We had our first walrus sightings today!! I haven’t ever seen a walrus before except in pictures. They look ugly in pictures and they look even uglier in person. However, I could sit for hours watching them flop all over the place while making all kinds of interesting noises. Before we had our first walrus sighting we had another early wake up call for some fin whales off the bow.
Fin Whale with calf
After we had our fill of pictures of the fin whales we headed towards Woodfjorden. Once again we were amazed at the polar bear spotting ability of the crew. Several kilometers away they spotted a polar bear on land just before it headed into the water.
Polar Bear on land
Polar Bear testing the water
Polar Bear shaking the water off (while in the water??)
As the polar bear swam off so we continued on and found some more bears on the ice. Can you spot the bear? I had a 500mm lens with a doubler on which gave me over 1000mm of reach and still the polar bear was only a spec on the ice. This was also taken after the captain had been slowly maneuvering towards the bear for a little over 30 minutes. I guess I need to buy a bigger lens!!
Can you spot the polar bear?
Later in the day we had a chance for a zodiac ride. We couldn’t land on the island because a polar bear was spotted on the land. This did give us a good opportunity to get some polar bear pictures from the zodiac. We weren’t able to get as close as I would have liked but we did get a few good looks at him.
Zodiac in front of Polar Bear
Polar Bear with flowers
One of my favorite things about Lindlbad Expeditions are the little things they do to make the expedition memorable. My number one little thing they do is the hot choco zodiac that roams around on the cold arctic days to warm up the freezing travelers.
Hot Choco Zodiac
Our last stop of the day was Moffen island. Walrus paradise. It was also our furthest point north on the trip. 80 degrees north to be exact.
One of the top animals on our list to photograph has been the “Ice Bear” or Polar Bear. These elusive creatures are getting harder and harder to spot in the wild but we knew we could count on Lindblad Expedition’s National Geographic Explorer and their crew to find them for us. We travelled on the National Geographic Explorer to Antarctica last year and had an amazing time. The ship, crew, staff, Nat Geo photo instructors and Antarcitca itself was one of the most amazing places we’ve been to. Many of the passengers on the ship with us in the Antarctic raved about the trip to the Arctic. Since seeing Polar Bears was on our wish list we booked the trip immediately after returning home.
Polar Bear in field of arctic flowers
Lindblad calls the trip to the arctic the Land of the Ice Bears. They market the trip as an 11 day tour of the Svalbard archipelago. In actuality, you only have 5 days on the ship searching for the elusive Ice Bear. All of the other days are travel days or embarking/disembarking from the ship. The trip was still amazing even though it was shorter than we expected. An extra 2 days at sea exploring the archipelago would have been perfect. It would have allowed extra time to search for Polar Bears, Walruses, Whales and most importantly not feel rushed when trying to get that perfect shot. Overall, the photography experience in Antarctica was far superior and I came away from that trip with much better pictures than this one. Even though it was only a 5 day trip they packed as much into every moment as they could and I did end up with a few good photos.
Over the next week or so I’ll do a few posts that describes what we did and what we saw each day we were on the ship. Similar to what I did for our expedition to Antarctica.
The photo instructors onboard the ship put together a video slideshow of the passengers best photos from the trip. Miki and I submitted some of our favorites. We tried to submit pictures that other people wouldn’t have posted so we tried to get a little creative and kept the wildlife pictures to a minimum since everyone else had lots of them.
Some of my favorites.
- Polar Bears above.
Arctic Landscape
The Ice of the Arctic
Waterfall flowing off the Austfonna ice cap. Largest ice cap by area in Europe.
Kayaking in the Arcitc. (Gopro camera attached to end of kayak paddle)
It took me almost 6 months but I finally got through all the pictures and video from our trip to Antarctica. We did take over 10,000 photos and several hours of video. It takes a while to parse that down into a 9 minute video slideshow. Enjoy…
Don’t forget to check out the previous posts from our Antarctica Expedition.
Doing the Polar Plunge in front of the National Geographic Explorer
We liked our trip to Antarctica on the National Geographic Explorer so much we booked another trip on the same ship to the Arctic this summer. In preparation of the trip to Arctic, they had National Geographic photographer Ralph Lee Hopkins give a webinar on the Top 10 Essentials For Making Better Travel Photos. These tips don’t just apply to trips to the arctic. They are very useful tips that will help you take better travel photos wherever you go. Click on the link here to watch the webinar.
Here are the top 10 tips that Ralph covers in his presentation.
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