Polar Expedition Day 5


Today we woke to better weather, the fog has cleared and visibility is good.  I’m wearing my lucky polar bear sox again.  We spent the whole day, up and down the coast, through the chunks of sea ice, saw nothing.  It was really cold on deck, two down jackets cold, and by afternoon it had started raining. 

Belinda and I had a sauna straight after lunch, that was really good.

We went inside and Chris gave us a quick lesson on Lightroom.  Unfortunately I have the wrong version of Lightroom on my laptop (mutter mutter), so I wasn’t able to follow the lesson with my own pictures as he did it.  But I took notes, and it was great to see how he enhances his pictures and how stunning they look from something not so special on the camera.  I have hope that I will be able to get something decent from my haul of photos.

After the lesson it was still bitterly cold, but Belinda and I went on deck anyway, snapping pixs of birds and ice.  I have sooooo many pictures of ice it’s ridiculous, but it's just so pretty.  


We passed the time by hanging over the bow and taking photos of the boats reflection in the mirror-like water.

Chris commented on how impressed he was with our dedication, others were inside watching crap on their computers, or sleeping !  It was a nice acknowledgement.  But you don’t come to the artic to watch crap, so we were out in it.  We were rewarded the first night with AMAZING pictures in beautiful light, and we were rewarded again today.

At about 6.45 we were all still on deck, thinking about dinner, when Chris said in a little sing song voice “I’m looking at a polar bear”.

This caused a flurry of activity, and the front deck was soon swamped with cameras and lenses and tripods.

Initial reports were that the bear had either a kill or a cub, but my photo when I zoomed in on my camera screen just showed he was hunched over something.  It turned out that was just the way he was sitting, because it was one bear, but he did have a major limp going on, his right front paw was not bearing weight fully.

We saw us approaching and slowly moved off, going from the ice into the water, and back onto ice, shook himself dry like a dog a few times, rolled on the ice to dry off, got back in the water and eventually went swimming off into the fog, which had just started to close in again.  In all about 30-45 minutes from when he was first spotted until he went out of sight.

shaking himself dry


back in the water, ready to swim off


Of course, it turned out that Rinie had already seen the bear an hour ago, but had lost it again as the ship turned back and forth.

Rinie saw a bear 14 nautical miles east and 11 nautical miles north exactly a month ago with a very sore leg, he was not putting any weight on his front foreleg at all and was walking on his elbow.  He rated the bears fatness as a 4+ at the time (5 being the fattest), this bear we saw today he rated as a 3+.  He is pretty sure it is the same bear, the chances of two bears with similar injuries in the same area is too great.  So he is pleased to see the injury has healed some, and the bear has survived so far, although he has lost weight.  Hopefully he can continue to heal and will make it.  Assuming it’s the same bear, he estimates it has lost about 40kg in weight.  Also the distance the bear has moved (and obviously we don’t know which route he has been exactly, but based on the co-ordinates of the 1st sighting and todays sighting) he could normally cover that distance in a day.

We ended up being slightly late for dinner because of the polar bear excitement.

Overnight, we are heading down the Hinlopen Strait to the west of the main chunk of Svalbard and the east of Nordaustlet.  

We are heading for Bjornsundet where the last trip Chris did they saw a mother polar bear and cubs.  We will spend a couple of days down there, maybe have a couple of zodiac landings and hopefully see some land-based bears.

Meals:


Lunch: variety of quiche’s

Dinner: leek and potato soup, fish, lemon meringue pie for dessert

Bear count: 2
Number of photos taken today: 600+
Location at approximate time of polar bear siting.  
This is as far north as we go, just over 81 degrees north.




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