Thu
22 Sep
2016

The start into the day was, admit­ted­ly, not real­ly gre­at. Rumours had it that a dead wha­le was recent­ly seen bea­ched some­whe­re in sou­thern For­lands­und. It tur­ned out to be impos­si­ble to find, may­be due to the very strong surf on the shores, which would any­way have made it com­ple­te­ly impos­si­ble to get any­whe­re near it.

Later, the swell tur­ned break­fast into some­thing of a spor­ti­ve exer­cise, good to impro­ve per­so­nal balan­ce. Unfort­u­na­te­ly buf­fet and din­n­erwa­re are not real­ly too adap­ti­ve.

It beca­me cal­mer as we went into Grønfjord. The first glim­pse out­side the­re: may­be rather stay in bed ..?
But no, that’s not what we came for. And the more time we spent ashore in inner Grønfjord, the bet­ter it beca­me. May­be not for our moun­tain hiking group, who were reward­ed for their phy­si­cal efforts by some insi­de views of arc­tic clouds, any risk of outer dehy­dra­ti­on being made a very remo­te one given cur­rent meteo­ro­lo­gi­cal con­di­ti­ons.

The rain that kept the hikers wet brought a love­ly rain­bow over tun­dra and fjord for the rest of us. Wide tun­dra, lush and green, beach rid­ges, a morai­ne to look for fos­sils. As if Spits­ber­gen had just rea­li­zed that the last impres­si­on out the­re in the arc­tic natu­re should be a nice one, pre­fer­a­b­ly. It work­ed well!

In addi­ti­on, some of us got a litt­le exer­cise in river crossing, some­thing that tur­ned out to be almost sati­ri­cal as some others had dif­fi­cul­ties during simi­lar acti­vi­ties in the area, while we were just doing it for the fun of it. As soon as we got back on board, a group of gui­des in trai­ning some­whe­re in inner Grønfjord cal­led us over the radio as their were stuck bet­ween rivers with increased run­off due to recent rain­fall. Well, I know tho­se rivers from per­so­nal expe­ri­ence and I know that they may inde­ed have some enter­tai­ning value. Being nice and hel­pful peo­p­le, we sent Uta and Timon off with two zodiacs. They retur­ned later with the news that ever­y­bo­dy had been trans­fer­red safe­ly, but the approach had been a bit tri­cky becau­se … it was almost too shal­low even for the Zodiacs. Lol!

Click on thumb­nail to open an enlar­ged ver­si­on of the spe­ci­fic pho­to.

Mean­while, we roun­ded our trip off with visit to Barents­burg, an important and con­trast-rich impres­si­on, making our Spits­ber­gen-expe­ri­ence as com­ple­te as pos­si­ble in 10 days. I think we did well! Not too long befo­re we then ente­red the port of Lon­gye­ar­by­en again.