July 24 Part 1 – Ice, ice, baby.

We were warned last night that ultimately the tour company doesn't dictate the schedule; Mother Nature dictates the schedule. Right on cue the morning briefing brought some inauspicious news: most of the Canadian sites were were planning to visit are still completely ice-bound due to this year's harsh winter and late spring, including Resolute, where we are supposed to catch our charter flight back to Ottawa at the end of the trip. In fact, they hadn't yet figure out how we were going to clear Canadian customs since they normally fly a customs officer to one of the smaller airstrips on Baffin Island and they can't find any that they can get the ship into. (At this point if there were any Republicans or Fox News pundits on the ship, they would take these two data points as evidence that Climate Change is entirely a fabrication made up by liberal scientists... like the ones serving as guides on this ship. Though interestingly we did have dinner with a climate change denier later in the trip.) The fallback plan for the rest of the trip if the ice doesn't clear is to find our way to Iqaluit and fly home from there. The good news is that the large ice shelf on the Canadian side means there is a good chance of seeing polar bears as well as walruses, though I am saddened that we likely won't get to see the narwhal breeding grounds that I have been looking forward to.

The threat of a reduced itinerary has been counterbalanced by the fact that one of the ship's two engines has broken down and the other one is only running at 70%, so we are already well behind schedule. Since we can still make landfall on Greenland (which, for the record, is more of a mossy grey than green) the plan is to fly in spare parts and mechanics from Copenhagen to meet us at our next stop in Sisimuit.

Meanwhile, the whether is pleasant and the top deck makes for a peaceful spot to write up blog entries and watch the occasional whale in the distance:

Sadly, we haven't managed to establish a satellite connection for the internet so none of these will be posted until we make it back to civilization, which seems a long way away at the moment.