Photos from Svalbard
19th June 2016

Last full day cruising

This was our last full day aboard the splendid MS National Geographic... and "full" it was!

The next day we would leave our floating home comfortably early in the day, enjoy Svalbard's principle town, fly to Oslo comfortably late in the day. So the 19th was pretty much "the grand finale".

Morning: Kayaking, Zodiac cruising; Polar Plunge.

Afternoon: Out to "drop-off" for exceptional whale encounters.

The hors d'oeuvre: some fin whales... similar to the blue, but a bit smaller. Enjoyed the company of a small pod feeding for a while... usually three, apparently working as a team, or maybe just being companionable. Once or twice I thought there were four together. Then...

The "main course", photo to right: The largest creature ever to live on earth, land or sea, and epoch, swimming on the same heading as us, a bit off our port bow. The dorsal bump is a long way down the spine, not anything like where it is on a dolphin.

And for "desert": feeding humpbacks. (More to be said!) The photo shows the last moments of a small shoal of fish. The whale has come up from under them, and used its mouth and extensible jowls just as a pelican does.

In the photo, the whale has come up from the left; you are mostly seeing the front, top part of its head. You can just see the lips, and the distended jowls. The water trapped in the mouth will be squeezed out through a barely open mouth, leaving the fish inside.

Here, all to the same scale, the three species we saw, in the order we saw them. First the fin whale, then the blue, then the humpback.

Note the position of the dorsal bump on the first two whales. That will help you imagine just how much whale there was in front of the bit of blue that shows in the photo.

Image to right shows the twists and turns of our ship, to follow (without harassing!) the whales. (They moved towards us on more than one occasion.) First image: The original. Best plan: Take original picture properly. Thank heavens for photo manipulation software for when things don't go to plan. Everything in cyan: Added to original image in post processing. (Will explain when this stub expanded.) Drop off was from a depth of about 200 m to 600 m.


Eve: Captain's cocktails. (To be expanded into page with pictures.)


End of day, end of "heart" of trip: The photo above shows two things... the state of the light... like 11:30 am most places... at 11:30pm, on our last day aboard, when I'd finally finished packing. And, from the mistake in the taking of the photo (I let the camera focus on the glass of my window) you can see the level at which my brain was "functioning" by then. (^_^). (That is in no way meant to suggest that the trip was "tiring", physically or mentally. It was very well paced. (I tire, and get "brain balk" easily.))

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