Post: A day on a fjord

When we woke up the swells were gone, and the ship had entered Skjoldungen fjord. King Skjoldungen was a legendary ancient Danish king and the island in the center of the fjord is named after him. Our cruising speed dropped and suddenly the scenery was everywhere. Tall rock mountains dropping straight to the ocean. Glaciers all around, and icebergs as well. As it’s the end of summer, there were also plenty of meltwater icefalls.

A ninety minute ride around the part of the fjord we stopped in cured yesterday’s sea sickness entirely.

When the zodiacs idled, we could hear the ice cracking, and the sound is quite sharp, given all the rock surrounding the fjord. These are some of the oldest rocks in the world, maybe 3.8 billion years old. (Earth is considered to be about 4 billion years old.)

While we were cruising around, a zodiac of members of the hotel staff arrived to offer us champagne. A toast to the glaciers!

There was a seal in this location although it took off for some peace and quiet pretty quickly.

My mantra will sound silly, but it was helpful, “Glaciers are huge, Glaciers are huge.” In the above picture, we look very close to the glacier. The zodiac was about 350 meters (so a little less than 1/4 mile away.) Glaciers are huge- they always look a lot closer than they really are.

In the afternoon we tried to walk around deck but kept having interesting conversations with people. The chief engineer spent about fifteen minutes telling us about ship. The engineering crew is 25 as is the deck crew (those are the sailors.) The hotel staff is about 60. There are only 60 passengers on board, so we have an indulgent ratio.

We heard two great talks. One was about all the citizen science projects that the ship participates in with passengers as observers. Some we knew about, like the Cornell Ornithology Project. Others were new to us, like the Nurdles Count (a census of plastic pellets when they wash ashore) and Happy Whale (using photographs of whale tales to ID individual animals around the world.)

A second talk was given by one of the naturalists about arctic expeditions. He has been to the North Pole by skiing/snowshoeing, on a three man team, and then did a solo trek by skiing to the South Pole. If you like modern day adventure/explorers, here’s his website http://antonyjinman.com

We were invited to two cocktail parties this evening. That’s about as many invitations in one evening as we’d get in six months at home. The first was hosted by the tour company, the second was the captain’s welcome aboard party which had been postponed due to the rough seas yesterday.

One guest had her photo taken with the department officers. You might recognize her.