After leaving Kvitoya, we sailed all “night” to find the sea ice and I woke up a little after 5:00AM and wandered up on deck to see if we had found the ice. We had indeed found lots of ice and there was even some sunlight making its way through the fog on the east side of the ship. I can’t say I didn’t think about the Titanic a few times upon seeing this, but I figured the people running the ship must know what they are doing.

This was the farthest North we would get on this journey and probably the farthest North I’ll ever get. I think from here, the ice just gets thicker and thicker as you go. You could get a little farther North on land if you went to the tip of Greenland, but I doubt I’ll ever do that. Below was our location plotted on a map.

I wandered around the deck trying to take good photos of the ice mostly with a wide angle lens. I mainly shot from the lower decks to get closer to the ice. The foggy horizon mostly meant that the ice faded off into a haze, which is nice I suppose. Compositionally, you are just getting an overall pattern and waiting for icebergs that look more interesting than others. Some of the icebergs had little pools in them, which I thought added some interest.

Eventually the clouds thinned and the sun began to break through providing some interesting reflections. The ship was slowly moving so I would have to see the reflection I wanted coming along and then be ready to take the photo when it was there. In the shot below, I could see the reflection moving across the water toward the iceberg as we moved and I waited for the sun to reflect in the pool. I was using a polarizer and I think that it makes the reflection in the pool actually sharper than the sun in the sky some how. Not sure I understand everything that happened here.

After lunch on the top deck, wearing a several layers and a coat, we prepared to find an iceberg that we could take the zodiacs to and actually walk on. Even though we were out in the ocean, the area can still have polar bears in it as they can swim for hundreds of miles and like to hang out on the ice hunting for seals. So, the expedition team had to scout the area for polar bears and identify a good iceberg before we could go out.

We piled into the zodiacs and headed out, navigating between the ice until we got to our target. Then they would basically ‘beach’ the zodiac on the ice and we’d all slide to the front and get out. The surface was crunchy like packed snow. They had certain parts of the ice roped off as I suppose there was a danger of it breaking under our feet.

Walking on an iceberg was quite an experience, for me anyway. Sure, I took some photos but after a while I just had to let my camera hang at its strap and experience the moments. Looking away from everyone and everything and staring out to sea; I could feel the stark isolation of the place even with a couple of dozen people just behind me. Feeling so small and in the middle of no where, made me appreciate how big and wonderful our world is and how glad I was to be there experiencing it. I had this feeling while hiking alone in Torres del Paine and I had it again here – I knew why I had traveled to this place. This was the moment that I’d hoped to have. Kind of strange that some sea ice can give you strong feelings, but that’s just me I guess.

I did eventually come back to my senses and start thinking about photography again. It wasn’t a huge iceberg, so there were only so many places to shoot without a lot of people in the shot. There was the nice blue pool in the photo above. I got down low and shot it wide. The activities then devolved into everyone getting a selfie and I certainly contributed to this low-brow form of photography as well. I do wish I had handed someone my camera instead of my phone as the iPhone photo is not very good.

Thanks for reading and I promise that awful beard is gone now.