Our final day saw us back at the floe edge, watching and waiting. The team pulled out kayaks and several of us opted to explore the water’s surface for signs of wildlife. It was serene and a little surreal, our paddles crunching as they broke through thin layers of ice. Then it happened. Not a narwhal, but a polar bear appeared on the ice and slipped into the sea in front of us. We instinctively stopped, gripping our paddles. I watched as it gracefully glided through the water towards an incoming mist, then disappeared as though a figment of our collective imagination.
An hour later, with the polar bear long gone, Billy suggested we go for a swim, and two of our group of 12 accepted. There I spent half an hour, cracking through near-invisible newly forming surface ice crystals with each arm stroke, occasionally working up the courage to dive under the waves. First, I spotted the tiny orange dots clinging to the underside of the ice – microorganisms, the first signs of the line of life. Then, before I hauled myself out with all the finesse of a rotund seal, I saw… something, metres below me, deep in the near black waters.
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It was a pale, torpedo-like shape of a small mammal swimming far beneath my fins. I stared hard. I couldn’t be sure it was narwhal, though I was not convinced that it wasn’t – and when I looked up no one else was in the water to verify what I’d seen. It was an aptly indeterminate sighting for a mythical marine mammal, and one that despite the subzero temperatures, made me warm all over.
How to do it
The writer was a guest of Arctic Kingdom (arctickingdom.com) on their Narwhal & Polar Bear, Floe Edge Safari (prices from CAD$20,569, includes all food and drink, return internal flights from Ottawa to Pond Inlet and snowmobile transfers, accommodation in the Arctic in hotels pre and post camp as well as ‘ensuite’ tent accommodation on the ice). Trips run each year in May and June. As with all safaris wildlife is unpredictable so seeing a narwhal or polar bear is never guaranteed.
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For more information about Baffin Island see destinationnunavut.ca
For more information on Canada see explore-canada.co.uk
Where’s the furthest you’ve travelled to spot rare wildlife? Please share your experiences in the comments below
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