Thinking ahead

I don’t think even we realised back then how comforting it would feel to know that these reinforcements were in place once the time finally came to head into the ice in a serious way. Our previous flirtations with such frozen landscapes were nothing compared to the expedition which would see us cover 5,247 nautical miles, docking on only twelve of the 54 days. We didn’t even drop anchor most of the time, spending nights drifting along with the ice flow. It never got really dark and, even in the places shallow enough to anchor, we rarely took the risk of becoming stuck. We did manoeuvre occasionally during the quiet hours to avoid being pushed ashore when the wind changed and dodge the risk of the ice becoming compacted around us.

To be honest, having a super strong ice-class vessel is not as crucial in these situations as ensuring careful navigation and good weather planning. You have to think far ahead to where you’re trying to reach in order to avoid being pinned into unnavigable places. You must never back the boat up unless the aft is absolutely clear of ice. If you hit something and it becomes attached there’s little hope of shedding the ice, and you could end up damaging your propellers or rudders. It’s better to just keep going forward very slowly – often just one or two knots – so that the ice has time to shift and float away.

Slow and steady

One doesn’t travel vast distances at that pace but that’s not what we were there to do. We started and ended in Greenland, eventually going as far as a latitude of 76 degrees, just fourteen degrees short of the North Pole. Our goals were to admire the wildlife, gain a sense of the overall environment, see the glaciers and observe how they might be receding, meet the very few locals who live up there and revisit some of their history.

By the way, we think it would be a shame to embark on a trip like this without first reading up on those who have gone before, including the Vikings and the monks who ventured into these cold lands millennia ago, as well as inveterate polar explorers such as John Franklin and Roald Amundsen. Understanding the mistakes that people made and the difficulties they faced will certainly help you be better prepared.

We were privileged to have aboard the acclaimed photographer, film-maker and marine biologist Paul Nicklen, the much-admired expert in whales and whale photography Flip Nicklen (no relation) and the National Geographic contributor Justin Hoffman, plus Glen Williams, who has lived for fifteen years with the Inuit. These guys had spent a lot of time in the Arctic and helped us arrange permits, acted as guides, ensured liaisons and generally made the trip even more extraordinary for us than it already would have been.

Close encounters

We were also very lucky with the large amount of ice present during our visit, which meant we got to see a lot of wildlife. There were only a handful of days when we didn’t see polar bears, for instance, and we logged 92 in total. The first sighting was among the most memorable, not least because it took place on the day we arrived. At the time we were fifty miles from land. It was a crystal-clear afternoon and we could see snow-capped mountains in the distance. As the first boat heading into the Arctic for the season, we’d been working our way carefully through the ice for around eight hours when our local guide saw a polar bear and her cub.

We managed to shut the engines down and manoeuvre closer quietly and gently with the sternthruster. Staying within the fifty-metre limit for wildlife, we could see clearly that mother and cub were both very inquisitive and considering whether to swim out to Archimedes in search of an early-evening snack (it was hard to escape the feeling that we were not at the top of the food chain here but very much on the menu). This was an astonishing moment which we managed to capture in some great footage.

This remarkable experience set the tone for the next eight weeks. Teams of spotters were placed on the bridge with binoculars looking for wildlife as Archimedes meandered along different routes. We sometimes climbed into the tenders at midnight and cruised around looking at walruses and beluga whales. We might get to bed at 2 o’clock in the morning only to be woken up again at 5.15 to watch a polar bear eating a seal on the ice.

Gentle giants

It is at this point that all the photos come into their own so let us just mention a few more of our favourite moments. One was observing bowhead whales, magnificent creatures that can only be seen in this part of the world as they are one of the few species of whales who don’t migrate. They can also live up to an astonishing 200 years of age, and it was impossible not to feel absolutely awed when coming face to face with one of these gentle giants as they came up under the hull of the boat to check us out. The visibility was low so we didn’t get any great photos, but we did have the hydrophone in the water and captured several hours of them singing to each other – a truly memorable experience.

Perhaps the defining moment for us was seeing the narwhals. They are said to be the origin of the unicorn legend, as they have a single spiralling tusk that can reach up to ten feet in length – this is actually their left upper canine that grows straight out. Like other whales, they’re mammals and breathe air. Observing them in their natural habitat was nothing short of magical.

Stirring spectacles

At some point we came close to an enormous glacier calving. This thing was a few thousand feet high and around seven thousand feet long. It was dropping pieces of ice every fifteen minutes or half hour that were the size of the Empire State Building and produced twenty-foot walls of water. It was hard to believe our eyes. This is one of the two glaciers in the northern hemisphere that produce the most icebergs.

We only saw a few boats during our entire Arctic adventure. The sun didn’t really set during most of the trip, although we did eventually get some darker hours towards the end – and that’s when we got to view the Northern Lights, an unbelievably stirring spectacle. We were very happy then about the length of our stay, as it gave us a chance to get a thorough feel for the land of the midnight sun while also seeing this grand natural light display.

Leave no trace

One of the major considerations during our trip was what to do with 54 days’ worth of rubbish. Archimedes was built with a small refrigerated space for this purpose but to make sure we would have enough capacity to last us the journey we also built a trash compactor. For starters, we made sure that all waste was separated for recycling purposes and gave our guests custom-made thermos bottles to keep liquids warm or cool and minimise the need for disposable plastic bottles. We didn’t discharge a single piece of trash into the environment throughout our trip. We felt it would have been terribly disrespectful of the communities and the Arctic itself if we started throwing our rubbish overboard or disposed of it onshore – after all, things don’t decompose easily in freezing temperatures.

While we’re on the subject of the environment, we also gained a keen insight into just how essential the ice is as a habitat for most of the Arctic animals. Bears, seals and walruses all need the ice to survive. As the ice recedes – something we witnessed first-hand – their habitat shrinks. The way things are going, in a hundred years’ time there will be no more polar caps. That would be a tragedy in more ways than one.

Something else

We came to the Arctic as part of an amazing year of globetrotting and from Tahiti to Israel we loved all the diverse places we visited. But this trip into the ice was so way beyond the norm, and to visit a part of the world so few people ever get to see was a genuine honour. As we left this phenomenal environment, precious in so many ways, we felt like we were leaving a little part of ourselves behind. It was as if we’d been ‘somewhere else’ and then come back to civilisation. To be frank, there’s no feeling quite like it…