Friday, September 11th, 2026

Despite the nocturnal frolicking, I woke up early, keenly aware that this was our last full day. As I dressed in the dark, I half expected that my clothes would still be warm – but I was disappointed.

I went up to the lounge for my cups of tea and was eventually joined by Jo and then, a bit later, by Lucie. We had quite a discussion about vegetarian/veganism. Jo is a rational vegan, in as much as she will take real milk in her coffee, but our talk mainly centred on how much of our food is unnecessarily, produced abroad, imported, moved around and eventually thrown away. Jo works in a hotel and is shocked, every day, by the amount of uneaten food that is simply discarded. All each of us can do, we eventually agreed, is to think before we buy – and not to waste it after we have. No problems there for me ! Outside, our final day on board dawned.

Then it was breakfast with Herman and Elise – we seemed to have finally acquired a “gang” and then back to the cabin. We were called, by deck, to hand our muck boots in. Pippa was collecting them. I was able to reassure myself, after a chat with her, that my Walrus comment of the night before (which already seemed to have circulated through almost the entire ship) would not result in her shooting me, with her rifle, once I was off of the ship for good and out of her direct responsibility.

The morning lecture was by Charlotte who gave an extremely comprehensive talk on Polar Bears – all that we already knew – and much, much more. Amusingly, her slide on a mother Polar bear’s behaviour in her den whilst birthing and nurturing her cubs, said “No eating, drinking, urination or defalcation”. Good old “predictive text”. Defalcation means misappropriation of funds and it is hard to imagine a Polar bear doing that in ANY circumstances. The pedant in me felt bound to point this out. Charlotte is a sport and took it on the chin – she promised to change the slide to defecation for the future.

Then, I went and paid our bill. Still reeling from the shock (it was so tiny), I retired to our cabin to await lunch.

We were well into the period of “lasts” and this was our last lunch on board. Oddly, Elise would be in the same hotel in Tromso, the Scandic, as we would. Herman had a cheap shack somewhere else. A friend of his was flying up from the Netherlands (they were there in the shack already, he had tracked the flight) and they would go on to explore the Lofoten Islands by car. The rest of us would be flying home at some point.

In the afternoon, there was a lovely presentation, by Sven, about Tromso. He actually lives in the city and his affection for it was very obvious. He gave us a few facts about the city, its population has increased sevenfold (from 10,000 to 70,000) since the 1960s and almost a third of its residents are students at, or workers in, its university (UNN) and the attached medical school. Then he gave a month by month run through of life in Tromso, using his own, quite beautiful, photographs. The city enjoys periods of endless darkness and also of endless daylight and this was well illustrated. Apparently, the Northern Lights are seen so often in the town that local people think nothing of them at all.

I suppose that it goes without saying that we had our Christmas hats with us ! Lucie even had them concealed somewhere about her person when we on top of Ayer’s Rock (Uluru) in the heat of the Northern Territory of Australia. We persuaded Herman to exercise his photographic skills, but you will have to wait until December to see the results on the Harley Christmas page. No actual bike this year, obviously !

Then, excitement ! The bridge had spotted a large pod of Orcas and, jackpot number goodness knows what number, a Blue whale, ahead of us on the port side. This was the only “possible” whale we had failed to see in Antarctica. I sprinted to the front of the boat and was just in time to see the huge creature dive. Another five seconds and I would have missed it – I am going to tick it off of my list. The Orcas though, hung around. They were doing Orcary (is that a word ?) things and not playing to the crowd as their cousins in the South Atlantic had done. Koen thought they were fish eaters, but we had seen what a pod of Orcas had done to a massive Fin whale down South. It was not surprising that the Blue whale dived under the boat towards the starboard side and was fleetingly captured, while beneath the waves, on camera by Lucie. We looked and looked but it did not resurface again.

That incident had delayed the usual “Captain’s Farewell” – but now we had it. It was more or less the same as the one in Longyearbyen, but with a slightly reduced audience. The applause, for both the Captain and for Pippa and her team was rapturous and prolonged. Then there was the video presentation, this time prepared by Marco. His “style” was different to Sven’s, more flamboyant, as befitted his Italian nationality, but it was just as wonderful and a touch emotional. There was scarcely a dry eye in the house.

Because all those orcas had started a chain of delays, we practically had to amble quickly to the last dinner. There is that word again ! We sat with our mini gang for the final time. Lucie had her alcohol free wine, Herman and I had a beer and Elise, who was obviously an ascetic or something, stuck to water. The tuna was great.

It appeared that the possibility of there being yet more Northern Lights looked promising, so we hung around a bit, but nothing happened. Herman and I enjoyed a final beer, but the Aurora remained elusive. Lucie hung around the bridge, watching the charts. In the end, I went to bed …..

Of course, no sooner had I pulled my quilt up to my chin, than Pippa came on the tannoy to say that the Northern Lights had just appeared, somewhat paradoxically, to the South. As you can probably imagine, the term Australis leapt into my mind, but again I held my tongue. Up onto the deck we went and there they were. As I said previously, they appeared far more as we expect to see them on the camera than they did through our eyes. Sven had explained that this was because we have two types of cells in our eyes, rods and cones. These handle our night and day vision separately. Night vision tends to be more monochrome, which is why most people cannot see the bright colours. Luckily, our cameras can – and we have lots of evidence of the truly spectacular light show to prove it !

Finally, the show wound down and we could retire to our cabin for, errr, the last time.