We left Akureyri, heading west and then south-west towards the south-east coast of Greenland and the town of Tasiilaq. We spent a night and a day and a night at sea. We were heading south, out of the zone of 24-hour daylight, so on the second night we had a sunset at sea:
We had on board with us three Danish Ice Pilots, who were on duty round the clock, in 8-hour shifts, as long as were in Greenlandic waters. This is mandatory . . . for obvious reasons. We arrived in Tasiilaq in the early morning, in thick fog - this was a pattern we became accustomed to. It's said that mountains make their own weather . . . mountains plus the icecap certainly do! The captain (or maybe the ice pilots) decreed that running tender boats ashore was unsafe in the fog, so we waited for the sun to burn it off.
After not too long, the fog and cloud started to lift:
And a large iceberg, that turned out to be quite close to the moored ship, emerged startlingly from the fog:
Across the bay, another berg became visible:
and the familiar sight of coloured wooden houses climbing up the mountain, still slightly hazy with mist:
Constructing buildings directly on the bedrock is now essential as the warming climate is melting the permafrost and making older buildings unstable.
The clear water also revealed a beautiful undersea world:
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