Very
quiet day today until about 4:00pm. We spent it heading north in
Smith Sound, the body of water between the Canada Arctic and the
Greenland Arctic. We were apparently supposed to be some distance
north of where we were earlier in the day to enable some excursions
to occur but the ship encountered heavy sea ice over night so was
considerably slowed.
Once
we got going though, we made excellent progress at 13.6 knots in 172
metres of water. The screenshot shows our course since leaving Pond
Inlet six days ago.
But at about 4:00pm, the highlight of the day occurred. We came to a vast area of sea ice where a polar bear was sighted so the captain manoeuvred the ship until we were adjacent to the bear but outside the ice. To get closer, he then took the ship into the ice.
The bear appeared to be quite interested in the big blue monster festooned with yellow parkas approaching him and gave us incredible photo opportunities. To quote the expedition staff, one is never going to safely get any closer to a polar bear than we did.
No comments:
Post a Comment