Tuesday 26 August 2008

At 87o 21.20N 07o 41.98W, -2C, winds <4m/s, good visibility, high stratocumulus clouds above us and northwards but clear skies and sun rays can be seen all day in the southward horizon.

Ice-bear story (by Sara de la Rosa):

Six days have passed since the polar bear gave us a curious visit...I guess I've been waiting for his next appearance to happen before I write this story! But so far he's been keeping well away from us.

It was just 6am as Thorsten and I were heading towards the ship from our oceanography ice-tent located some 100 m away from the ship. I was 10 steps from the gangway when I suddenly saw these big eyes staring at me...
The first milliseconds I was just paralized, trying to figure out whether what I saw was some fake bear set up on the ice by the crew as a joke, or whether it was actually a real one! As he slowly turned his head back to watch the seal hole where he was standing by, I realized that it was a real bear. The Arctic experience that I was hoping for!
I had no radio on me, so I tried best I could to get some words out my mouth to tell Thorsten to radio the bridge and warn them of the polar bear's presence. From the ice, the bear first seemed just 50m away from us, but as we got back onto the ship we saw that he was more like 180m away. He seemed a young male bear, but showed absolutely no interest on the icebreaker nor us (9 people awake at the time), watching him for about 40 minutes. It took him a long while to react to the ship's horn that blew to try to scare him off...all he probably wanted was to relax by the seal hole and us to leave him alone! Eventually as the bear retreated, the helicopter took off and scared him even further away from our ice-flow.

The reason that nobody had seen the bear arrive close to the ship the night before was because a dense fog-band was blocking the view from the bear-watchers on the bridge. The bear cleverly kept well out from the visibility line as he walked passed our ice camps.- Therefore, all precautions on the ice have been increased, such that some of us working on the ice have had to miss many working hours. Due to the presence of fog around us we had to stay onboard until visibility cleared up. Weather and visibility have now stayed considerably clear for some days, making both work on the ice and bear-watchers happy.