- Ship
- 14 Breakfasts, 14 Lunches, 14 Dinners
When entering East Greenland, you sail along an unbelievable wild and uncharted coastline. A fair amount of our time the next couple of days will be at sea travelling North again. The strong East Greenlandic current is meanwhile carrying a parade of icebergs southwards. Glacier fronts calve straight into the ocean and there are many unexplored unnamed fjords. Weather and ice conditions decide our course of exploration more than ever! You aim to visit Umivik Bay, which was chosen as the launching point for the brave pioneering westward crossing over the Greenland ice sheet by Fridtjof Nansen in 1888.
As you reach the large Sermelik Fjord system near Tasiilaq, you are greeted by icebergs of all shapes and sizes, in a never-ending spectrum of blue and you collect some glacier ice for our drinks. This fjord system is awe-inspiring and could be explored for days. You make several remote anchorages and are constantly on the lookout for marine mammals!
You continue to the town of Tasiilaq via a tiny secret passage. With its 2000 inhabitants it is the largest settlement in East Greenland. It is home to an older and different Inuit culture, where shamanism and native culture is much more vibrant and alive than in other parts of Greenland. Here you are closer to the rural and original Greenland culture that most visitors unfortunately never experience! During our visit here, you will try to organize story telling of local myths and legends, as the one about tupilaqs. In Greenlandic Inuit religion, a tupilaq was an avenging monster fabricated by a practitioner of witchcraft or shamanism by using various objects such as animal bone, skin, hair or sinew. If lucky, you get to witness some ritual or traditional singing.
When you leave the Tasiilaq district northbound you are finally entering the Forbidden Coast of Greenland where travel even in this day and age means real exploration! You are visiting places where you might as well be the only visitors that very year. Thus, the following places are just examples of our possibilities. Weather and (now finally also) sea ice conditions play the key role for our day-to-day planning.
As you sail North above the Arctic Circle again, you get to experience the eastern wild, beautiful and unchartered coastline first hand. But you also see that even in these seemingly remote regions human influence has altered nature. The remains of the former US American air base Bluie East Two (1942-47) stand as a monument of human destruction midst the Greenlandic wilderness. Visiting this place is nevertheless extremely exciting.
In the ice choked Tuttilik Fjord, meaning the place where the reindeer live (a long time ago), you hope to go ashore and explore some abandoned Inuit winter houses. With some luck, you might also find the memorial built in honor of the famous explorer Gino Watkins that vanished here in 1932 while hunting seals from his kayak.
As you continue north, you enter some of the wildest coastal landscapes in Greenland. In favorable conditions, you enter Kangerlussuaq Fjord and Watkins Fjord with beautiful hiking possibilities.
In this area, you could also experience the first severe sea ice encounters during our voyage. Due to the cold East Greenlandic current, sea ice is normally blocking the entrance of Scoresby Sound until mid-July. But at the start of August the passage now has usually opened up reasonably. Still, every year is different and thus you have to adapt our plans to the sea ice concentration in that very year. If you encounter a fair amount of sea ice, you also want to make the most of it - scouting for ice-loving animals like seals or other marine mammals.
A little bit further up the coast is Nansen Fjord, which lies directly south from the impressive Gunnbjørn fjeld, Greenland’s (and the Arctic’s) highest mountain, measuring 3694 meters. You have now entered the area where you are most likely to see Polar bears and you intensify our scouting! Polar bear sightings are not an everyday thing in Greenland, but if you wish to see one, the leg from here to Scoresby Sound offers the best chances.
As you explore the area of Rømer Fjord, Deichmann Fjord and Steward Island our chances of seeing polar bears increase. On rare occasions even narwhals have been spotted here.
On our final days you aim to venture into Scoresby Sound, the world’s largest fjord system. Here, you might visit Vikinge Bay a sheltered place perfect for Zodiac cruising amongst magnificent basaltic columns and icebergs. Hall Bredning is a place where huge icebergs from the deeper fjords tend to accumulate; icebergs in a density and size you have not seen since leaving Ilulissat at the very start of our voyage. Though, the difference now is the magnificent mountain scenery in the background giving us even new perspectives. Finally, landing at Sydkap, you might get another chance to see Muskox or Arctic hare.