Walking on (frozen) water.....

We went pretty far north, and are now heading southeast deeper into Canadian waters.

It was a pretty noisy night - crashing thru the ice is a noisy task. Bob decided to stop when we got close to a 9 mi wide piece of ice we were watching on the satellite images and thus the CTD team was back on (I'll explain what they do later this week). So we basically parked the ship in the ice for the night if you can imagine that. They mount special lights on the ship to monitor the ice. I was really tired but it was almost clear nite so those of us on the day watch tried to stay awake for the northern lights....no luck. I crawled into bed at around 1:30 and guess what I missed - A POLAR BEAR CAME RIGHT UP TO THE SHIP....and no one woke me! People got good photos so I'll have to post them later. We found out the next day that the Russian icebreakers actually feed the polar bears - really not a good idea. They are curious enough without baiting them. I did get to see 2 polar bears far from the ship while cruising thru the ice (the picture was not very good) so that helped.....a little.

Besides waking up to that disappointment, the clouds rolled in and we could no longer get good remote ice images. We got to the spot we dubbed "ice island" and guess what - no island. Just patchy old ice. We then basically bashed our way back to where we started and finally found a piece of ice that looked ok for the met station. It looked pretty small and we were all pretty sad that it looked like our ice liberty was not going to happen. The CG is very very careful on the ice - we had a big meeting where they explained that the rescue swimmers would go first and drill a few bore holes to check things out. Then the met team would go and install their station. The captain then told us "and then we'll assess the stability of the ice and determine whether there will be ice liberty". Hmmmmmm - things were looking up but we didn't want to get our hopes too high. We all watched the rescue swimmers flag off the floe, and the safe spots got bigger and bigger. The announcement then came that ice liberty was on! Everyone lined up to go down the companionway and there we were - standing on a floating piece of ice in the Arctic. Truly amazing. The crew actually played a short game of touch football. Everyone seemed refreshed but really tired if that makes any sense.

Goldie, the little stuffed retriever from Nye Beach Montessori, snuggles with Elizabeth, our local Inupiut. Yes, even Goldie got to step on Arctic ice.

 We are now heading further east and hope to see some more wildlife. I seemed to be jinxed and they are only seeing animal life when I am NOT on watch!