We spend our days exploring these Islands, going where ice and weather allows, landing where possible or zipping about in the ice in the Zodiacs. They keep finding new and different things for us to do – today we walked around on the moraine at the foot of one of the massive glaciers, walking to the end to get a good look at the ice face. Sometimes its hard to take my eyes off the ground, the plant life here is extraordinary, its all mosses and fungus, so beautiful, the flowers, the colours, the variety.

One landing was aborted because the scouts spotted a bear on the island so instead we went to watch him from the Zodiacs, he got up from his slumber and lumbered around the island, slipped into the sea and swam across to another island. As we watched him wake up, a couple of walruses were frolicking in the sea immediately below him. Returning to the ship we were thoroughly sussed out by a young seal who popped up on every side to examine us. Its like a dream. Yesterday’s bear didn’t bother moving himself, just lay there snug between a pile of snow and a rock and peered us. We are being incredibly lucky – the previous group doing this trip only got 3 landings out of a possible 11 because of fog and, I think, didn’t see a bear at all.

The ship nosed her way north, flat calm, amazing cloud formations with shafts of light hitting distant ice caps and peaks, islands all around, among loose sea ice to the point where the Captain decided was the farthest north we would go on this trip, 81^o10^’, and did one of those superbly elegant 180^o turns on the spot to wend our way southwards again.