Cruising Bellot Strait & Icebergs!

Wednesday, August 31, 2016

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Clay was up early and on the treadmill today. I slept until 7am waking up shortly before he returned. I had turned on the TV and checked our position on the nav map and the bow cam and knew it was only 30F this morning. He announced there’d been snow showers and during Lido breakfast I’d seen  them too. Later they checked the weather on the TV to reflect 30F and snow showers. We are still in the Beaufort Sea somehow. I am not sure exactly when it changes to the Atlantic. We have been sitting at 3 to 5 knots for an hour or so outside the entrance to the narrow Bellot Strait. This is the route they told us yesterday they were hoping to use if it was clear of ice. It is 10am and they have just started up the Cineflex and have shown several zodiacs in the water entering the cut. I don’t know if we are conducting some zodiac unexpected adventures today or if those are just scouts from Shackleton to check the strait. Tim Soper said yesterday that they would check the channel by helicopter so I don’t know. It seemed like more zodiacs than would be required to just check the passage.

The Bellot Strait is 25km long and at its narrowest 1km wide. The slopes rise to 450m on the north shore and 750m on the south. It separates Boothia Peninsula from Somerset Island.

The captain just made an announcement that our first slow down this morning was at a wildlife viewing point but there was an expedition ship already anchored there doing zodiac excursions so out of courtesy he sailed on by. Plus he said they did not spot any wildlife so felt it best to keep sailing anyway. He said Shackleton had sent 4 zodiacs ahead into the Bellot Strait for photography purposes and if conditions were right they would launch a helicopter for photography once in the strait. The cineflex has been showing big brown moving lumps on the slopes ahead. I guess he has the camera as focused as possible but I assumed I was looking at ATVs. Then Clay’s devices started pinging and the e-alerts were that they were muskox! The captain also announced that and that our scenic sail through the Bellot should begin about 11am and we should be clear of Magpie Rock on the east side sometime after noon.

It is an overcast day again. Like the last 2 with intermittent showers and low cloud but today with snow showers instead of sprinkles or rain. It is very atmospherically scenic. On that note, there was a lot of concern prior to this cruise about the starboard side cabins being preferable for views. We have not found that to be true here on the port side. From time to time, land is closer on one side than the other but when no land is visible that is true on both sides. The captain has done a good job when sightseeing, like yesterday with the polar bears, to turn the ship so both sides eventually have the same or similar views. Given what I know now, I would actually pick the port side as being the better views. Also, I would not worry about taking one of the truncated 2-week long expedition cruises. I enjoyed seeing Nome and the 2 port stops in the Alaskan archipelago but there was some rough sailing in the Bering Sea and Bering Strait that was not scenic sailing before we reached Ulukhaktok. There are a lot of North West Passage cruises that we looked at that go from Greenland to Coppermine or reverse and I worried about missing most of the passage that way. It seems that from a sailing perspective this Canadian archipelago section is considered the North West Passage itself and since it is also the scenic part, now I see the sense in the shorter expedition cruises that are mostly offered. In hindsight, I wouldn’t hesitate to book one if that was what was available to me. That being said, Crystal has done an amazing job. I can only imagine that when they get their 200-passenger ice class yacht and do the NWP again that it will be absolutely awesome. We had been hesitant to try Crystal because of the large size, large number of passengers, fixed seating and formal nights. In other words, we felt Crystal was known for all the things we dislike about cruising. But we have mostly experience what we do like about our favorite lines and have ignored the rest. We were unable to get early dining, so went on the reservation only dining and while it was a bit of a bother to make 30+ dinner reservations it has not felt like fixed dining even though we are fixed by our reservations and always seated in more or less the same spot with the same waiters. That is another thing that has been a pleasant surprise on Crystal. We have always praised RSSC for knowing our names within days. We attributed the welcoming, familiar nature of the cruise experience to the small size but by day 2 aboard Serenity our cabin stewardess, every waiter we’ve had, every headwaiter and maître d’ knew us by name. It was surprising but in a good way. Well done, Crystal.

Gotta go, polar alert just received! Gotta move laundry to dryer soon too. More later. Latest alert is polar mom & cub coming up on port side. I am back at the cabin window with binoculars! Still not on Cineflex either. Good news is Cineflex is viewable in the laundry room as well! The captain just announced that the land we are pssing on starboard side is Point Senate (sounded like Senate, I don’t know how it is actually spelled). He says it is the Northernmost point on the North American continent. We are at 72N 94W. The clouds have lifted and sunlight and blue skies are visible. The hill or mountain tops are snow dusted. E-alert for narwhal a mile ahead. I am still doing laundry and no polar bears ever appeared on Cineflex either so it isn’t just me missing it. Hopefully Clay is out getting some photos. I don’t know why he decided laundry couldn’t wait until tomorrow morning! As far as I can tell the Cineflex never found the narwhal either. The landscape is spectacular though! I’ve seen the helicopter up, so hopefully the team will have some photos for us anyway.

Clay only got landscape photos with some birds and some blurry-looking boulders that were actually muskox. The captain said during his noon announcement that he didn’t see narwhal either. He said when Shackleton was ready we would set sail for Beechey Island by morning. The plan is unexpected adventures off Beechey Island about 10am on 9/1/2016. We sat around once we reached deep water at the east end of Bellot Strait. We were waiting for Shackleton to reload all the zodiacs and helicopter, plus they are slower than us so they always need a head start. While we were waiting we went up to a packed deck 12 for lunch. The sun was bright and everyone had an appetite. We checked every table through Tastes, Trident Grill and Lido before finding an empty table. I was craving pizza. I ordered it at Tastes and picked it up and carried it to Lido where Clay was eating. We both had desserts there. Right after we finished lunch the captain was back on the speakers with another announcement that they could just make out something large on the horizon ahead and it was visible on radar. He hoped it was a really big iceberg. Our first official iceberg of the trip. We left the Shackleton to finish packing up and we set off for the horizon. There were actually 2 great icebergs when we got to them about an hour and a half later. They both seemed to be traveling west. The tall one was traveling faster than the flat one, so I guess it was pretty lucky that we arrived when they were side by side. The captain said these icebergs had probably broken off from Greenland last year and drifted here. The sun is still shining brightly and the skies are bright blue and partly cloudy. It hasn’t warmed up today like it has the past several days.

We have nothing planned the rest of the day except for the recap & briefing followed by dinner. We have a DVD. So if we have Internet, I’ll post this now.

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Ice Bears!

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

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Well, we knew with the time change that it would be a short night. So, I planned to sleep in and have breakfast at 8am and gentle yoga at 9am and maybe chair yoga at 10:15am. Serenity had other plans. Clay said sometime after midnight he noticed the message light on the phone had started flashing but he didn’t want to wake me by turning a light on to work the phone. When I got up to pee about 4:20am, he checked the message. We had won the lottery of unscheduled adventures. We had tickets outside our door for an 8:15am zodiac excursion in ice. We decided we’d go and hope for more than just ice for $149pp plus the lost sleep and disrupted breakfast. At 6:30am we both got up again after we received an e-alert for sea ice. We showered, dressed and went to Bistro for coffee and pastries. Back to the cabin to finish gearing up. Since we wouldn’t be going ashore, we didn’t need boats but at 34F and staying in the zodiac for our scheduled hour, it would be cold. We both wore our enormous parkas today. They definitely kept us warm. We were really lucky with our draw today! Shortly after our 2^nd group of zodiacs headed out we received a radio call of where to head and to report what we saw. We saw a polar bear! He was a most cooperative bear and sat on a large ice berg for over 3 hours. He’d get up and walk from one end to the other and then sit or lie down again, but he didn’t jump in and swim away. We parked about a football field away from him and sat and just watched him for about 20 minutes. What a relief! After no polar bears in Svalbard last summer, I was worried about spending this much money again to not see any. So we got lucky and got our trip in with perfect timing. We left him with time to go look at other sea ice and to hunt for the numerous seals we kept seeing around. We found an ice berg with seal poop on it but we didn’t get a good look at any seals. Just random heads popping up and down at a distance. While we were parked and ice bear watching, a zodiac with 2 big urns and a number of crew approached behind us and offered hot chocolate. A nice touch!

Back onboard, we stripped out of the heavy gear and dressed for our first late breakfast at Tastes about 10am. They have some different food than the dining room or Lido. For example, they had blintzes which I had not seen elsewhere. I had chocolate chip pancakes and Clay had fried eggs. We crossed the pool deck and went to Palm Court to check things out. Before leaving the cabin, we had the TV on 82 and had seen the Cineflex view of the polar bear. Evidently they had lost track of him. We waited for a turn on the big mounted binoculars but couldn’t find him. They were doing knitting on one side and cross stitch on the other. The sample cross stitch kits were out on display on a counter and Clay picked one he’d like to try as a tablet cover. He asked me to ask for it. I did and she had me sign for it before asking if I had already gotten one. I pointed out the one I am working on now and a little over half finished. She told me when I have finished it that if I bring it to her, then she will give me the one Clay picked out. The pressure is on now! According to the navigation map outside the Palm Court, we are just port side of the channel in Vitoria Strait. There is a kind of bay there on the east side of Victoria Island. We are at 69N 110W. Oh, while we were having breakfast, Clay checked his tablet and while we were out bear watching there were 2 e-alerts sent out about the polar bear. Hopefully everyone got to at least see it on Cineflex.

We came back to the cabin and brushed our teeth and Clay got some photos uploaded and I cross stitched while watching the Cineflex. At one point, the camera panned around until there was what appeared to be a white cruise ship with a reddish funnel in the distance. He did stay on it or display it clearly enough to tell what ship it was.

There is an Asian themed lunch today. Clay says there is nothing for me for dinner tonight again. Not to worry, I could probably live off my own body fat for months! Clay found the day’s movie channel schedule on the TV and said there are 2 we can watch this afternoon. We still have the DVD for this evening. We have no other plans today except the recap at 5pm before dinner.

The orange-funneled white cruise ship is back and Clay has ventured out to see if he can spot it again. You mostly can’t tell where that Cineflex is pointed. It is too bad they didn’t send their aerial photography drone out again today. Clay says the other ship is approaching from forward on the starboard side. If we sit here long enough, we may be able to read it. The captain’s noon announcement today did not come through the TV and by the time we figured that out and got the door to the hall open we had missed most of it. He did say we’d stay here at least another hour. The orange funneled white cruise ship had dark blue characters on it but it was beyond Shackleton and we couldn't read it. We learned later that it was the Bremen.

So, the unexpected adventures today were only by zodiac. When we requested them, we could choose kayak, helicopter, fast boat or zodiac. We chose only zodiac and fast boat. It sounded this morning like they will do 4 more days of unexpected adventures before Pond Inlet. We’ll see.

This afternoon we started watching a movie only to learn there were a lot of polar bears in ice in front of us. We spent at least the next 2 hours slowly turning the ship to see them all as we drifted and the ice drifted. It was amazing once we could get enough clothes on to stay out there. We saw at least 3 individual bears on ice or swimming and sometimes one of each. But the most amazing thing was a mother with 2 cubs swimming and then standing, walking, hugging, snuggling on the ice for hours! The last thing we saw was a polar bear with a dead seal bloodied all over the ice. About 4 pm the captain came on the intercom and announced that the teams' plan from 24 hours earlier had been successful beyond their dreams and it was time for us to get underway again. It was a great day! Ice Bears!

I want to say that even though I don't like requiring everyone who wants viewing opportunity e-alerts instead of say shipwide announcements, the team has done a good job with them. If you're willing to always carry a phone or tablet, the e-alerts will keep you informed in a fairly timely manner.

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Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, Canada

Monday, August 29, 2016

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I am sorry to report that there are no photos today as Clay dropped his camera going ashore from the zodiac. He had more than one camera, so he’ll hopefully carry on a bit more carefully but he only took one camera ashore with him today. With the zodiacs, you get one ride each direction with a tour ticket and so he couldn’t just come back and get another camera and start again. So no Cambridge Bay photos.

We were both awakened by the alarm at 6:45am today. We had a quick breakfast at Lido Buffet and then geared up in the cabin for the trip ashore. The zodiac tendering was running ahead of schedule today with low wind and very calm water. It was 41F when we woke up and even though it was overcast all day with a random rain shower, it was warmer and without the wind felt warmer still. We are in the Dease Strait. It is narrow and shallow. It is the place that stymied most of the early attempts at a North West Passage. In modern times, it makes Cambridge Bay rather a North West Passage crossroads or midpoint. Whereas Ulukhaktok had under 500 people, Cambridge Bay has over 1500. So, we were off and loading a zodiac by 8:45am. We had a bit of a wait for a shuttle ride to town. There were people on the beach offering hot drinks and Bannock. I don’t remember writing about Bannock. We were offered it on the beach of Ulukhaktok too. We took some there. It was not freshly fried, but Bannock is a kind of fry bread. Ours was a lump, but we saw some today and then that were doughnut-shaped. Ours was rock hard and difficult to chew and swallow. I expect it is more palatable fresh and hot and it may also be an acquired taste. We didn’t give it a 2^nd chance. We were in town before 10am. We were dropped at the school, but walked on down to the main street and through town. Our shuttle bus driver pointed out an arctic hare on the other side of the bus on the way in. We didn’t see it and he didn’t stop. We saw a lot of birds today. The bus driver recommended a walk through town to the Arctic Coast Visitor’s Center and then along the water front to look for the Arctic Char which he said were running like salmon and to see the remains of Amundson’s Maud. We didn’t see any fish at all. There was a boat moored in front of the wreckage of the Maud. A Norwegian concern has recently been recovered from the sea and next year will be towed to Norway where it will be preserved in the museum there that houses Amundson’s other 2 ships the Fram and the Gjoa. We visited both last year. The driver also told us that the Post Office was using a Maud cancellation stamp until the ship leaves. We went into the Post Office and the man working there had just stamped a Post-It Note to show another passenger. She said she was going to buy some postcards at the Co-op and be back. I asked him if he’d give me the Post-It and he did! Clay got a Nunavut t-shirt at the Visitor’s. I got a Nunavut Provincial Flag embroidered patch at the Co-op. We did go to the Nunavut Arts Fair and to the craft sale in the school. At the school, they were also giving away free local foods. Clay ate muktuk (which was boiled narwhal skin and blubber) he had his dipped in soy sauce and I guess he liked it. He had Arctic Char 3 ways, as a type of salsa on a cracker, as dried jerky and like sushi on a cracker. He ate an open face muskox slider. We both ate a little puff pastry with artic berry filling. When we got back to the zodiac tender beach they had a pot cooking filled with big chunks of moose. It had a line up but they were big drumstick-sized pieces of meat on the bone and we passed. We went to the Northern Store which had a Quik-Stop attached where they had the KFC and Pizza Hut express outlets. I think that was about it. We were back aboard Serenity by 1pm. Oh, I guess I should talk about the shuttle rides. Evidently EYOS/Crystal put out a call for all available vehicles and they’d pay whoever gave rides back and forth all day. We wound up both ways in one of the 2 hotels’ shuttle buses with the hotel manager driving. It was supposed to be about 10km and it was about a 20-minute ride. We drove through a real working gravel pit beyond the beach, past the airport, past the DEW line station and past the golf course. It is a desolate landscape. Oh, wildlife sightings! We went back to the Arts Fair at the Community Center before leaving so I could use the restroom. The 2 local volunteers were pointing out some busy little critter under the building when we arrived but I didn’t see it. When I came back out, I spoke to the girl who was still sitting there. She asked me if I had ever seen a sisksisk (I think that is what it sounded like she said). I told her I didn’t think so. She pointed out that it was running between this building and along the front of the next. I asked her if it was the same as an Arctic Ground Squirrel, which I thought it was, and she said yes, the same. So, I had seen one before. We thanked her and followed it back up the street. I was carrying a rodent not much smaller than itself in its mouth. It crossed the street and then the cross street and we lost it. So, we missed the arctic hare, but we did get to see more than just birds. There is a low mountain visible from town and evidently there are large herds of muskox up there. They were spinning Qiviut at the craft fair! We didn’t ever get close enough to their table to even check prices here.

We ate lunch at Lido Buffet after changing out of our waterproof gear. At 2pm there was a craft sale and throat singing demonstration scheduled in Crystal Plaza. We went early to snag seats at Cove Bar. There was throat singing, which you’ll have to Google. I have to confess I don’t understand the tradition. Then there was a kicking contest demonstration with a boy and a young man. They could both kick an object that dangled over their own heads. Last was a larger troupe of drum singers/dancers. It was an enjoyable hour. They had something similar about 10am and 4pm. There is an understanding that they are not allowing everyone ashore due to physical abilities to zodiac tender and they are trying to bring somethings onboard from the zodiac ports for those and all guests. I have to say that Crystal has done a much better job than we ever expected. I guess that is the good thing about low expectations is you get a pleasant surprise.

We checked out 2 DVDs later. We watched “Salmon Fishing in Yemen” and really liked it. Tonight we plan to watch “Prince Avalanche”. We also have to move the clocks forward one hour tonight. Since we have a stretch of 5 sailings day through the Canadian Archipelago section of the North West Passage, we should have plenty of time to adjust.

Dinner was 6pm in the main dining room. It was not great but OK. I should mention that when we got back aboard this afternoon, we stopped by the Reception Desk and asked the Concierge for dry rice for the dropped wet camera. She understood immediately what we wanted to do and about 15 minutes later the doorbell rang. The waiter with the bowl of raw rice wasn’t at all sure he was delivering the right thing. I assured him that was exactly what we wanted. The photos on the card early this morning have been retrieved but the camera is probably toast. It has not restarted. It won’t cost anything to keep it in a bag of rice for a couple of more days, so we will and keep trying to power it up. We’ll see.

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Sailing Dolphin & Union Strait & Coronation Gulf

Sunday, August 28, 2016

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I slept right through the night from around 10pm to 7am! We are sailing Dolphin & Union Strait so the seas are pretty calm, still I was dizzy and unsteady this morning. It is Sunday so I wanted a special breakfast. We went to the downstairs main restaurant and I had Eggs Benedict and Clay had blueberry pancakes. It was pretty quiet in there. Evidently on grand voyages only Crystal has an occasional Viennese Buffet on a Sunday.  Today is one of those special days. From 11:30am to 1:30pm they will turn the Crystal Plaza into a big food court. We looked around at the setup they were working on after breakfast. It looked like it would be a nightmare. I told Clay he could photograph it from above if he wanted, but I’d rather eat at the Lido buffet. At 9am I did gentle yoga in Palm Court. At 10am I went back to the cabin because I wanted to watch the Inuit Print Making Lecture. After my first try at attending a lecture live and not being able to find a seat, I’d just as soon watch the cabin broadcast. Clay was watching the movie “Brooklyn”. He had no recollection of seeing it before. It should be rebroadcast, so I’ll hope to see it later. There is a TV movie on at 3pm I’d like to see. It will be a quiet sailing day for us before Cambridge Bay tomorrow. Last night we watched on TV the destination talk for Cambridge Bay. It seems that the Community Visit tour we booked will get us a zodiac ride to a remote beach landing where they hope some vendors will have tents set up nearby. It was not clear if walking into town is feasible or how far or close it is. It was clear that they have requested all available transportation to shuttle passengers back and forth but I guess none or few have been promised. If you get to town, it sounded like a school and art center and community center have opened to us with arts and crafts vendors. Since we won’t be there overnight like Ulukhaktok, we won’t really know what to expect until we arrive. We are on the 9am zodiac group which is number 3 of the community visits.

It was a quiet day today. We have been in view of land off the port side for most of the day. Evidently there is a narrow channel through this part that is deep enough to be navigable. The landscape is barren and desolate. The big excitement was passing a DEW station. I keep forgetting to write about this. We have been seeing and hearing about the DEW line since Nome. Evidently some time through the 1950’s and 1960’s the Americans spent billions building a Defense Early Warning system against Soviet ICBMs. I believe we were told that it had been decommissioned but the stations and towers and airfields are still in place. This was the largest one we’ve seen. It looked like it had big hangars and it had 2 huge golf ball looking things. Clay thought he saw some seals in the water in the afternoon. I saw birds only.

The other thing I’ve forgotten to write about was how the expedition crew and ship’s crew worked together yesterday manning zodiac lifevests. This was the thing that really streamlined the process and enabled them to process so many people in the time allotted. Every other expedition cruise we’ve been on, this has been an obstacle and a time-wasting cluster. You have to go pull a vest from a pile get it straightened out and adjusted and strapped on. Here both leaving and returning they had us approach several people fitting the zodiac lifevests in a line. When it was your turn, a crew member of some kind held your bag or daypack and held the vest for you to turn around and slip your arms in, then the put the bag back on your back, turned you around or came around you and fastened and tightened it and sent you on your way. It was a huge time saver! Well done. Our regular assistant waiter Ben is on the shore side team for that and is loving it.

At the expedition briefing and recap we learned that we’ve traveled over 3000 miles and have over 4000 to go! We cruised Coronation Gulf this afternoon and have a last strait before we arrive at our anchorage for Cambridge Bay. Ulukhaktok was on west side of Victoria Island and Cambridge Bay is on the south side. Ulukhaktok (which means place of ulu knives!) is in the Northwest Territories and Cambridge Bay is in Nunavut which is Canada’s newest and largest province.

We learned more about our visit tomorrow and it sounds a bit more promising now. It should be partly cloudy and 48F. There should be cultural events and arts/crafts sales both onboard and ashore and the leader actually said and it was printed on the map about a 10K shuttle service from the gravel pit beach to town and the handful of buildings open to us. They rescheduled their annual arts festival so we could attend. In less positive news, they were disappointed to have to inform us that the Public Library had decided since we were coming that they would impose a CAD$25 entry fee to their small museum area. The school also wanted us to know that no boots or shoes would be allowed inside and would have to be removed and left at the door. I guess they do this all over the Arctic. We saw the shoe/boot storage cubbies at Ulukhaktok too but they didn’t enforce it.

Dinner was not special, but the food was fine as was the wine. At 8pm we went to the popcorn movie “Louder than Bombs”. It was sad. Time for bed now. We have a busy day tomorrow followed by 5 sea days. The wildlife viewing so far has been a big disappointment. After 5 days on Svalbard without a polar bear, I guess I’m over expectations. A woman at yoga said they were wildlife viewing from a fast boat yesterday and when asked what they viewed, she answered an arctic hare. Hmmm. They’re wild animals, even if you think you know where they are they don’t have to be there when you are. It sucks about no Northern Lights too though. At least we have seen polar bears and auroras in the past! I’ll see if there is Internet now and if so I’ll post this before bed.

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Ulukhaktok, Northwest Territories

Saturday, August 27, 2016

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The big excitement in my afternoon yesterday was when an RCMP, or Mountie, appeared in Lido Aft balcony performing some kind of ship inspection. He was in full regalia with a bright red coat, big hat and sidearm belted across his chest at his waist. I guess because I wasn’t working, but just sitting waiting 30 minutes for my paint to dry, I saw him and no one else had noticed. I couldn’t take it anymore and pointed him out to the others. It was like groupies at a rock concert! The guy was a trip posing here and there on deck for several minutes for photos. I didn’t have a camera or I might’ve done the same. Not like the first time we saw a Mountie like that and snuck photos from across the street and a parking lot!

Dinner was fine. We both had filet mignon. The evening’s entertainment was 2 troupes of local performers. As the cruise director said, it doesn’t get more local than this. We enjoyed it even if all the songs sounded the same to us. The dancing is mostly with hand movements. We had a bed gift last night. It is a piece of traditional Inuit art from the Canadian Arctic. They say they ordered a gift for every cabin over a year ago. Each piece is unique and hand-carved from local stone by the renowned carvers of Nunavut. The card says this is some of the contribution that Crystal has and is making to the region we are visiting. Last night before the performance they had a plaque presentation for inaugural port visit and said they had donated money and a ton of school supplies. They also introduced the RCMP and said after they boarded they learned from them about their Santa Project to buy gifts for children at Christmas and they presented them with a giant $2000 check. Ulukhaktok is famed for artists too but in printmaking.

We were delayed about 20 minutes in our zodiac departure time. I am not sure what the delay was due to but they were blaming the chop. We could see it was choppy from upstairs. Breakfast buffet started at 5:30am. We were up at 6am and in a lightly attended buffet by 7am. Our departure from Stardust should have been at 8:30am but it was about that time that the 8am group got called. We heard ashore that the morning kayaking excursion was canceled due to the wind and chop. We heard on the tender ride back around 1pm or so that they added some afternoon kayaking to make it up. The sun was shining and it was all blue skies for a couple of hours midday. It was 37F when we woke up today and the forecast high was 46F. I expect it made it. We did not wear our parkas. We were sweating bullets by the time we boarded an admittedly cold zodiac ride ashore. There were 3 stores (we visited 2, the Co-Op and Northern), the arts center, the community hall set up as an arts and crafts mall, the school which had an arts and crafts mall set up as well as free samples of Arctic Char chowder and the Anglican Mission church. All the buildings were hot with us being dressed for the zodiac rides. After all the buildings had been visited, we walked up the viewpoint walk to Uluksartok Bluff. It was supposedly a 1 mile walk in each direction. It was steep and a very rough rocky road. The good news was the wind pushed us going up. Three times or more as we hiked uphill, a 4-prop engine plane circled the hill and Ulukhaktok. When we got to the top there was an expediton guide excitedly photographing it and he told us it was an Aurora, sub-hunting plane of teh Canadian military. The views were pretty spectacular. We could see all 3 bays, the zodiacs, the Serenity and the Shackleton, the town, the airport and the golf course. We watched a woman work at print making. She was working with a template and ink with brushes and what looked like homemade paper. It was a picture of a girl in a pink parka on a dog sled with 2 dogs. She told me it was very her memory of when she used to travel (by dog sled) with her father to train the dogs and to go ice fishing. She used to travel! I loved that and later that was the print I bought for $15. We also spoke with a woman who was loading a change of color thread on a Brother knitting machine. She said she was making it with Qivuit. (Say kiv it.) Qivuit is a fiber made from the undercoat of musk ox. They were selling the yarn in Nome at what we heard were exorbitant prices. I didn’t check any prices there. The hats here were selling for $160. I didn’t see any yarn for sale here, but the woman who was loading the Brother knitting machine must have had about $2000 worth of yarn stacked up on the table behind her. Clay bought a t-shirt and I got a coffee mug at the Co-op. We were supposed to return around 11:30am according to our ticket, but for practical purposes you could leave as early or late as you wanted. We were on our way back about 12:30pm and on a zodiac around 1. We found a line of 8 loaded zodiacs waiting to reboard the ship when we got to the starboard side. I am not sure what the log jam was. I have to say that they did a better job with the zodiacs than I had expected. They were still working out the kinks when we boarded ours to leave. The 4^th guy to get in staggered around and stumbled onto the tube and never did grip anything to keep himself in place. I don’t know how he managed to stay aboard, just dumb luck. They learned a lesson there, not to release your passenger until they are seated. The zodiac before ours was the kind we’d been on before with the driver in the back steering the outboard motor with a stick and they only got 8 aboard. Remember they said they needed 10 aboard each to move everyone in time today. Ours had a standing center console, was larger and was loaded with 16 so they were probably averaging 10 per boatload with both types of zodiacs. We saw one coming back with 20 aboard! It was a good day. The only animals seen were birds. Seabirds and ravens.

We had lunch in the Lido buffet and they had a wide choice and it was a good meal. At 2:30pm they were having a 2-hour Traditional Mitt Making class. They had one in the morning too. Three women from Ulukhaktok were teaching with I think the help of an onboard instructor in the Studio. I was in there at 2:10pm with a bunch of people who were left over from the morning session for personal help. By 2:18pm, it looked like they were about out of space but by now some of the new people were receiving instruction to get started and some like my half of the room were being ignored. I could see the gist of it. Cutting out red felt around cardboard patterns, sewing the pieces together and then trimming in contrasting thread. I decided I didn’t need to fight for that and gave up my seat as there were people in the hall trying to get in. I went up to Palm Court and watched a woman and 3 kids on rocks picking up stuff that had washed up through the giant tripod-mounted binoculars and watched the Cineflex screens. I got run out as they were setting up for tea time and people who wanted to sit at those set tables were coming in looking for seats. I was just there for the views, Cineflex and sunshine by which to needlepoint. I came back to the cabin where Clay was possibly sleeping through a Mission Impossible movie. He told me he couldn’t access our blog to attach photo links so I did it. Internet was up but painfully slow.

We start sailing again tonight about 8pm. (Everyone was back onboard before 7pm as all the zodiacs were off the beach and the Shackleton had sailed. We set sail before 8pm.) Tomorrow we sail all day. The next day we should be anchored off Cambridge Bay. If we still have Internet, I’ll post this now. We have no evening plans beyond dinner in the main dining room an hour from now.

I would like to say that I recommend EYOS Expeditions. This is the company that Crystal hired to handle this North West Passage expedition style cruise. They have done an excellent job with what they have to work with. I'm not sure whether they do anything that we would have an opportunity to travel with them again, but I would recommend them and look for them again in the future.

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Arriving at Ulukhaktok, Northwest Territories, Canada

Friday, August 26, 2016

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We had a long, quiet, restful night last night. Clay was up early and used the treadmill. He woke me a little after 7am when he got back. We are sailing the Amundson Gulf. It was 32F and partly cloudy this morning. We went to Lido for breakfast. I went to 9am gentle yoga. I walked through the Bistro on my now routine thrice a day quest for Portuguese tarts. Success! Today as I buzzed past, I screeched to a halt when I saw the rather unattractive tarts. I scooted to get a paper napkin and grabbed 2 as they rapidly disappeared. I went back to the cabin hoping to find Clay with the warm tarts wrapped up. I didn’t get a bottle of water and proceed to chair yoga! Clay was lying on the loveseat waiting for the movie “Jenny’s Wedding” to start. After we ate the delicious tarts, I brushed my teeth and settled in with my needlepoint for the movie. After the movie, at 37F we dressed as we expect to tomorrow for morning ashore. Neither of us want to have to wear those bulky parkas. Given that the average temperature here is August is well above freezing, we don’t feel we ought to need them. We walked a circle on the Promenade deck and as we came to the front starboard side, we could see the red Shackleton ice breaker in the distance before our next landfall. We listened to the captain’s noon announcements in the cabin and then went to lunch. It was a bell pepper packed Latin America theme today. We ate in the Lido Buffet. As we were finishing up about 1:10pm, the captain came on the intercom again with a sea shanty song about Franklin and the North West Passage to announce that the Shackleton had sailed out to greet us and escort us to our anchorage off Ulukhaktok. We headed to starboard for a look and saw our fast boat and 7 zodiacs in formation with 2 helicopters swooping and the Shackleton coming along side. Clay went to get his coat and his camera and I met him out of deck 7. It was pretty exciting. The zodiac drivers seemed pretty excited. They’ve been here waiting a couple of days for us so I guess they had lots of time to rehearse their formations. They circled us and then formed up in a line and led us in with Shackleton in the lead. They are doing a great job with the Cineflex camera atop the ship and streaming in to the cabins on channel 82. We can mostly watch from our window and that TV view and then throw on a coat and dash 4 doors down to get out on either side of deck 7 in less than a half minute.

Last night they delivered an Arctic Code of Conduct A guide to Arctic Etiquette booklet. It is similar to the guidelines for the Antarctic or a National Park. Take nothing in, leave nothing behind, don’t pick anything up, don’t take anything. Etc. We’ve just dropped anchor for the first time! Which finally answers the question that no we did not drop an anchor in Nome. I didn’t think we did, but now I’m more sure of it.

Clay is on his way to see the 2:30pm movie “The Family Fang”. I have to go to Art again today at 3pm in Lido to finish up by painting my sculpted Inukshuk. There is no 5pm briefing today. They are bringing locals onboard to demonstrate Western & Central styles of Drum Dancing at 6:30 and 8:30pm. We are in the main dining room tonight at 6pm, so it will be the 8:30pm show for us. If we have Internet now, I’ll go ahead and post this. If I have anything else of interest to post, I do it tomorrow.

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Sailing the Canadian Beaufort Sea

Thursday, August 25, 2016

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We had to move the clocks forward another hour last night so it made for a short night. I couldn’t stop the tremor, was too cold then too hot and back, my throat felt scratchy which made me realize what I had fussed over the big medicine cabinet/bathroom bag about when packing. We didn’t have any throat numbing spray in the house and consequently we have none with us for this trip. If I had realized earlier there were plenty of places in Alaska I could have found such a thing, but now probably not before New England and the end of the trip. We’ll just have to pray that we don’t need it! I can’t imagine how it happened that we were without a bottle in the house as it is something I always keep because when you need it, you need it. You don’t need to go out shopping for it! I didn’t get to sleep until after 2am and I swear I could see a thin line of blue sky at the horizon with I looked out the window. I don’t think we’ll ever get a look at the aurora borealis this trip because at night this ship is lit up like Las Vegas at night. The bridge might be the only dark place aboard at night. One hopes that if they ever spot the aurora up there and send out the e-notification that they will have some designed deck section darkened for it. We can only hope.

A couple of more kudos for Crystal. Q-tips. I have never been on any vessel where they keep a supply of Q-tips in the bathroom until now. The other thing is this morning there was a letter on our mail hook. It was from the shore excursion desk. It thanked us for our Nome Tundra Wildlife Adventure feedback. Now neither of us provided them any feedback. I made my thoughts known here, but I sincerely doubt any of the excursions desk’s people are reading my blog, so that means that they didn’t ever get any feedback from us. However, they must have gotten enough negative feedback that they felt the need to make a global response to all participants including us. The letter advised us to adjust our expectations when visiting remote, seldom visited ports. True. But, this excursion did not come close to meeting its description of a wildlife adventure. They only took us at $398 per couple back in the same school buses to see the musk ox herd that we had all seen for free in the morning. They did not point out any of the birds or the dead walrus we passed as the morning’s free tour did. So, by any lowered expectation, it was still an unacceptably priced and described excursion. To Crystal’s credit and due to the evidently universal participant dissatisfaction, the letter says they will credit back to our onboard accounts 25% of the $199pp charge. It seems in all fairness that it should be more refund than $99.50 for the 2 of us, but that is what they said they were able to negotiate with the vendor. So, the good news is it is something and we didn’t have to go complain for it. Now if they would just trouble to try to clean the windows, I be a pretty happy cruiser! This ship keeps the dirtiest windows I have ever experienced. I can’t recall another cruise where they didn’t have a team of full time window washers out at least hosing and usually squeegeeing windows daily. Our cabin window has had a hose sprayed on it once since we came aboard!

We had a normal breakfast upstairs at Lido. The day broke sunny, blue skies and calm seas today. Reflections says sunrise was to be at 6:51am, but Clay woke me up at 6:50am and the sun was well up over the horizon. The temps were a bit warmer today at above freezing all morning. The wind seems to be from the east instead of the north so that and the sunshine would account for it.

I went to gentle yoga again. Since it was so calm, she tried to do a lot more standing and balance poses. With the Meniere’s Disease progressing, I have learned to rely mostly on proprioception. I learned for sure today, if there was any question before that the Parkinson’s Disease affecting my right side has destroyed the proprioception from my right side. I skipped chair yoga. I guess I plan to try out a sculpting class at 3pm and go to the expedition briefing at 5pm They say they will have important info for those of us planning to zodiac ashore on Saturday. The Crystal Plaza is decorated as an ice palace today for a “mixer” this evening. We’ll probably go to the 8pm movie “The Family Fang” as we haven’t seen it before. They haven’t put today’s restaurant menus online yet, but I guess we’ll be in the main dining room at 6pm anyway. There was a stuffed animal polar bear at yoga in Palm Court. Word was that a shop girl is responsible for him and has been moving him around. I hadn’t seen him before but it was funny. He is juvenile-sized and has a pink tongue and no teeth, also he has four protective booties on. One woman said she had ridden on the elevator with him.

Today’s Reflections gives the expedition blog address. When I’ve been able to get it, it has been interesting and informative. I can see what I’ve missed! http://blog.crystalcruises.com This is one of the free things we are supposed to be able to get on wireless devices but it seems that network is as intermittent as the Internet is and is probably one of the reasons the Internet reception is so spotty. If the wifi is down, then there is certainly no Internet. But if you’re at home and can get to this map-based blog, I recommend it.

It is nearly noon and still today’s menus have not been posted. Clay went down and photographed the lunch menu and came back and read it to me. I think it is time for lunch at Trident Grill or Tastes. We’ll see how cold it is out there today.  Clay also picked up a copy of our cruise statement and we have $11.50 remaining of our initial $1000 shipboard credit. That’s not too bad.

The captain announced at noon that our ice pilots pointed out when the day dawned clear that we are in the Canadian Beaufort Sea now! He said he expected to enter the Franklin Bay and view the Smoking Hills at 8:30pm and leave at 9pm. So, we won’t be going to the 8pm movie. Maybe we’ll see it at 2:30pm tomorrow. Clay has decided to go see “Money Monster” this afternoon since he says he slept through it at the theater. We did have lunch at Trident Grill which we quite enjoyed again. Clay did not find it in time, but found that they do have yellow mustard. We were joining by Flip & Linda Nicklin. They are both expedition naturalists and he is the National Geographic whale photography guy.

It seems that no slack time for sightseeing or impromptu adventures has been built into our schedule. We were 3 hours behind schedule at Point Barrow. Originally the Smoking Hills was described by our expedition leader as a possible Crystal Impromptu Adventure spot if visibility was good. Today at noon the captain completely eliminated that possibility with only an allowed 30-minute detour over there. We must still be running behind. Certainly whenever anything of interest has been spotted this ship has not even slowed down. This is a huge disadvantage of a non-expedition style cruise! The advantage is the large number of berths available means we could sail at all now! We are to be at Ulukhaktok tomorrow afternoon to meet up with the Shackleton, our leased ice breaker escort ship and to clear Canadian Customs and Immigration for our shore visits on Saturday. We are hoping we get a clear sunny, smooth seas day like today on Saturday for our zodiac tendering and community visit.

So it is 3:40pm and I am back from the 3pm art class. I didn’t go for the past 2 days of acrylic painting on canvas bags because I thought since I can’t draw that I wouldn’t be able to paint, but a lot of the people there had their work or were finishing their work and when the people at my table showed me their work and explained how they’d done it, I probably could have done it too. Oh well. So today was carving and sculpting. We had directions to carve a polar bear from a bar of Ivory. I mangled my bar pretty well and it was clear I’d never get anything resembling a bear out of it so I quit. I moved on to sculpting an Inukshuk. I was pretty sure I could do that as the instructor called it idiotproof and had a nice diagram of how to shape each piece in a couple of different patterns. You could keep your Ivory bear or they’d commit it to soap recycling. I donated mine. She took my Inukshuk to dry and said I should come again tomorrow to paint it in either stone colors or vibrant colors. So, to be continued. I guess I’ll miss tomorrow afternoon’s movie now. The 2 women at my table said they had been watching the Smoking Hills from the starboard side before coming to class. When I left class I went to see them. It looks like we should be alongside them ahead of schedule unless we slow down. Maybe we’ll still go to the movie tonight if we see enough earlier. I’ll keep you posted!

So, we were outside viewing the smoking hills and dozens of bowhead whale blows between 3:30 and 4pm. The captain made his announcement that we had arrived and about the whales at 3:45pm. By about 6:10pm during our dinner the ship turned around and headed back out of Franklin Bay. What the expedition leader had just described at the 5pm briefing and recap did not happen as far as we could tell as we were at dinner. He had described that we would get close to shore and their high definition cameras would search for land mammals etc and that the ship would head out of the bay by 9pm. We had our photos taken by Emily who posts the expedition blog. She said to check: https://my.yb.tl/CrystalSerenity

We went to the 5pm expedition briefing and learned that Ulukhaktok has one hotel. They rent out beds, not rooms and the expedition leader and the captain had once stayed in the same room when they were here arranging our visit. We were asked to stay away from the hotel as it was booked up with the Canadian Customs and Immigration officials that are meeting the ship tomorrow to clear the vessel for our visit ashore on Saturday. Does Canada honestly believe that some baddie is trying to enter North America through Ulukhaktok aboard a $30,000 dollar cruise? I guess they must think it is a likelihood since they are treating our arrival as if it is a threat. So, the Smoking Hills. They have been smoking for hundreds of years. The smoking is caused by a burning layer of lignite. It is ignited by the exposure by erosion of pyrite to atmosphere. Both minerals are deposited together and so they are always smoking somewhere along the coastal ridge. Interesting.

So at 8pm we were in the theater watching “The Family Fang” and about 8:45pm or so the captain makes a loud speaker announcement. He explained that the further into Franklin Bay we went the less the hills were smoking. They decided to turn around and cut back to where the smoke and whales had been thickest about 4pm. He said we went reached that point he would drop a small boat and send a camera crew to take close up photos and perhaps launch a drone to take photos and they would broadcast the photos on the screens in Palm Court and on cabin TVs. He didn’t say if any of this photography was going to be livestreaming or broadcast at a later date or time. Clay left since he can see the rest of the movie tomorrow. He took some photos and did not go up to Palm Court or turn on the TV in the cabin. I finished watching the movie and got out in time to see the small boat returning. We must be 3 to 5 miles off the coast from the hills. I turned on the TV but all the footage was from the Cineflex camera they have atop the ship. I didn’t see any from the small boat or from a drone. Clay said he never saw a drone and he didn’t think they launched one. So there was a beautiful sunset at about 10:45pm. Sorry we got no photos as Clay was gone to bed and finished processing his photos for the day. We are sailing away from Franklin Bay now. We expect to arrive in Ulukhaktok about 1:30pm tomorrow to meet the Shackleton.

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Sailing the Beaufort Sea

Wednesday, August 24, 2015

Clay got up early and did the laundry and his treadmill time before I woke up. I was slow to start. We woke to 30F and thick fog. It warmed up to 36 to 37F by noon but the fog remained the same. The seas remained relatively calm though so that was good. We had breakfast in Lido and then I went to gentle yoga in Palm Court. Sea watch was on for that hour as well but with the heavy fog they spotted nothing. I went to chair yoga in Stardust. I went to Galaxy at 11am for a polar bear lecture but even though I got there 10 minutes early I couldn’t find an empty seat. I came back to the cabin to find Clay on the love seat watching a movie. He changed the channel and we watched the lecture on TV. After the captain’s noon announcement, we headed to the main dining room for lunch. The captain announced that they were planning something special for the Smoking Hills. (You’ll have to Google that.) Hopefully the fog will burn off for that. We both had sausage lentil soup for lunch. Clay had a massive BLT that he could only eat half of it. I had the pasta special. Clay had French Apple Pie a la mode and I had the Viennese coffee sundae. It was a really big lunch for us both.

We plan to go to the 2:30pm popcorn movie later. It is “A Walk in Woods”. We’ve seen it but I could watch it again and it looks like we’d only be missing the fog. No plans after that until the 5pm expedition recap which should be interesting, or not. We have main dining room reservations at 6pm with a very dull menu from my point of view. Clay is looking forward to the soft shell crab appetizer.

We enjoyed a 2^nd viewing of A Walk in the Woods as much as the first. The fog had lifted or thinned a bit around noon to 2pm but at 4:30pm it is back with a vengeance.  I took my parka out on a trial run. It is very cold and windy outside. The parka seems warm enough and fits well enough. Clay got the original Napapijri that they promised us all. His has the dates embroidered on the chest and 2 cruise logo patches. Mine is Stormtech and only has the polar bear patch. Our understanding on being told by those who boarded in Vancouver is that the Stormtech batch were ordered after they tried to deliver the parkas to those who boarded in Vancouver and they mostly did not fit. I am happy enough with mine.  I don’t expect to have anything else to report for the evening. If we have Internet now, I’ll post this now. If anything else happens, I’ll type it up tomorrow.

 

Sailing the Chukchi Sea

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

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We were early to bed last night as nothing going on interested us. Overnight we made a bit of a right turn and the seas are dramatically calmer. The temperature dropped to 34F and with a still stiff Northerly breeze it feels very cold out. We expect to pass Point Barrow around 7pm tonight. We had breakfast back upstairs in Lido today. Clay made a sandwich. I had muesli and yogurt with a mocha latte. I have been eating Dannon Oikos but today there was none. There was no non-fat yogurt at all except for one foreign looking plain carton. I wound up eating a Dannon Light & Fit. They don’t like you picking up and putting back yogurts, but that is the only way you can study the labels! Clay had his tablet and showed me the lunch and dinner menus for today. I didn’t see anything I wanted at all. I sent him to make Tastes reservations. So it might be cold up there but we’ll be eating there at 7:30pm. No plans yet for lunch.

The mandatory briefing ran about an hour. We are going to be guinea pigs on Saturday. I have a bad feeling. The ship is not suited for this, there are too many people and too many people who are too physically unsuited or frail or disable for this. The instructions were basically the same as the Antarctic and Svalbard, with the exception of vacuuming your gear as in the Antarctic. I don’t think anything but experience can prepare you for zodiac transportation and too few aboard have experience. We’ll see. Hopefully our inaugural voyage will be the learning experience they are hoping for and they’ll be better prepared when they do this again next year. Captain Birger had produced an instructional video so at least so of the ship’s staff and crew had tried to walk through the process. They will have us go through the crew and luggage staging areas to load and unload zodiacs. The will have a boot wash walkthrough before we come up to the passenger decks. But both ships we were on before for expeditions had a place to put on and take off boots so you aren’t tromping through the ship in them. The same for the last outer layers being put on and taken off right as you get on or off a zodiac. We are instructed to go our waiting area of Galaxy or Stardust or wherever instructed all geared up and ready to go and back to our cabins in full gear after. If we sit in the theater or lounge waiting more than 10 minutes we’ll be drenched in sweat under all that before we even get to the lower decks!  Again, we’ll see. They also say they planned to load zodiacs with 10 passengers each run. They did not have any photos of a 10-person zodiac. We’ve never had 10 in a zodiac before 8 for transport and 6 for sightseeing. I don’t know how they’ll do 10 but since they kept repeating it, it must be the logistical number of people they need to move with each load given the passenger count and the zodiac count. Wish us luck!

I went to a 30 minute chair yoga class in Stardust Lounge after. I was OK. They don’t really have the right kind of chairs except maybe in a restaurant but it was probably better than Palm Court where they had been doing it. There are no exercise classes in the fitness center until 4pm. After lunch sometime as long as it stays calm, I plan to go up and do my own yoga. They have floor space and mats up there and I already asked and they said the same was for the passengers unless they were teaching. We’ll see. They also teach private lessons when none are scheduled so the space could still be unavailable even when the schedule shows it unused.

We went up to Lido for lunch. Clay went to the buffet while I held our table. He came back and said he didn’t see anything I’d eat. He was right. I had a salad while I waited for Tastes to open. We were sitting inside right before Tastes door outside. I had overheard a man in a uniform telling the table behind me that since it was so cold they were allowing us to order Tastes and eat it in Lido. Clay asked our waiter and he said yeah, go out there and order then go back out and retrieve it to bring back. I got a pizza with salami and ham (evidently the only meat toppings they have) in 7 minutes. I shared with Clay but he didn’t have much. It was very thin crust and alright. Clay asked me to surprise him with dessert. He ate a tiny crème brulee and we each had a Godiva chocolate mousse. Clay had a cookie and we shared a strawberry roulade.

After lunch I went up to do yoga. I got a little more than half way through the 47-minute routine. The captain excitedly broke his no ship wide announcements rule with the ship wide announcement that he could see sea ice ahead and port side. There was too much commotion in the fitness center between ice viewers and private lessons and consultations and sales pitches for me to stay. Also the view there is only starboard and I came back to our port cabin for the better views. Clay had to go out and wash the dried sea spray off our windows so we could see. They are not big on window washing on Crystal as far as we can tell. I was a bit surprised we hit sea ice so soon. We are half way between Icy Point and Point Barrow. It was about 2pm and we were past it more or less by 3pm. The temperature is 32F. We are at 70 degrees 45 N. The captain said in his noon announcement that he didn’t expect to be off Point Barrow now until 10pm or so vs the earlier 7pm estimate. He said he had telephoned the mayor and promised to stay at least 20 km offshore so as not to scare off the whales they were planning to launch a hunt for tonight.

We finally got around to comparing our own binoculars that we brought from home with the massive heavy ones Crystal provided in the cabin. Theirs are Bushnell, same as ours and theirs are 8x42 and weigh about 2 pounds. My old ones are Bushnell and as nearly as big as theirs but about ½ pound and they are 7x35. Clay’s are very compact and light and are 8x32. We both compared ours with their and thought they were clearer and sharper as well as less unwieldy. I guess you’d be happy to have the cabin binoculars if you hadn’t bought any but we’ve put theirs away now. Clay has been out in the parka they provided. He unzipped the fur ruff and adjusted the hood’s snorkel factor so he could see. They should have held an educational briefing on how to use those parkas. The women’s parka’s don’t have the same adjustable hood strap on top. I haven’t worn mine yet. I guess I need to make a point of doing that before I need it on Saturday at 8:30am when we get our turn ashore.

I did needlepoint by the window and ice watched most of the afternoon. Clay laid on the bed and mostly slept. We have our 1^st scheduled expedition recap & briefing at 5pm in Galaxy Lounge this evening. I plan to go to see what I’ve missed today. We have been without Internet all afternoon. I don’t know if it is because of how far north we are or something else. If it is just northerliness, then we are going to be out of touch for a long while. Unfortunate since we learned late last night that our home’s alarm had gone off days ago and we were waiting to hear back from our neighbor who had offered to go look into the house’s condition. Oh well.

Checking the navigation map on TV, I don’t think it will be 10pm to reach Point Barrow. I think it’ll be closer to the original 7pm estimate. Just back from the expedition recap and they’re still estimating 10pm. They reported bowhead whale blows between us and the port side ice this afternoon which jibes with the one blow without a whale that I thought I saw. I also thought I saw a gray colored seal on a slab of blue ice but they didn’t report that so maybe it was just a dirty spot, or maybe the experts missed it. We learned from a 6-hour old satellite view of sea ice that the company requested that that strong North wind we’ve been fighting for the past 2 days was what pushed the sea ice we saw so far south so quickly.

I will post this now if I can. We have already reported on Tastes and we have no plans out this evening. BTW, Clay got a very weak Internet signal for about 15 minutes and our neighbor had emailed that checking the house she had found nothing amiss. So that was obviously a false alarm and we’ll figure out what happened when we get home if we ever figure it out. No can’t post yet. Due to our location, we have no Internet. I’ll try again before bed and if not then I’ll try again in the morning.

We spent over an hour this evening in Palm Court watching the Chukchi Sea. We saw a lot more sea ice. We saw 2 other ships. One looked like a tanker and the other like a large fishing boat. I saw a dolphin jump out of the water. I think that is what it was. It was just one and it was a slick gray with a fin atop a curved back. I just happened to be looking there at the time. Clay drank 2 pastises and carped about how nasty it is compared to Pernod and how Regent served Pernod and knew how to serve it and he can’t get a bad drink served properly here. We had an even better meal in Tastes than the first visit per Clay. He said it was because he got the Alaskan Halibut steamed in a grape leave instead of salmon sliders. Also we ordered 2 duo of tacos and Clay ate the 2 chicken and I ate the 2 vegetarian this time. Both of our desserts which should have been served warm (mine was last time) were served cold. It was ok because Clay made us go to Bistro so he could get some cookies. There was a chocolate fountain there and some pink macarons so I soon had a plate with his cookies, 2 macarons, 2 homemade marshmallows and a strawberry for the chocolate dipping.

It is quarter to 10pm and according to the TV navigation map we have just passed Point Barrow. We are at 71 degrees 37 N. As we make this turn past the point we should enter the Beaufort Sea. They are gathering in Palm Court with the expedition team for the passing of Point Barrow but since they have said repeatedly that we are more than 20 miles offshore that it would not be visible, I don’t know why. We aren’t going back up there. Fingers crossed for continued smooth sailing! Tonight they delivered a passenger directory to our cabins. Tomorrow night we lose another hour. Clay slept all afternoon and has been asleep since we got in from dinner.

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Cruising the Bering Strait

Monday, August 22, 2016

We had a shortened sleep with the time change last night. At some point in the early morning hours the seas got dramatically rougher. Our roughest yet as we neared sunrise. When I looked out the window before the sun had risen, I could see a small muffin-shaped island as we approached and passed it. I don’t know if it has a name what it is. I thought it was Little Diomede. As we passed it and compared our view with the TV’s navigation map, it was clear that it was not Little Diomede and we could see it coming up ahead and port. We passed the Diomede Islands about 8:30 to 9am on the port side so we could see them from our cabin window before we had breakfast on the starboard side. It was raining to start and then as we got past the islands, the sun actually came out. We think it is the first time we’ve seen the sun while aboard. It stopped raining. So far all of the scheduled sea life viewings have been rained out except the Dutch Harbor sailaway. It was our coldest day at 39F and strong wind.

Since it was so rough, I decided not to try to go to higher decks and skipped yoga classes. We went to breakfast down in the main dining room and considered it our Sunday breakfast. Clay had his usual and I had Belgian malted Brux waffles with maple syrup and bacon. I got 2 waffle segments or a half of a waffle. It was shatteringly crispy! I enjoyed it. We came back up to deck 7 to find that the aft Promenade Deck doors had been unlocked and there was a birding naturalist back there. This must be his permanently assigned location. The Diomedes were just aft of our port side and the sun was breaking through on them. I hope we got a photo.

After breakfast, we found a small yellow card at the cabin notifying us that we have a mandatory expedition briefing at 9am in the Galaxy tomorrow morning. Attendance will be taken and if you’re not there then you will not be allowed ashore until we reach Nuuk, Greenland. I hope the seas calm down before then since there will be no sleeping in tomorrow.

Clay walked on the treadmill very early this morning. I found some jigsaw puzzles this morning. They are in what looked to be a rental office (I think the door said Constellation Suite) aft of the Bridge Lounge. I poked my head in and asked the couple in there if anyone could come in and work on the puzzles and they said they assumed so. It was very dimly lit in there and the sun was glaring through the window so they were not having an easy time of it. It was awkwardly configured for more than the 2 of them so I left them to it.

So we have sailed the Bering Strait and I have no need to do that again! I am guessing even with our big seas and 27 knot winds that given the sunshine that we have had a relatively calm sailing day for the Bering Strait. The captain said it was 65 knot winds early this morning and calmer now at noon. Soon we should pass 66 degrees 33 latitude North and cross the Arctic Circle. The captain said that when we were looking at the Russian Big Diomede Island and the USA Little Diomede not only were we seeing 2 different countries but it was Tuesday in Russia and still Monday in the US, so we were looking across the International Date Line. The captain says due to the strong North wind and southerly current that we are only making about 9 knots on 2 engines. He said before we got into the wind and current we were doing 18 knots. He says we need to average 12 knots over these next 5 sea days to make Ulukhaktok on schedule. We hope to step on land again on Saturday in Canada.

We stayed low for the rest of the day. We had lunch in the main dining room even though the menu was unappealing. I had the vegetarian curry with steamed rice and pappadam. I ate the rice and pappadam. I have had curries I like and I have curries I hated. I didn’t like this one. Clay had a hamburger. He ate it. Clay had soft serve butter pecan ice cream and I had a scoop of banana sherbet. Given the fit of my pants, I can skip some meals. I failed to note that we have each been eating a small tub of popcorn every time we go to a movie! We went to Belle Epoque at 2:30pm. It was in Spanish subtitled in English. It was funny. Clay must have liked it more than I did because I could not stay awake and he did. Of course, he had napped all morning after breakfast and I didn’t.

We had our 2^nd dinner at Silk Road at 6pm. We enjoyed it much more this time. We made better ordering choices this time, I think. Clay had sushi to start and salmon for his main. I had vegetable tempura to start and “Wagyu Beef” from Greg Norman’s Queensland Ranch for my main. In the past I have not like the taste of Wagyu beef compared to regular beef. I quite enjoyed this and it was tender and tasty and cooked well done per my order. Clay had the green tea ice cream in coconut tapioca soup and I got the best dessert again which was sesame ice cream with chocolate soufflé cake. Clay said if we can get another reservation that he would order the same dessert. It is the best dessert I’ve had onboard. It is not clear that we can come again. We are entitled to 2 more free reservations per our cabin purchase, but when Clay tried before he was only offered 9pm and we won’t eat that late. Given that the 2 times we’ve been at 6pm and it was mostly empty I don’t know why we can’t get an early reservation. We’ll see.

 

Nome, Alaska

Sunday, August 21, 2016

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Clay was up early for his treadmill time this morning. He came back and woke me around 6:30am. Since it is Sunday, we went down to the main dining room to see if they had a special menu. They only had out the lunch menu and didn’t open for another half hour so we assumed it was just the normal daily breakfast menu and went up to the Lido Buffet. We stopped on the way to look for Portuguese tarts that we had heard so much about at the Bistro. It is not the first time we’ve looked at various hours of the day and still haven’t found any 6 days in. I ordered a mocha latte to go since everyone says the best coffee on the ship is made at the big Italian espresso machine in the Bistro. The guy that was working there, walked over and ripped open a packet of Swiss Miss and dumped it into a paper cup. He stopped at the one touch coffee machine and shot some hot water in there. I had asked for a mocha latte made with skim milk so he went over to the big espresso machine and steamed some milk and poured that on top of the little mud patty he had created at the bottom of the cup. I tasted it as Clay swore he had seen the guy pour a thimble of espresso that had been sitting on the machine into the cup but there was no coffee at all in that cup and I had been watching and he hadn’t made or poured any coffee in the cup. I dropped it off near Tastes. We don’t need to do that again. In Lido, I had muesli and yogurt as usual. Clay had a bacon and tomato sandwich. We wandered Palm Court and the Promenade deck watching as we approached Nome. We did a lot of maneuvering to line up with the opening in the breakwater and then to turn the port side to it and hold there. Eventually, a couple of lifeboats/tenders were lowered and the announcement was made that the ship had been cleared. It was overcast with low clouds about 50F and raining. It pretty much stayed that way all day. It cleared for about 20 minutes once but it never stopped raining. Everything was muddy. We had complimentary city tour tickets for 10am to 1:30pm. We were in the Stardust per direction and they called 4 buses of people to leave at 10am. Problem was they only had one tender ready. It took us about 40 minutes to get ashore after they called us. They people who made it over on the one tender that was there when they shipped 4 busloads out of the theater were not loaded into one bus and start the tour. No they were directed to any bus so they filled the first 4-6 rows of all four buses and sat staring out at the rain for the next 40 minutes of so that it took for all the tenders to get everyone over. It was a cluster cuss. This is why we hate ship’s excursions! I don’t think we’ve ever been on any cruise line that had a good logistics planning tour department and Crystal is clearly no exception. We can only hope that they get better because the only way we can go ashore at most of the remaining ports is on a zodiac excursion. Since it had taken us 40 minutes to get ashore and we only had 2 hours between excursions, we decided to remain ashore between them. On our complimentary city tour, we learned about placer gold mining and I panned some flakes. We sat and watched a roadside herd of wild musk ox. We saw a dead walrus on the beach. We learned more about gold in Nome. We learned about life in Nome. We met an Iditarod competitor and his sled dogs. Nome is the finish line of the Iditarod. We visited the start and the finish and saw sled dogs in both Wasilla and Nome. Our last stop was a Jam Berry Festival in the civic center which was very small and warm and crowded. They were selling crafts and souvenirs and food. I couldn’t stay there. We walked down Front St. to CenterPoint (I think that was the name.) It was a youth activity center that was open to us to use restrooms and they were fund-raising by selling moose chili, fry bread and blueberry delight. All items our school teacher guides recommended. Clay had all 3. I had all but blueberry. It was good! We walked most of Front St and back. I got a patch at the National Park Service Bering Land Bridge building where we had earlier seen and heard from a marine mammal researcher. Clay had an Alaskan beer at the oldest bar in Nome. I got a shirt at the gift shop on Front. It seems we hadn’t been informed about Bering St. and missed everything there. We went through the berry festival on our way back to the small boat harbor to meet our next tour. The bus showed up after the tender full had arrived and we had to work to board the bus 2^nd after we had stood in the rain for an hour to load first. They were school buses so it was even harder to see than in a normal bus. In actuality, it didn’t matter on the morning or afternoon buses as the guides stood in the front and completely blocked the forward view anyway. This morning we had 2 school teachers. School starts tomorrow. This afternoon we had a school teacher and a fish scientist. So, this afternoon was the $400 worth of Tundra Wilderness Adventure that Clay decided we should do at close to the last minute. It was not worth anything close to that especially compared to the free tour! The wildlife we saw was the same musk ox we had seen this morning. At least that team also pointed out the dead walrus and all the birds we passed. This afternoon we mostly learned about gold mining, now and historically. We got off the bus to go look for some little plant with an edible root. They dug one up and sliced it up so people could taste that it was like a parsnip. There was musk ox poop all over the tire ruts we walked and a pond covered with noisy birds but not a mention of those. We heard we would stop at a beaver dam but that never happened. We stopped next at the foot of the wind farm and got out to pick and eat blueberries. Clay ate some. It said his were a little tangy or sour and blamed musk ox pee. I didn’t eat them. The ground was covered with them! The guides this morning said they have polar bears here and the fish guy said the only bears here are brown. Go figure. We didn’t see any bears but the skins hanging at the National Park building and they had one of each.  I don’t think we were the only ones disappointed. We rode the elevator up from the tender deck with some people who had picked a lot of blueberries and brought them back. One was teasing them about their $400 worth of blueberries. The whole bus had been going on about there not being any blueberries onboard. I have had blueberries served to me at least once every day and I see them all over the ship. Clay and I were mystified by all the complaining about no blueberries. I mean I haven’t seen bowls of them on a buffet or anything, but there are 2 in every bowl of muesli every morning. Anyway, $400 for a half-quart baggie of Nome blueberries. The world’s most plentiful and most expensive blueberries. We didn’t get to dinner until 7pm. It was not very appealing. We each only had a main course. Clay had liver with onions on polenta. He said it was good. I had a filet au poivre. It was OK. I shared it with Clay when he finished his and it caused him an episode so dinner was over. We both caught grief over skipping dessert. After the reaction of the waiter who picked up Clay’s sodden napkin, I was afraid of the doorbell ringing with someone to medically evacuate us from the ship before the next 4 sea days. We move the clocks forward an hour tonight. So here is hoping for calm seas for the next several days.

Here is another link that the expedition team aboard it putting online as we go along with the tracker. Maybe you'll have better luck with it than I am onboard. Also, you'll evidently see more wildlife than I will with a fraction of the effort and cost I'm expending! 

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In the Bering Sea

Saturday, August 20, 2016

I’ll start with last night. We didn’t see anything exciting at the sailaway wildlife watch. We did see 2 more sea otters. Mostly there were a half-dozen kinds of birds. Our area’s naturalist was a birder. We saw puffins on both sides. This ship is so huge and even our deck 7 is so high that you need good binoculars to see something that small while it is even close to the ship. Photography is out of the question at this point. We can only hope when we get further north that they would stop or slow down the ship for sightings. According to the whale guy aboard during his lecture today, last night during the sighting hour 8 whales were seen feeding surrounded by a flock of birds. We never saw them. We had a 6pm dinner reservation at Silk Road though and were changing at 5:56pm when the rather vague whale sighting e-notification came through. I ran back out to the starboard side where we were told to look, but I didn’t see any sign nor did I see the aft group with the naturalist looking at anything. Oh well.

I didn’t not enjoy Silk Road and they had only a couple of dishes that didn’t contain fish. I liked the chocolate soufflé cake with sesame ice cream. Clay has dishes at Prego and Silk Road that he’d like to return for. Our cruise fare entitles us to 8 “free” reservations. Clay waited until we’d been to both before trying to make the extra reservations. When he called today to make them he was offered all 9pm times except I think he said one 7:30pm, so he didn’t make any. I’ll keep you posted on this. Neither of us liked the 2 specialty restaurants very well, but Clay did want to return. After dinner last night we came back to the cabin briefly. I changed clothes and shoes and got a peppermint tea bag. We went to Bistro that Reflections says is open from 6:30am to 9:30pm and found it unstaffed from 7:45pm to 8pm.  We went on to the movie theater and got seated with popcorn. As it started, a man carrying a Bistro to go cup walked past. I ran back out and quickly got a cup of hot water and later enjoyed my hot peppermint tea.

The seas got rough again overnight and this morning. I wanted to go to gentle yoga on deck 12 forward in the Palm Court at 9am. So we went to breakfast at Lido on 12 so I could acclimate. I struggled but made it through. I sat and watched the last half of energetic yoga and I don’t know if it was because of the rough seas, but what I saw was all on the floor and I could have done it, but it would have meant a half hour earlier start.

Clay sat up in Palm Court because they were doing wildlife watch again for an hour with the naturalists. I was in the center of the room on a mat and they never put any animals on the TV screens so I guess they didn’t spot anything of note. The birder was near me again and he was pointing out lots but birds is all we had seen at breakfast too. We went back to the cabin and I took a nap. Clay went to the whale lecture. He came and got me for lunch. It seemed calmer so we went to the main dining room downstairs. I enjoyed everything I ate except dessert. We both had aubergine, sprout and noodle salad with peanut dressing. I had huevos rancheros. It was made with a corn tortilla, black beans puree, corn tortilla, black beans, corn tortilla, black beans, 2 fried eggs topped with tomatilla sauce and cheddar cheese. I had a Gateau St. Honore. It was not a cake. Clay and I both tried it and didn’t like it. Clay had Chubby Hubby ice cream. It’s banana?!?

The captain said in his noon briefing that we have a surprising shadow. He said 8 miles off our port side and pacing us is US Coast Guard ice breaker Healy. He said it was docked near us and we recall seeing it in Seward. He said he was surprised to see it so far south as it is an icebreaker and even more surprised to be called by them this morning and asked to identify himself as they let him know they were shadowing him. Weird. I saw a ship distant to us but parallel when I looked out the window this morning. I couldn’t see it clearly even with binoculars. But it was pretty big and since it was still mostly dark out, I could tell it was there because it was lit up on the horizon. I haven’t seen it since, but it has rained steadily to heavily all day. The swells are calmer than in the morning.

In the room now with a movie on TV. I’m typing and Clay is asleep. We watched all today’s lecture on TV this afternoon. At 5:15pm today we have the Cruise Critic Meet & Mingle. At 6:30pm we have reservations at Tastes. It is described as an international tapas type place that is always informal. You have to have reservations but there is no set limit to the number or charge for extra reservations. Clay didn’t try to get any extra reservations at Tastes yet, so it isn’t clear yet whether we’d like to or will be able to return.

Notes about our cabin 7042. Clay has gone outside while I’ve been at the desk with the lights on and he couldn’t see me. The promenade deck is busy, so that’s good news. We still keep at least the sheers closed when changing clothes. There is one 110 American-style outlet in the room. It is at the desk. Bring a power strip! There is a 110 outlet for shavers built in to the built-in hair dryer in the bathroom but it has a sliding door and a raised lip around it so you might not be able to get a plug seated in there. I couldn’t. Also, there is no power to that outlet when the bathroom lights are turned off. So there is no need to bring a nightlight. The good news is that there is a dim yellow light that emanates from below the full length mirror at the foot of the bed by the closet side. It seems to always be on and if you leave the bathroom door open at night there is enough light to manage. The bedside clock is also very bright on the other side of the bed and thus serves as another nightlight.

We got an extra 6pm reservation once each in Prego and Silk Road by showing up to talk to the Maître d’ in person about it. It would have been easier if the person handling reservations over the phone today could have done that. Tastes was OK. We will probably return and order other things. We ordered the Taco Duo not realizing it was one tiny chicken taco and one veggie. It was hard to each have a bite of a half taco. I liked the veggie and Clay liked the chicken so next time we’d ordered 2 and each have 4 bites of the taco we like. Clay also had some other dishes he wanted to try. After dinner we went to the 1974 movie White Dawn in the theater. We’d never seen it or heard of it. It said it was filmed entirely on Baffin Island. We have to sail around it to get to Greenland. After dinner we went to the Bistro to check out the chocolate fountain I had seen set up there last night when I got my hot water. It was there again tonight and since there were handmade marshmallows, I had to try it. Clay had to try the macarons and other cookies. I had 2 marshmallows and 1 strawberry in chocolate. Yum! There was a string quartet playing in the lobby. This is pretty much all wasted on us!

We got firm pillows tonight. Clay likes his. I asked for 2 so he can have one. Peace left the 4 soft, flat pillows so now we have too many. Hopefully she will take some away tomorrow. Tomorrow we are in Nome, our last US port. We have 2 excursions tomorrow.  We booked the complimentary visit here since it is a tender port and we thought we might need a tour ticket to get ashore. That for us is 10am to 1pm. Clay decided 2 days ago we should also have the Tundra Wilderness Tour at $200 each. He got us on a waitlist. Tonight we got our tickets for 4pm to 6:30pm. I am afraid that may mean 2 roundtrip tender trips. I hate that. I’ll let you know how it goes and I hope we see amazing wildlife for the trouble and cost!