30 days in the sea ice around the Norwegian Archipelago of Svalbard, June/July 2019
The primary objective of this trip was to photograph Polar Bears on ice. Svalbard is famous as the best location in the arctic for this type of image. In recent years the ice has been problematic arriving later in the winter and melting earlier in the summer. This year was different; whilst the ice arrived very late, it stayed much longer than usual. So rather than being compromised by the lack of ice, ironically there was rather too much, restricting the areas we could visit. However we still encountered over 30 different bears in some superb locations, and a small selection of the shots I took are shown here.
We spent 10 days on board MS Freya, followed by 20 days on MS Malmo, both high ice class small ships perfectly suited to the task in hand. We were guided by Svalbard's very best experts. Rinie van Meurs, was expedition leader throughout, and he was accompanied by fellow guides Morten Jorgensen and Nazomi Takeyabu. A superb team who spent literally hundreds of hours scanning from the top decks. Both tours were operated by Morten and Nozomi's company, NozoMojo LLC.
My thanks to the guides and crew of both ships for running such a superb and memorable trip.