During the night, we passed the northernmost point of Spitsbergen, which means that we were 80 degrees north! I missed that, not that there would have been anything to shoot there out on the sea in overcast weather anyway.

We had anchored during the early hours of the morning and I got out on deck before breakfast to take a look. I saw a walrus looking rock on the shore, and when it moved, I decided that it was not a rock at all… it was really a walrus! They were not going anywhere, so we had breakfast and then took the zodiak to the shore. We got really close to the walruses and they didn’t mind us, just gave us a few looks occasionally but they had no reason to be threatened by us. They are not really threatened by polar bears either, so a group of tourists is just an insignificant speck on their horizon!

It’s hard to say exactly how many walruses there were because they were all lying in a big lump. Maybe 10 at most, with 3-4 in the water? The funny thing was when I was really concentrated on shooting one individual in the lump and finally got up, I saw the rest of our group looking in the other direction. Those walruses in the water were coming on shore close to us, so everyone except me got a good look at them. I just had time for a couple of frames before they went back in the water, but I didn’t really mind – just seeing a walrus in its environment for the first time was all I needed!

Then we visited the Brünnich’s guillemot bird colony at Alkefjellet. I have never seen a proper bird colony and this one was amazing – it is home to about 60000 nesting pairs, plus tens of thousands of single birds. Stunning place. Birds perched precariously on narrow ledges, birds in the water, birds in the air.. everywhere!

Then we started looking for the polar bears again. But still, no bears, even when we found some ice trapped in a bay which would have made a good polar bear spot. We did see a lot of polar bear tracks though, so we knew that there are bears in the area, or at least was in the past few days. The guides started to get a bit concerned that maybe we wouldn’t find any bears and called another ship which was further south, and found out that the ice has drifted south and there are loads of bears down there, so they changed the route plan. Normally they wouldn’t go that far south because there’s just not enough time for it, but now we’re doing it. Exciting night ahead!