28.06.2011 – 28.06.2011  -2 °C

A very slow start for weary as I was still suffering with a migraine headache. Spent the entire morning in bed asleep. The rest of the team were supposed to go out in the zodiacs to get a “bird’s eye” view of a bird nesting habitat on the side of a cliff here on the north of Spitsbergen. Unfortunately the weather has been really poor with high winds and therefore extremely cold air.

The winds were gusting above 30 knots this morning so the call was made to not deploy the zodiacs. Apparently the morning was spent viewing the bird rookery from the main ship, which by all accounts was an amazing site.. thousands of birds nesting in this one cliff face!

I finally got going (although fairly slowly) after lunch where we were supposed to be deploying the zodiacs to go on shore and see a colony of walruses. By now the winds were gusting above 40 knots so the zodiacs were definitely not being deployed! The wind was that strong that the boat (which was at anchor) was being moved around quite significantly!! Not only was the weather pretty poor (at least it isn’t raining) but the walruses weren’t at home on the shore so the call was made to not bother deploying the zodiacs and for us to continue on to see the Svalbard ice pack!

Therefore the afternoon was spent listening to the most boring lecture on the race for the North pole by aeroplane. This was chapter 3 of the story (and I had missed chapter 2) so it was a fairly slow arvo. I’ve decided though that the ship’s historian tells his stories like Days of our Lives.. it doesn’t matter if you miss an episode, you can still follow the story! (that should give you an idea of the style of story this historian tells…..)

Finished the day by seeing the Spitsbergen Ice Pack incredible to see 25m of ice towering over you for as far as the eye can see! Absolutely amazing! We were fortunate too because the sun had just started to peak through the clouds so the colours on the ice pack and through the clouds were just glorious. Lovely ending to a pretty miserably cold day!!!