Northwest passage 8, Aston Bay, Saturday September 6, 2025

20:02

Ice sculpture by nature

That was quite the day. We were on the ship for most of it, only landing at 16:00. One of the things Adventure Canada tries to do is to go to locations they haven’t been to before and today was one of those days. We parked the ship at the opening to Aston Bay and then took the zodiacs into the bay. It turns out it was a very interesting site.

Getting into the ice

We are beginning to see ice bergs and bergie bits now and there was an interesting bit with a hole through it right were we landed in the zodiacs.

Bergie bit near the landing site

It was a gravel beach with the benches much like what we saw yesterday.

Gravel benches

It was around 1C but there was quite a breeze which made it feel colder. I’ve got my cold weather gear absolutely dialed in now. I had my long sleeved merino t-shirt as a base layer and over that I have my merino button down shirt. I decided to try that instead of my turtle neck and it worked well. Sometimes, despite the fact that merino is pretty soft, it gets a bit itchy. Then I put on my vest with all the patches, and over that was my down pullover. The second to last layer was my favourite grey sweater and then my expedition jacket. I didn’t wear an ear band or a toque. The sun was getting low in the sky so I wore my old faithful Tilley hat. It may look really dumb but I can put the jacket hood over it, bend the brim around my ears and have the advantage of keeping the sun out of my eyes, and the hood from sliding down onto my face. I didn’t need any extra layers on the bottom since we weren’t going to be sitting the the zodiac for long. I do need those on a zodiac cruise that’s an hour or longer.

They really hit the jackpot at this site, unless your main interest is in plants, then not so much. There was a meat cache, and a polar bear skeleton.

Meat cache

There were also polar bear tracks, goose tracks, fox tracks, and lemming tracks in the snow. There wasn’t a ton of snow but it had settled in the little depressions between the benches and they asked us to avoid walking in it if we could so we wouldn’t disturb the tracks. We could manage that most of the time and when we couldn’t, we walked where the others of our group had walked before so as to mess things up as little as possible.

Before we got out of the zodiac they warned us that the rocks near the top of the perimeter were quite sharp and to be very careful if we were going to sit down to take in the scenery. One of the guys helping with the loading and unloading of the zodiacs sliced his rubber boot on one of the rocks when they were scouting earlier in the day.

Richard and I split up fairly early. I stopped for some photos and he continued on. We find this works quite well because he’s not waiting for me when I want to take 10 shots of a feather from different angles, and I’m not waiting for him when he wants to examine a chunk of rock with a hand lens. We generally meet up and take the same zodiac back having had different experiences. It’s interesting, though, how many times we come back with very similar photos of the landscape.

After I took my photos I continued up and past where the folks were learning about geology. It was pretty easy walking up the beaches and I stopped a few times for photos. Of course, I had to get one of the feather I saw on the ground. On one of the first Adventure Canada trips Niap, the artist, told me that if I came across a feather it meant I would have good luck. I always think of that whenever I see a feather on the ground even at home when it’s only a magpie, crow, or northern flicker feather. This feather was fairly small, beautifully white, and the light was hitting it from the side. It was also blowing in the wind. I tried several different angles and probably got one of two shots that are useable.

Lucky feather

As I climbed up towards the saddle between two lakes, I took several more shots of the lines made by gravel and snow. There were some really interesting curves and the appearance of the lines in relation to each other seemed to change as I got higher. The low sun was both a help and a hindrance for photos. It gave some interesting backlighting to the ship and it also cast long shadows. In addition to trying to keep people out of landscape shots I had to watch for their shadows. In one photo I deliberately used the shadows that seemed to be coming together into a circle.

Using the shadows

I pretty happy with the choices the camera in my phone makes. As I’ve said before, I don’t have a lot of patience with post processing and most of the time I can get what i want out of the phone with no muss, no fuss. After all, I’m not trying to create great art or sell large prints. I do need to adjust the exposure when there is a great expanse of white, as when I was looking at fox tracks and wanting the snow to appear white instead of grey.

Polar bear

I got a few shots of polar bear tracks right near the beach and up farther there was a place where there were fox tracks and, what I took to be lemming tracks.

Fox and lemming I think

I haven’t checked that out with any of the naturalists on board so I don’t know that for sure.

I even saw a couple of birds. Carolyn who is a plant person married to a bird biologist told me that they were probably fulmars in their dark phase. I’ve only seen white fulmars and didn’t know they had a dark phase. Cool!

I like to get up as high as I can to get more of a sense of the scale of the place.

View from the height of land

I walked up the sharp rocks without any trouble and took some photos from the highest point of the perimeter. The polar bear skeleton was nearer the landing spot so i started heading down towards it. Everything was going fine until it wasn’t. I’m not exactly sure what happened but one moment I was making my way down and the next moment time slowed as I realized that I was going down and I wasn’t going to be able to catch myself. I can attest to the fact that the rocks were plenty sharp. I landed on my side and a couple of people came over right away to see if I was alright.

One man offered me a hand but I told him I would rather take my time and get up slowly which I did. My knee hurt but I was more concerned about my camera which was in the pocket of my jacket. Once I got to me feet and determined that everything bent the way it should, I checked out the camera and it seemed to be just fine. I hope I thanked the people who were there to help, although I can’t actually remember doing so. As I got down off the sharp stuff I saw Richard coming up towards me. He had missed the show. We agreed to head down to where the bear carcass was. I moved a bit more slowly than usual but I got there, saw the remains of the bear which were quite interesting rather than really gross, and then headed for the zodiacs. By that point I was sulking and didn’t feel like hanging around.

Young polar bear skeleton

I got almost to the zodiac and realized I didn’t have a life jacket on so I went back to the pile and grabbed the first one that came to hand. There are two kinds of lifejackets. One has a clip similar to what you find on a backpack. You slip one part into the other and it locks into place. To take it off, you squeeze the two tabs toward each other and pull it apart. Easy peasy. The newer models have two metal rectangular pieces, one of each side of the jacket. To fasten them you have to put one through the other by turning it on its side, then once through you turn it so it’s vertical again and the PFD is secure. This one also had either a very, very, long waist strap or a crotch strap. I’m not sure which. I was rushing to try to get into this apparatus because I was the last person on the zodiac.

Well, my mum used to say, “Less haste, more speed.” I ended up trussed up like a chicken and one of the staff had to come and extract me, which wasn’t exactly a speedy operation. Then had to untangle the life jacket from itself while the others in the zodiac waited. Finally he and Richard were able to get me into the life jacket so I cold join the others in the boat and we could take off. I was in the bow and the waves had picked up so I got splashed a bit, which I thought was rather fun. The driver was taking it easy so as not to get us really wet.

When we got back onto the ship we swished our rubber boots in the cleaning solution and when we got to the mud room we also treated our hiking boots to prevent and cross contamination of sites.

I was anxious to see what the damage was on my knee. When I took my pants off there was quite a cut across my knee cap and my knee was turning a bit purple. Not much blood had soaked into my pants and the cut didn’t seem all that wide. I hopped in the shower and after a few yelps, it got used to the warm water and I made sure to give it a good cleaning with soap and water. [I'm not going to include a photo of the bloody knee. You just have to trust me.]

There is a doctor onboard but you pay for each individual service so we were debating as to whether or not it was worth a visit. Our friend Christine was an ER nurse before her retirement so Richard phoned her and asked if she would stop by for a consultation. She did and determined that my leg was not about to fall off and that we could probably patch it up ourselves. The cut was a bit too wide for a single bandaid so she stuck the sticky bits at the sides of the two bandaids together and then put it on my knee. When I said I never would have thought of that she graciously pointed out that it wasn’t her first rodeo. We had a good laugh and then went in search of a cup of tea.

Before the landing today we got a briefing about tomorrow. The plan was to visit Caswell Tower a site on Devon Island where there are well preserved examples of whale bone houses, and then to sail to Beechey Island to visit the Franklin graves. Before we went for supper tonight there was an announcement saying that the ice was moving in and there was a way we could get to Beechey but it would take us longer.

As you know if you follow this blog, Beechey Island is the one place I was really hoping to land on this trip. We have passed it four times and never been able to land. I heard about the Franklin graves on Beechey Island when I was in my teens listening to a CBC radio program and from that time on I’ve been fascinated by the place. At dinner we were talking about it and the others at the table said they had both landed on Beechey. The staff member who was with us said that she had landed on Beechey every time she has done this trip. They assured me that we would make it this time, that their good luck would counter our bad luck.

We’ll have to see tomorrow. I think this is my last kick at the cat. If we don’t land this time I’ll just have to shrug and figure that it wasn’t meant to be. By the time you read this we’ll either have made it or we won’t. We just had a look out the window and there certainly are chunks of ice floating by. Here’s hoping that as we sleep the wind, the waves, and the ice will be in our favour. I guess either way it will make a good story.

A last thought: I guess the feather was lucky in the sense that I didn't break my camera and didn't break my neck.

Stay tuned.