“To meet some Tasmanians”, with apologies to Lewis Carroll, but upon seeing them his poem surfaced in my mind…essential British schoolboy poetry.

5 minutes into yesterdays cruise we spotted this pair on a shingle beach just out of the harbour. Another 5 minutes later we sailed through a pod of 20 Beluga whales, what a start to the afternoon.

Sadly that was the most of the wildlife interaction. With no sea ice around our chances of seeing a polar bear were slim. We will have to come back during the early spring. However looming up in the distance was Borebreen Glacier.

The closer we got the bigger, and more impressive, it got. It’s one of few glaciers actually advancing, some 60m a year into the sea.

Very impressive up close, with large cracks and booms as the ice calved off. We had just enough light on a dull day to bring out some of the blue colour. This was more apparent on some of the small icebergs, some of which had an amazing texture like a reptilian skin. I took quite a few photos….

After loitering around a bit we headed back to port. Not much wildlife apart from the ever present Little Auks and gulls.

The light had changed enough to light up the mountains around the fjords entrance, one could have almost been in Scotland with the orange “heather”.

We have a 2 sea days now as we leave Norway and make our way to Iceland, so I’ll save today’s excursion for tomorrow’s blog…..