Voyage North - a photo essay: (10) south-west Greenland sea

We left Tasiilaq, heading south along the SE coast of Greenland towards Cape Farewell and Prince Christian Sound (the sound is a route through the Cape Farewell Archipelago). The plan (or hope!) was, after a night at sea sailing south, to sail through the Sound, a narrow and dramatically scenic gorge, and then along a fjord to the town of Narsarsuaq. But the weather and the conditions were against us, and Ice Pilots said no . . . what they say goes, without argument.

There was a large iceberg grounded at the narrowest part of the sound and it was impossible to get through; and no, we couldn't go and look at it because we wouldn't be able to turn round to get out . . . we'd have to exit the narrow gorge backwards . . . so we sailed the long way round the Cape. All plans in Greenland are subject to last-minute change because of the vagaries of the weather and the ice. It also turned out that we couldn't call at Narsarsuaq because there was a storm in the fjord system of the archipelago and it wasn't safe to take the ship in.

So after a night at sea we spent the next day sailing up the coast of SW Greenland. We were quite a distance off the coast, and the spectacular scenery was shrouded in sea mist and low cloud. A rather lovely glacier - Jakobshavn Glacier - was hard to see clearly:

There were also icebergs all the way up the coast:

Typically, towards the end of the day, the mist lifted and we had clear weather with good visibility:

As we had been unable to spend the day in Narsarsuaq, and had consequently continued travelling north instead, the captain arranged an unscheduled stop at a town not originally on our itinerary for the next day.