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Wednesday 24th July 2019 – OUR LAST …

… complete day on board ship – for now anyway – and what an interesting day it has been.

The day started off with, probably for the first time for quite a while, some uninterrupted sleep. And although I awoke at about 05:20 or thereabouts, uninterrupted it was. And for the first time for quite a while, I actually felt almost-human when i awoke.

It was a much better start to the day.

Outside, there were things to see too and that made it so much better. Much better than being totally shrouded in fog and mist

We’re sailing down a fjord, the name of which I forgot to note, somewhere round near the settlement of Qeqqata. And I made a discovery too, and I was lucky enough to photograph it.

It might well be a haphazard pile of stones but from the angle from which I took the image, it looked just like a ruined stone house (and I’ve seen a few of those – even lived in one too – in my time). It was on a spit of land sticking out at the junction of two fjords, in exactly the spot where one might expect an early settler, even of the Norse era, to erect a dwelling.

I showed it to the on-board archaeologists, and they seemed to think that it was something man-made. And who am I to dispute that? After all, we are somewhere in the vicinity of the limits of where the Western Settlement of the Norse might have been.

After breakfast I edited some photos for a while and then later on we had a talk on geology. And shame as it is to admit it, I dozed off in the middle of the discussion. I don’t know why, because up to that point I had been feeling quite good.

Once the talk was over we donned our wet-weather winter gear and clambered aboard our zodiacs for a final cruise. Past various nesting colonies of kittiwakes and guillemots up to the head of the fjord where a glacier was busy calving off into the water.

Strawberry Moose came along too and he went for a short kayak trip with Genevieve. He has more luck with the girls than I do.

But my luck held out today, just for a change.

My camera was in the right place at the right time with the right settings just as a huge pile of ice calved off the glacier. It made the most enormous splash although by the time the tsunami reached us it was pretty miserable.

By now the old Danish guy was feeling the cold so we headed off back to the ship. And that turned out to be lucky too because we caught sight of a young bearded seal sunning itself on an ice-floe. Baldur called up the other zodiacs to come to see it, and so it chose that moment to slide off the iceberg into the water.

But not before I took a photo of it. And what a stunning photo it was too and I’m well-pleased with that one. It’s definitely one for the family album.

Lunch was a barbecue on the rear deck and then we had all of the usual housekeeping stuff and instructions for our disembarkation tomorrow morning. That was followed by a packing session as we need to vacate the premises, and I can’t find the hood for my camera lens. And that’s a disappointment and no mistake.

There was another photography session dinner this evening and we had quite a discussion, which was punctuated by the ship making a severe U-turn as if it had missed the turning into our fjord.

And as Rosemary and I were leaving we were accosted by one of the Québecois women who wanted a chat. An elderly woman who is travelling alone and by the looks of things hasn’t made any friendships. We all had quite a chat in French.

On the deck, the views were spectacular as we entered the fjord and I took quite a few photos before the cold wind from the interior drove me inside. I wrote my notes, has a chat and that was that. I’m off to finish packing and then to bed ready for an early start in the morning.

It looks as if it’s all over for another trip.