1st.-10th.July 2025, Around Spitsbergen with M.V.Planicus
Contents
This was my second journey with Oceanwide Expeditions to Spitsbergen. The first one took place at the beginning of June 2023 and was confined to the North-West coast since the range of the pack-ice at that time of year prevents any travel further North or East. A month later in the season the plan was to complete a circumnavigation of the whole Spitsbergen main island. My chief aim was to obtain a better sighting of polar bears for although 2 days were spent searching the pack-ice on the previous tour only one distant bear sighting was achieved.
I was able to fly in one day from Basel via Amsterdam and Oslo to Longyearbyen but arrived too late to board the ship Planicus the same day. The night was spent at the Hotel Svalbard and the following day with visits to the North Pole Expedition and Natural History Museums. The ship was boarded at 16:00 at the Coal Harbour as previously, but straight away sailed a considerable distance up the West coast before stopping for the night. The main island Spitsbergen itself has a length of ca 360 km and to reach the Seven Islands, the most Northerly islands of the Svalbard archipelago, a further 100 km of travel is required. It was therefore necessary for the ship to sail throughout the nights in order to reach all the nine daytime destinations. Perhaps for this reason there was remarkably little overlap between this and my earlier voyage. Lilliehookbreen was the only place visited on both occasions. Although the first trip revealed more variety of wild life this second one showed greater numbers of the species that were observed, particularly at Monacobreen (Kittiwake) and in Hinlopen Strait (Brunnich’s Guillemot). The main new species for me was the Beluga Wahle seen at Nigribreen. A Bow Head or Greenland Wahle was spotted but I unfortunately did not see it myself. The last two days in Hornsund and the eastern arms of Isfjord afforded brief views of previously seen species such as Humpback Whale, Reindeer and Puffins.
Once on the ship I of course soon met my roommate for the 10-day journey. He was an American from Austin in Texas, of about my age, although had Scandinavian descendancy as he put it. Iceland and Sweden, I think. We had a so-called luxury 2 window cabin right at the stern of the ship with one window looking to the rear and the other to the side, which was very pleasant. The only other luxury compared with the standard 2 window rooms was the inclusion of 2 bottles of wine.
The main objectives of the expedition to sail around Spitzbergen and to see polar bears were well met and the ship also reached 82 degrees latitude, only 800km from the North pole, which had been a wish of some of the passengers.
The first polar bear sighting happened almost by accident when we landed on one of the Seven Islands north of Spitsbergen hoping to see walrus. The chances were low because of thick mist but I decided to go anyway just to be able to say that I had landed so far north. However before my boat arrived on the beach a polar bear was spotted on land. This is dangerous with a group and everyone had to return to the ship from where it could just about be seen with powerful binoculars. I took photos with my 500mm lens and could just find it as a smudge on one or two of them. Then the mist came down to sea level obliterating everything.
The following day out on the pack-ice we were much more successful, since already in the early morning 2 bears approached the ship quite closely. Then later and in the afternoon the polar bear sightings became even better with 2 more bears attracted by an almost intact large Sperm Whale (Moby Dick) carcass floating on the surface. This was of course a source of food for the bears. So during the day we were able to watch in total 4 bears over the course of several hours. I was able to set up my tripod and use the 1.4 x converter for even closer photos. With such focal lengths it was not possible to get 2 bears in one photo as they keep their distance. I took almost 800 photos in all. Towards the end some large gulls, a glaucous and an ivory gull, joined the feast to create a real ‘David Attenbrough’ feeling! We had been very lucky to witness this apparently a very rare occurrence since the ship’s captain with 33 years’ experience had never seen it before.
The following pages contain excerpts from the ship’s logbook as written by the expedition staff and map sections with a trace of the ship’s route for each day. More information about the wildlife observed can be found on the pages of this website describing the 2023 cruise which I took part in on my first visit to Spitsbergen.
Panorama pictures requiring a wide screen (and window).
