Day 7 and 8: Woodfjord

Our time with the Polar Bears

Careful readers will notice today’s photo journal title only has one location and covers two days of our expedition. And that’s for very good reason. On day 7, we met the goal of our expedition: We found and photographed polar bears.

At first it started as murmur. Jan, a Czech photographer on the ship, started telling people near him, including me, that he thinks there are polar bears way far off in the distance. This spread to our photographer guides - Tom, Brendan, Jonas, and Neil. Eventually, everyone came to have a look. Soon the expedition guides locked on the polar bears as well. The polar bears were hundreds of meters away, maybe 5 kilometers or more. Even on a 600mm lens, they were dots. We started calling them “pixel bears” they were so small. Especially from such a distance, the cream-colored fur of the bears easily blends in with the snow and ice. Most guests couldn’t locate the bears through their lenses or binoculars. I struggled too for 10 minutes before I spotted them myself (and I tried to stay quiet about this as I thought there was nothing more annoying than complaining loudly that you can’t find them). I didn’t care too much either way, not like I would be able to get much enjoyment photographing or observing them from so far away. I think for a while I didn’t even have my camera and was just using my binoculars.

The Polar Pioneer could get closer to the bears, so we sailed as close as allowed. The plan from then on was to wait. As we could see through our lenses and binoculars, the bears were clearly enjoying a recent seal kill.

Many of us stayed up late into the evening observing the bears (we saw 3 or 4 total, which is actually rare to see all at once). Two shared the carcass, while the others wandered on their own. Sometimes the bears would walk substantial distances to the left, to the right, toward us, and away from us, but they never seemed to get any closer. At some point the bears laid down to rest, so all of us went to sleep.

The next day

We woke up the next day and it appeared two of the bears had got closer! Close enough I was able to take a panoramic photo on my Q2 Monochrom with the bears clearly visible.

Eventually, though, the bears weren’t moving much and I decided to head back to the lounge to grab a coffee. This turned out to be my most brutal decision of the trip. Countless nights up until 2 or 3 AM and waking up at 8 started to catch up with me, and I feel asleep inside. In the roughly half hour I was out cold, one of the bears - which we later named “Portia” approached the ship, coming within 20 or 30 meters of the bow. Everyone was out there, except me. Instead, I was sound asleep in the lounge.

At some point, an Australian guest on the ship, Josef, woke me up and said “Drew, you know the bear is out there right?” I jolted awake and ran outside, only to discover the bear wandering away from the ship and already 60-70 meters off the port side of the Polar Pioneer. For the rest of the trip, I was shamed as the guy who slept through the climax of the trip. The entire reason we came to the Arctic was to see the polar bears, and I was fast asleep in the lounge. As a result, I missed the opportunity to take close-up photos of Portia. Many photographers were able to fill the frame with the entire bear! For me, I was left with a few more environmental shots, which you can see below.

Although I missed the most important moment of the trip, I still got to enjoy with the rest of the guests and guides the next hour or so watching Portia. Polar bears are surprisingly playful. Portia found a stick and a piece of kelp on the ice, and she would toss and throw these items like toys. She swam in the water several times, relaxed at the waters edge, and even laid down in the snow and rubbed her back against the polar bear version of a chair. Every behavior of the bear was adorable, but you can’t help but have in the back of your mind the thought this animal could tear you to shreds at a moment’s’ notice.

At some point, Portia walked off into the distance and we couldn’t photograph her anymore. Regardless, the Polar Pioneer waited in the same spot in the chance she were to return or one of the other bears approach closer.

The expedition crew warned us that we could be awoken at any time of the night for a zodiac cruise if the bear came closer. With this knowledge and my recent goof in mind, I went to bed at 8 PM. My plan turned out to be the right one, because at 1:30 AM the alarm rang to prepare to board the zodiacs. At the time the alarm was sounded, Portia was back on the edge of the ice - And there is little more special, beyond witnessing a live kill, than observing a bear hunting along the ice from a zodiac.

However, by the time we boarded the zodiacs, Portia had left the ice and was sound asleep inland. So, there was no more polar bear photography to be had. We did cruise through some interesting icebergs along the shore, but I wasn’t able to come away with any images that I love. The same photographer who woke me up in the lounge, Josef, captured an amazingly minimalist photograph of one of these icebergs, which you can see here on his Instagram.

This 2 AM zodiac cruise concluded our long day and a half photographing the polar bears and successfully meeting the purpose of our expedition. At this point, the crew was growing increasingly concerned with the weather causing the pack ice to thicken in our area. The decision was made to head back west, tentatively aiming for a polar plunge north of 80 degrees latitude.