Sunday, August 30th, 2026

Distance hiked – Hike 1 – 4.2 kilometres
Distance dived in Polar Plunge – 0.16 fathoms
Distance hiked – Hike 2 – 4 kilometres

I awoke from a peaceful night’s sleep and, so steady was the bed that I momentarily forgot that I was on a ship. The Plancius was cruising slowly up Segelsallskapets Fjord, towards Skipperdal where we would do our first hike and, possibly, the dreaded “Polar Plunge”. The time was either 04:00, 05:00 or 06:00 depending upon where our iPhones and iPads last received a GPS signal – but the ship’s time was a few minutes before 06:00.

Breakfast was early, at 07:00 ship’s time and, luckily, there was bacon and eggs. I was able to “pre-blubber”, with a good sized helping, against the increasing possibility of some very cold water in my near future.

Skipperdal

From the deck we watched as the guides selected a landing spot and checked it out for Polar Bears.

Then it was, suit up, boot up and into the Zodiac for the short trip ashore to a sandy cove. This was Skipperdal and the striations in the sedimentary rock formations were simply astonishing. On every side, stripes assailed our eyes. The mountains rising from the fjord looked more like giant humbugs, than anything else. Every outcrop seemed to be composed of a different combination of stripes or combinations of other colours. It was like being in a vast stone sweetshop.

We were again on the medium hike. The long hikers had long since vanished over the horizon and our group contained the bulk of the passengers. Of course, such a number can be a bit unwieldy so Marco and Charlotte were glad when Koen and another guide, Mark, appeared and stole a lot of the German speakers away. Marco set a fairly good pace which, sadly, soon spread us out into a very l-o-n-g line as some struggled to keep up. This necessitated more and longer stops than we would have preferred, while the stragglers caught up. Luckily, Marco was a “mine” of geological information so, if you were in any way that inclined, the stops were very educational.

Part of the initial briefing about the Arctic included the phrase “we leave only footprints” – incorrect, we were on a definite path ! In fairness, the route we were on would, more or less, force anyone, or any animal, walking that way to be in a fairly defined area, but it was a path.

On a distant mountain slope, at quite a height, someone spotted a Musk Ox. Careful scanning with our monocular revealed not one, but several. Once you knew they were there, they were visible to the naked eye, but they were too far away for a meaningful photo.

We came to a small lake.

The waters were crystal clear and there was a good variety of aquatic plants visible beneath the surface.

The shoreline was ringed with footprints of ducks and geese and the hoof prints of Musk Oxen. Reassuringly, we could find no paw prints from Polar Bears.

On the crest of a distant ridge, a line of shapes appeared. As the shapes were multiple, there was no “Polar Bear Panic”, but it was a bit like in the film “Zulu” where the impis first appear on the ridge above Rorke’s Drift. The monocular soon resolved the shapes into the “long” hikers who were carrying cameras, not Assagais.

Marco declared an “Arctic Silence”. We all stopped talking, stopped clicking away with our cameras and stopped moving about. Instead, we stood, sat or, as Lucie and I did, lay on the springy grass and listened – to absolutely nothing. It was a wonderful interlude. Even a duck, that was carefully keeping the maximum distance from us intruders, seemed to stop swimming. If it had moved so much as a single webbed toe, I am sure we would all have heard it.

Marco called us to order and we all posed for a group photo. Then, we completed our circumnavigation of the lake and climbed over a steep rise. At the risk of sounding like an advertisement for Oceanwide, its guides really love what they do. There had been some debate, the previous day, about the calciferous content of sedimentary rocks. Marco had somehow not only obtained, but had carried with him, a small bottle of Hydrochloric Acid (HCl). He dripped this onto a striped piece of rock that bubbled on one (the chalky) side and did not bubble on the other (the silt) side. 

Still marvelling at the sheer scope and variety of patterns in the rocks, we reached the top of the final rise.

The Plancius was rocking gently in the bay below us and we started downhill towards the beach.

The “Polar Plunge”

“Out blew the web, and floated wide,
the mirror crack’d from side to side.
“The curse has come upon me” cried,
the lady of Shallot”

Those words, by William Wordsworth, fairly accurately described my feelings as I walked down to the beach. When we went to Antarctica, there was a plunge – and I wimped out ! One guy from our then “gang”, Dave, did do it, swimming about as casually as if he was in Sorrento and not some freezing bay. Regret is not really an emotion that I entertain, we do what we do and we move on, but retrospectively, my lack of resolve had rankled. Now, redemption beckoned it icy fingers……

I did try and dally slightly, by examining some interesting rock patterns on the rocks, but it was now or never !

I walked to the beach, stripped off my clothes, declaimed the above verse of Wordsworth, strode to the water’s edge and went straight into the water, where I dived to put my head under. It did take my breath way – but it was nowhere near as bad as I had thought it would be.
I turned around, gave a triumphant pose to Lucie, who was filming, posed for a photo and walked back up the beach. I was so pumped up with pleasure (let no man call it puffed up with pride !) that I did not even feel cold.
Getting back into my clothes (waterproofs and muck boots were still a requirement to board the Zodiac even when you were already soaked to the skin) was harder than the swim.

Job done !

–

After a shower to wash the salt out of my hair (it took one and a half seconds), it was time for lunch. The fare on offer was exclusively vegetable based, so I felt no hesitation in loading up my plate to replace both of my lost calories. There was consternation, in some quarters, about the lack of meat. People seemed to be worried that, due to an error, we might have left it all on the Rembrandt the previous day. Reassurances were quickly issued that, in the evening, there would be an “Arctic Barbecue” at which there would be meat a’plenty.

We were still en-route to our next landing site, so the recap was held early. Pippa told us the Plan A, but stressed, as ever, that it was open to amendment. Even that early in the year, there was already a long tongue of Arctic sea-ice a long way south in the Greenland Sea. That might effect what we could do when we got back to the coast and then dictate how we made the crossing to Svalbard.

Then Chloe gave a short presentation on the Greenland Shark. It is huge, the third biggest of the shark family and can grow to be up to six metres in length and weigh a thousand kilograms. It is also extremely long-lived and the oldest one found was 522 years old. It also cannot even start breeding until it is about 150 years old and a female can control the length her gestation period. What Chloe did not say, was how all that was known. All I could think of, anyway, was that I had recently been swimming in the same sea as where it, presumably, lived.

Next up was Marco, with yet more geology facts. This was, no doubt, prompted by the myriad questions which people had posed about the rock formations that we had seen in the morning. In a nutshell, countless millions of years ago, stuff like shellfish died in their billions, sank to the bottom of the sea and, over countless years, solidified. Sometimes, other substances, like silt or iron accumulated, sank and, in its turn solidified. This happened in a random order, with more than just just two or three possibilities. When the Tectonic Plates collided (there is a join between Greenland and Norway) this slanted, folded and distorted the layers in a number of picturesque ways.

There you have it.

Finally, Sven enlightened us on the Sirius Patrol. This is an elite unit of the Danish army, named after Sirius, the Dog Star, because of its husky dogs, that is charged with patrolling the wastes of Greenland (like the S.A.S. but with the huskies). There are only twelve members and six are rotated out every year. The area it watches over is immense, 18,000,000 square kilometres and units can be on a single patrol path for five months without a break. It can be dangerous, one member was ambushed and killed by the Germans in 1943 and another froze to death, whilst on patrol, in the 1960s. Preparing for and executing the patrols is a huge amount of work. Depots, caches and survival huts are scattered all over north-eastern Greenland and it takes all Summer for the Patrol to replenish them for Winter usage. The unit’s home base is on Ella O island, where we were now anchored just offshore.

Part of the squad’s brief is to check legal visitors as well as to root out “illegal” activity. As I wrote this, they were on board, doing their thing. I hoped that Pippa had dotted every i and crossed every t.

Ella O

The Plancius passed its inspection and, by way of gratitude, Pippa invited five of the Patrol to the barbecue.

This meant that we could land, but we were asked not to photograph the patrol’s little huts as we hiked past them. We were again on the medium hike which, as was becoming the norm, was split, this time into quicker and slower walkers. Mark was leading. Almost everybody, including us, thought they were faster – and it soon became obvious that a lot of them were not. We were soon strung out in a long line, yet again and Koen, as rearguard, must have been tempted to use his rifle to chivvy them along. Using it to thin out the stragglers would probably have caused legal problems for Oceanwide later on.

The first thing we saw was a cross and a rock with a memorial plaque. This was a tribute to a Swedish Greenland Expedition of 1899. This was a balloon expedition that vanished without trace in the vicinity in that year. No trace was found until the remains were finally located in 1933.

The climb was not so rocky as in the morning, but it was quite steep and we eventually ascended to quite an elevation. You guessed it, the views in every direction were breathtaking. Some of the  low lying bushes there still had berries. There are three types, Bearberries, Crowberries and Bilberries (which seem to be a version of Blueberry). All the fruits looked more or less identical to the naked eye and taste pretty similar as well. They were mainly pips.

It was an up and down walk over rough terrain. To be completely fair, it was marred a bit by people who could not really keep up and who, when they were within the group, demonstrated no knowledge of basic hiking etiquette or indeed of manners. Lucie and I are inclined to shrug our shoulders, but one or two of the other hikers did let them know that taking endless variations of the same photo at every viewpoint and stopping others getting near to it was simply not on. Did they take this on board ? No they did not.
Enough said.

We did not see any wildlife, but there was plenty of Musk Ox poo about. In the absence of much bacteria and insects, it was difficult to detect its vintage. There were a couple of lakes and, on one, there was a pair of adult Red-Throated Divers. There were no chicks in evidence, but so late in the season they might have already fledged, or been eaten by Arctic Foxes of which there was quite a lot of scatological evidence, but we did not see any. The Divers were already growing their Winter plumage of white belly feathers.

Once again a group photo was taken, but weirdly, from the other shore of what was not a small lake. I hope the camera had a good lens or people might think there ARE bacteria on Ella O.

We wandered back to the Zodiacs and embarked once more.

–

Almost as soon as we were back on board, the Arctic Barbecue began. Left to my own dubious devices, I would probably have sat on my little bed and gone to sleep – but Lucie said we should show our faces, so we trekked to the open end of deck three. In a way, we arrived in the nick of time, as the staff were just beginning to pack up the meat courses. Charlotte, who is a tallish blonde, was getting some close attention from what must have been two of the Sirius Patrol members. Tall, blond and muscular would not have summed them up. Charlotte’s head did not even reach their armpits. They also had what appeared to be a wolf on a lead, I suppose that was a “military” husky !

We helped ourselves to some meat, sweetcorn, grilled cheese, baked potato and, in Lucie’s case, some chicken. There was nothing wrong with it, but the usual food was way better. For dessert, we had something that looked, superficially, like bread and butter pudding. Closer examination (read eating it) revealed an absence of bread and also of butter. The pudding part was nice though.

As ever, just looking over the side of the ship gave an unending succession of views. The sheer starkness of these mellowed as evening began to fall, but the grandeur remained.

Even though it was only just after 21:00 in some time-zone or another, I was pretty tired. An early start, two hikes and a swim had done me in. I trotted gratefully off to my little bed.