So many narwhals!

 Tuesday September 2

We awoke to fresh snow on the sides of Rannoch Arm in Buchan Gulf. The conditions weren’t great for walking on the rocky shore and the snow fall meant that sighting polar bears was difficult ( and therefore dangerous). Therefore the options for the morning were kayaking or a zodiac cruise. We opted for a zodiac cruise around the narrow end of the fjord. It was definitely an Ansel Adams photography morning, with gloomy skies, falling snow and a temperature of 1 Celsius. The water was calm inside the fjord with very little wind.

As our zodiac cruise headed deeper into the end of the Arm, our driver / naturalist said she had a destination in mind. Soon we could see dark shapes surfacing in the distance: a pod of Narwhals! Narwhals are hunted by the local people so they have learned to be very skittish around boats. We turned off our engine and waited—- over the next half hour, we saw four or five pods of narwhal all around us but at a distance. The estimate is that we saw more than fifty, including males, females and young ones. Our local interpreters said that the narwhal are migrating which explains the high concentration of them in one place. You know that it is a special experience when the naturalists are giddy. 

This afternoon the skies cleared and the ship cruised slowly up the Icy Arm, also within Buchan Gulf. The cliffs of the fjord were spectacular. The light snow fall accented them in beautiful patterns. There were numerous glaciers, some reaching the water’s edge while others were hanging glaciers. At times we thought we were seeing clouds, but it was ice fields atop the mountains. It was a geologist’s wonderland. At the far end of the Arm, above a pebbly beach, was a beige rock that looked out of place  — a sleeping polar bear! 

Today was the kind of experience we had hoped for on this trip— and we still have two more weeks to go!

Pictured: Narwhal (credit Patrick Webster), sleeping polar bear, the kayaking conditions this morning, Icy Arm fjord walls (2), braided glacier