A Whale of a Tale

It was a rough overnight sail across Baffin Bay and our first visit to Groenland. The destination is Ilulissat and we were questioning why we would be coming to such a remote town. Greenland has a total population of 55,000 and Ilulissat is the second largest town with 4,500. The answer is quite simple. The glacier field of Ilulissat is a world heritage site and to me anyway should be considered one of the natural wonders of the world. After an initial walkabout of town with Jennifer, I have two missions needed to completed today. One, to hike to the Icefield Centre and overlook the icefield from the safety of terra firma and two, take an iceboat into the actual icefield and approach the face of the glacier where the calving of the ice takes place. Words cannot express the shear grandeur and awe-inspiring amounts of ice and power this natural phenomena has to display. I’ll let the pictures try and depict the scene but really one has to experience it firsthand to get a real feel for what it is all about. While I stood on the cold and windy boat deck, the iceboat navigated the ice field for the better part of an hour. I had my camera ready in the event of some ice calving. However, low and behold I was lucky enough to capture a humpback whale swimming near one of the icebergs and actually got a shot of it’s tail when it dove. I think the captain and I were the only ones to see it, as he circled back and cut the engine to follow the whale’s direction, but alas it was not meat to be. This certainly was a highlight for me and you’ll have to scroll down to the final picture to see what I was fortunate enough to experience.