,

which meant, since 1 minute of arc = 1 nautical mile at the earth’s surface, we’d covered at least 480 nautical miles since being at 78°. Kuba had done a good job of managing our expectations – he’d said that it was possible that all we’d see was fog.  It rather looked like he was right.

We started soon to encounter the first icy outcrops, and people hurried outside to record this.

The ice got more and more densely packed

until I felt I had to go out and join in taking photos, just in case this was all we got to see.

We could begin to see signs that the sun might burn through.

Whether we saw anything else, it was an amazing experience to be among the pack ice, both visually and aurally – the sound inside our cabin, which is at the watericeline, was astounding.

We eventually got a fogbow – a real sign that the sun might be on its way.

Skipper Jesper and First Officer Morten took us through the pack ice by gently pushing – we’re not on board an ice breaker, after all – but after a while, progress was slow and there was no sign of life outside the boat, so we turned back, and went along the edge of the ice for another go further east

and the crew rigged up some nets over the stern, which is quite low to the water, to make it more of a challenge for any importunate polar bear to join the party.

Not sure it looks robust enough to rebuff an impatient ursine, tbh

This is where we were, by the way.

Not that I trust Google Maps in this region, much.  One of our previous Zodiac cruises – when we were incontrovertibly on the water – appears like this:

Then – bingo! Jesper spotted a bear!

This was about 1.15pm. The bear ambled along and we followed it for quite some way, and I thought that was going to be it for the day’s bearable excitement, so I tried for some pictures of the seabirds that were flying around.

These are Kittiwakes, presumably on vacation from Newcastle-on-Tyne, where they normally live on the bridge there. (I’m joking. These were probably locals.)

The bear pottered along for quite some way,

and then settled down for a kip. This was around 2pm.

If you have five minutes to spare, then you can follow the course of the rest of the afternoon here by watching this video. Otherwise, read on.

I got the Big Lens out.

Every so often, the bear would do something to keep the photographers engaged

and they were so engaged that they didn’t notice the double fogbow.

Morten was driving by now, and he skilfully edged us closer and closer,

and the bear seemed quite relaxed about our presence, even indulging in some yoga.

The yoga poses allowed us to establish that the bear was a male, quite young.  It was in good condition and so had probably fed recently (hence being sleepy, I suppose)

At our closest, we were probably only some 30 metres* from the bear, who would occasionally look up as if to say “are you guys still here??”

By now it was 3.15pm, so we’d been there for a couple of hours already.

In an effort to make the bear actually do something photogenic, one of the guests, Annie, even dressed up as a reindeer.

to no avail.

We did get some more ursine yoga, though.

We were really close by this stage, now at 5.30pm, to the point where the ship’s shadow fell on the bear.  He was unconcerned, though. However, Morten repositioned us so the shadow fell elsewhere.  The bear slept on…

I decided that he had probably set up camp for the night, so went inside to warm up a bit. And, of course, the bloody bear stood up and started walking! (This was at 6.45pm – we’d been there five and a half hours, mainly watching a sleeping bear!) Fortunately, Jane was there to take some photos as he walked back along the length of the boat.

I bumped into Jesper who said “the bear has stood up!” so I rushed outside to find the bear just a few metres away, checking us out.

Apparently, the crew were even beginning to consider ways of discouraging the bear from any thoughts of boarding us, but

he just ambled off, presumably to look for something with more fat on it than a tourist.

So.

“What did you do with your day, Steve?”

“I spent five hours in sunshine at freezing temperatures watching a sleeping bear. And it was a perfect day.”

It was, perfect: Kuba’s plan, Jesper and Morten’s driving, the beautiful conditions, the bear, its calmness as we approached. A great, great day.

Of course, we have to head back now, so we have a long and not necessarily calm sail to get to our next destination, Kvitøya, which is here:

The start has been calm though – an extraordinary sea.

Let’s see how the rest of the journey back turns out….

* Norwegian regulations stipulate that the minimum distance to be maintained from a polar bear is 300 metres. But we were in international waters, so yah boo.