Believe it or not – it got more icy …

Today it was a mountaineering day again; the plan was to get onshore to do some proper ice climbing. So once the gangway was down, we (the mountaineers) were the first ones to get on a zodiac. We started cruising heading for the coast – and again ice forced us to constantly look for different ways.

As it turned out, it was just impossible to get onshore, too much and heavy ice around us – and even if we had gotten onshore, there would have been guarantee that we would have made it back to the ship. So at some stage we gave it up and made our way back to the ship. From here we directly started for a proper zodiac cruise – the focus shifted from looking for landing spot to sighting wildlife.

I finally had been on the zodiac for around four hours (same for the other climbers) at the end of the zodiac cruise … we were all freezing … thank god we had a 85° sauna waiting for us.