We quietly nose our way through fog and sea ice looking for wildlife and for places to land, or to go out on the Zodiacs and explore glacier faces or ice bergs or just roam around among the sea ice. Because we never really see the sun and because it never actually goes down I have no sense of which is north or south. I feel afloat in a wilderness where no man has ever lived, divorced from all our normal points of reference, and I am content.

We change our plans by the hour depending on conditions, or because we have spotted a bear. We land where no tourists have landed before. We are surrounded by this huge seascape, all clouds and sea and ice and rocks, glorious colours in the glacier ice – pink, green, yellow, blue, with marbling effects and striations where crap has become embedded, and then a shaft of sunlight lights up a distant iceberg or icecap. The sea will reflect the islands, the icebergs, the light…..it is utterly and completely glorious.