Lagøya & The North
A new day and our good fortune with fine weather on this voyage continued. While early morning fog threatened the prospect of a landing, it cleared at just the right moment to allow us to go ahead with a landing on the island of Lagøya. This island lies above 80¢ª N, and is by any standards a remote location. Onshore here we found a wealth of wildlife – birds and mammals. Piles of walrus lay stinking on the shore at one of their traditional haul-out sites. High Arctic birds were well represented with dozens of beautiful red phalaropes spinning in the shallows like some clockwork toy. Among these were one of the prizes of birding in the Arctic – half a dozen of the elegant Sabine’s gulls. This species was named after Edward Sabine; a naturalist on a Royal Navy expedition lead by Captain John Ross to search for the North-west Passage in 1818.
We thought we had done well this morning to reach as remote and northern a location as Lagøya, but the day was not finished. Open water to the north of the island drew us further north and in search of the pack ice. Once again, fog came and went and as we continued to press on we past the most northerly rock in the Svalbard archipelago – Rossøya.
This island has a neat connection to the Sabine’s gull, as it was named after James Clark Ross, the son of the aforementioned Captain John Ross. James Clark Ross followed his father into the Royal Navy and, during a number of expeditions to both polar regions, he completed a series of remarkable discoveries including fixing the location of the northern magnetic pole. One of his lesser known finds was that of another species of Arctic gull. In 1823 he was the first to record (=shoot) the rare and beautiful, almost mythical, Ross’s gull while on another (unsuccessful) expedition in search of the North-west Passage.
We were not fortunate enough to find this high Arctic denizen this evening, but we did find a further three polar bears close to our farthest north of 80¢ª 51 N. From this location in the land of the ice bear, a mere 549 nautical miles of Arctic Ocean and polar pack ice is all that separates us from the North Pole. Fortunately, we are not attempting to get there by walking and camping, as our Global Luminary Eric Larsen has done. So while it was with some sadness that it was time to turn our bow to the south, it was with pleasure that we could retire to a comfortable cabin to await the adventure of the next day.
