Having left the dissected coastline of mainland Norway from the northern port of Trømsø, we struck out last night for the remote and wild island of Bjørnøya. Lying nearly 200 miles to the northwest, this magnificent piece of rock is the southernmost island in the Svalbard archipelago. Rarely visited due to its remoteness and often unfavorable weather, just getting there makes for an exciting proposition. With fair seas the entire night and a still, calm dawn we realized that our time here would be of an extraordinary nature.
Nearly one million nesting seabirds call this island home during the short Arctic summer and with each passing mile of our approach the amount of bird life became more and more evident. As did the life in the waters around the island as we spotted several pods of the northernmost species of dolphin in the Atlantic/Barents Sea, the white-beaked dolphin, as well as a few feeding humpback whales.
We were anchored shortly before lunch and our plan was to lower our fleet of Zodiacs and get up-close and personal with the fabled “Bear Island,” named for the fact that at one time polar bears frequented its shores when the sea ice use to regularly fill the southern Barents Sea. But with changing climate over the last several decades, the extent of sea ice is reduced to just the northernmost regions of the Arctic hundreds of miles away, now a more fitting name would be “Bird Island.”
This quote from an enthusiastic and somewhat awestruck guest in the author’s Zodiac sums up the experience better than any I could imagine, “There's more birds than air!” Truly fitting when one scans the air high above the water where sheer walls of rock, covered with birds explode into the sky. Navigating our trusty craft along the cliffs and at times into caverns carved out by the tumultuous seas we could see no surface not being utilized by the different species of seabirds. The dominant species found here are guillemot, Brünnich’s guillemot, fulmars, kittiwakes and other gulls. The weather remained favorable – and by Bjørnøya standards downright pleasant – the entire afternoon, even allowing a few of our crew members the opportunity to harvest a couple hundred kilos of North Atlantic cod, later to be served on board.
To conclude our incredible day we had a wonderful Philippine dinner and to follow a performance by our very own Explorer Spice Boys. The author himself even managed to pull off a few numbers as the opening act. By night’s end there was laughter and dancing in the lounge as the memories of Bjørnøya filled our thoughts.
