Tag Archives: Walrus

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 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!