Polar Expedition Day 4

Up at 8pm for breakfast, a few people are grumbling because there was no fresh hot coffee this morning in the lounge prior to breakfast.  My shower took ages to run warm, and was then only just warm enough to get under.  I was super grateful for the warm towel straight from the towel rail.  They stopped the ships engines last night and only left the generator running, not sure if that has anything to do with it.

Today I remembered I had wool felt innersoles so I’ve added those to my boots, and wow, what a difference that extra layer has made, between my feet and the deck. 

As we’re finishing breakfast, Rinie has an announcement – he’s seen a bear.  He assures us there is no need to rush, but we do anyway, and frantically layer up and haul our gear up to the deck.  The bear has been spotted off the stern, swimming towards us.

I have only got crappy binoculars, and I am hopeless at using them, so I use my largest lens instead to see if I can spot the bear.  Eventually, about 5 minutes after everyone else with binoculars has spotted it, I can see a blob moving in the water.  Just his head poking out.  There’s no way I can identify it as a bear, and it’s only because I know exactly where to look that I can see it.  The ship is not moving under power, we’re just moving with the current, and the bear is moving towards us, so we just sit and wait.  There is a large pack of ice off to our starboard side, and the bear heads for that.  They prefer to get out of the water when they can, they use much less calories on land than they do in the water.  

A few minutes has passed and I can now tell it’s a bear head moving through the water.  He must be about 100 metres away from us by now.  He swims really fast, I’m surprised at how quick he moves.  He heads for a large chunk of ice, and hauls himself up onto it.  Shutters are blasting away.  It’s quite foggy still, so the pictures won’t be sharp, but he is well lit and is moving from left to right in front of us and mostly facing towards us a little.  Out of the water, he shakes himself, does a huge big yawn, and starts striding across the ice.  Rinie says it’s a young male, about 7 years old, and estimates the weight at 400kg.  He steps from one chunk of ice to another still heading across in front of us left to right and eventually wanders off into the fog and out of view.  

This is taken from my phone towards the end, and if you look REALLY hard, you can just make out a bear.  It shows the actual distance he was from us.

This is what we saw from the deck as the bear walked away from us into the fog.

And this is what I got with my camera when he was closer.  

Bear swimming

getting onto the ice

Checking us out

Rinie’s warnings from last night were perfectly accurate, 15 minutes start to finish and the whole thing is over.  17000 kms to see a polar bear, and it happens in a 15 minute window, after a day of scanning and waiting.  But – I have seen a polar bear, in the wild.  Pretty cool I have to say.

We all check our photos in camera, and despite lining up along the side of the ship, everyone has different photos.  Different cameras, different lens sizes, different vantage points.  Everyone gets great shots, and Rinie is happy that the pressure has eased a little.  He has never been on a trip and not found a bear.  Phew.  This guy is a legend.  Between when he first told us he’d seen a bear coming towards us, and when I could actually recognise it as a bear swimming in the water, must have been 20 minutes to half an hour.  How he could pick it out, I do not know.  Chris tells us the record is 7 nautical miles, which is about 13 land miles.  I took a photo with my largest magnification as soon as I could recognise it was a bear.  This is what I could see.

I download my photos, very happy.  The photos are good enough, made awesome by the fact that I took them myself, of a polar bear that was right in front of me.

 The ones I have posted above are straight from the camera, so there can be some tweaking done to sharpen the image a bit and enhance the colours.  But this is what I saw through the lens.

The excitement lasts a few hours, and we have lunch.  As we eat lunch (and dessert is berry soup with an ADORABLE polar bear shaped cookie resting on a ball of ice cream) Rinie comes in again, he has seen another bear, but this time it’s waaaaay on the horizon.  We go back on deck, and some others can spot it with their binoculars, but I can’t see it at all.  The fog closes in again and the polar bear is lost in the fog.  My bear count remains at 1.

We carry on for the rest of the day, searching, going through pockets of fog, the fog clears for a while and then comes back in.  The ice thins out and there’s less of it, the ship changes direction (I have no clue which way we are facing, there is no frame of reference) and the ice gets thicker and there’s more of it.  We see a few seals, one or two at a time but that’s it.  There are a few birds, Guillemots and Kittywakes mostly. 

Rinie knows there are other bears in the area, so the plan is to stay around here and hope the fog clears tomorrow.

It’s really cold, the bridge tell us it’s -0.2 degrees, and I’ve added another thin down jacket under my big thick down overjacket, and I now have 3 pairs of gloves, 2 hats, a balaclava plus the hood of my two jackets, and I’ve added my wool felt in-soles to my boots.  We get flakes of snow which is neat.  We all just wish the darn fog would lift.

One of the crew girls comes out with a tray of hot chocolate for everyone, which we are so grateful for – Natalie one of the girls from Salt Lake City says “shut the front door” when she sees the hot chocolate, she is so excited.  There's a shop in Wellington called Shut the Front Door, I didn't understand what it meant.  Now I know!

I eventually call it quits about 6pm and come inside to catch up on the blog and warm up a little.

Tonight, Chris gives us a presentation of photos he’s taken and gives us some tips on what we can do to get better photos next time.  Take-aways for me are about framing, and anticipating what the bear/whale/walrus will do next and being prepared for it.  

Meals

Lunch: called hachis parmentier or shepherds pie, and red berries soup for dessert(literally the texture of soup and slightly warm) with a scoop of ice-cream and a polar bear shaped cookie, worthy of it's own photo.

Dinner: Dubarry soup (made from cauliflower and potatoes) for starters with Tuna steak and mediterranean vegetables, sauce verge, dessert was a chocolate dome with coco crumble and mango coulis.  This was spectacularly good.

red berries soup

Number of photos taken today: 160

And this is roughly where we saw the bear: