Rounding Kapp Thordsen our vessel enters Skansbukta, the most beautiful bay I have seen in the Arctic. This time I’m onboard the Bard, a catamaran with huge windows and hybrid electric engine. The bay’s cliffs are streaked with minerals, olive-green and maroon, and deeply incised by gullies. The sea colour is floury and spearmint through freshwater discharge from the Nordenskjold Glacier ahead. I see distant white reindeers and the abandoned huts of prospectors. Guillemots join puffins and fulmars swooping exposed bluffs, pungent with guano.
“Warm gulf stream currents meet the cold water to create upwellings of nutrients providing food for many whales,” said our Spanish marine biologist, Teresa Losada. She’s reeling off whale species, ‘belugas, blue whales, etc’, when up surface two pilot whales. With silent motors we watch them repeatedly arch out of the water. Teresa explains they are actually of the dolphin genus but can weigh in at five tonnes.
Shortly after, our barman, Ivan, appears as we pass Pyramiden, a former Russian coal-mining town not currently being visited by Svalbard operators. The Soviet Union started building it up from 1931 until operations ended when the communist empire collapsed in 1998. It’s backed by a 410-metre-high pyramidal mountain bearing a mine, from which a tramway once ferried coal down to the dock.
“It was at its peak between 1960-80, and 3000 people lived here,” said Ivan. “They had everything: school, hospital, Olympic-sized swimming pool, and greenhouses heated by coal. I think communism reached its ultimate goal here, something they never managed on the mainland”.
More information: Hurtigruten Svalbard