Bowhead whales at the ice floe edge
Posted by: Chris Debicki, expedition leader
Whales! Lots of whales! After two days out on the ice, we have just returned to the ship. We left Nutarmiut on Monday with two Greenlandic guides, David and Martin, in their small hunting boats. They took us well into the ice, where we pulled the boats onto a somewhat stable floe and waited. And waited. And waited. We were visited by plenty of curious seals, including almost every seal species in these waters: ringed, hooded, bearded and harp.
Five or six hours after we made our first camp, the unmistakable sound of a mighty bowhead exhaling filled the air. Pppsssh. Pppsssh. Pppssh That’s the closest I can get: not just one “P” because it’s really quite a burst of air and water through that blowhole. We can hear bowhead from several kilometres away with the naked ear.
Over the next 24 hours, we collected as much acoustic data as we could and paired some of it up with visual identifications. Outi is pleased with these results and plans to do more acoustic work this week.
We slept sporadically on the ice — several pairs of eyes and ears alert at all times, as much for lurking polar bears as whales. Sometime Monday night during the sunset that never sets, we were frantically shaken awake by David, our guide. The ice lead (crack) we’d used to penetrate the pack was closing, and quickly. No time for an organized takedown of our little camp. We hastily piled gear back into the boat and were off, sneaking through a narrow channel just as it closed. An hour later, we settled on a new floe. Alex said he thought it looked like a better vantage point for spotting narwhal. Unfortunately, we did not see any narwhal. But we saw and heard many more bowhead throughout the next night and day.
I slept better in the open air rather than inside the covered boat where the kerosene heater filled my nose and lungs with soot. Neither option was particularly warm. I kept my floater suit on throughout what passed for “night.”
We met up with the Arctic Endeavour late Wednesday afternoon in the open sea, an amazing feat of coordination. Not really. Thanks to GPS, satellite phone and VHF we knew exactly where to find the ship, but it still felt very Mission Impossible.
Despite the minor hardships, the trip out onto the ice with our guides David and Martin was for all of us one of the highlights of the expedition. It started as a business transaction: we needed local expertise to get us into this ice in a safe and productive manner. But when we said goodbye to David and Martin upon our return to the Arctic Endeavour, we all agreed that we were really lucky to have met these guys. They were not only amazingly competent guides, they generously shared what they know about the sea around us. We share a common love of this ocean and its inhabitants. After a barbeque and guitar-playing on the roof of the boat in the calmest, bluest sea I’ve ever seen, we bid farewell to two new friends.
We’ve now concluded that our window for pushing north is closing. Without enough open water ahead, we are making our last push north on Wednesday night. We will proceed until we hit the "wall" — the barrier of dense pack ice that remains in Melville Bay. When we can go no farther, we will turn around and begin our final series of acoustic monitoring along the ice edge. We plan to work until we arrive in Upernavik sometime on Saturday. From there, we will fly to Pond Inlet, the shortest route back to Canada. We will complete this last leg of following the Arctic whale migration by air. We will be following much the same route as the bowhead and narwhal populations that swim from this coast through Lancaster Sound and into the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.
