Arrival at the Ocean Endeavour 09/29/24

Well this is a whole new experience! I don’t have internet and I assumed I could work in Google docs offline. I do think this is possible. I just don’t know how to do it and, of course, because I have no internet I can’t Google it to find out. So, here I am using Pages for the first time. I have no idea how this works and my sense of it is that it is somewhat cumbersome and it probably does not play well with Google docs which is what I normally use to write my blogs.

So let’s back up a bit. I’m currently on the Ocean Endeavour anchored in Kangerlussuaq Greenland. There is a storm brewing outside the fjord. Even here in the shelter of the fjord MJ [Matthew James Swan, expedition leader] clocked the wind speed at 37 knots. That doesn’t mean much to me so MJ said to multiply that number by 1.76 which gives us 65 kmh. I can see why we don’t want to be out in that. We are going to hunker down today and try to make it to Nuuk tomorrow. There is an excursion scheduled for this afternoon if the seas permit and I said I would go on the photo walk. Now I’m thinking I might just stay on board. I’m still feeling quite tired and maybe I need some time for my soul to catch up.

Yesterday we were late leaving Toronto because the plane was late arriving. When we got here it was dark and the ship stood glowing offshore with its lights reflected in the water. I used my phone to capture some photos and a video as we took the zodiac to the ship. I’ll have to try downloading the info to my computer a bit later on. I think it turned out not too badly. The phones now are certainly impressive. Did I mention that it was raining when we were out in the zodiac? Good thing we had our trusty AC jackets although I don’t think these are quite the quality that they have been other years. I noticed that parts of the jacket were wetted out even though it wasn’t a hard rain, just a steady one and we were only out in it for maybe an hour max. Like I always say, two choices in the rain, wet from condensation on the inside or rain from the outside. My trusty Grimsey sweater served me very well on this occasion. I will be very sad when it wears out. It’s one of those items of clothing that is going to be hard, if not impossible, to replace unless I take up knitting myself and I don’t think that will happen anytime soon.

I was lucky on the zodiac ride because I was right in the bow and nobody else seemed crazy enough to even try to take photos. I wonder if I can put a link to the video in my blog. There must be a way to do it. One more thing to figure out. [I couldn't get it to work but there is a link in the last blog post I made to YouTube where I eventually decided to place it.]

This morning we had a safety briefing and a lifeboat drill only this time we didn’t actually have to put on the lifejackets. Maybe because it was rather brisk outside and normally when we’ve done this it has been the middle of the summer. I wasn’t exactly crying briny tears that we didn’t put on the lifejackets but it is curious how the protocols change from one voyage to the next or, more properly, from one year to the next.

There are a handful of people that I have met before and it’s almost like coming back to a summer camp where you know the kids from last year.

Riding in the zodiac at night was very cool.