Glittering Fjords and wonderful wilderness.
Overnight the fog melted away and we were awakened by a shaft of brilliant sunshine in our cabin. Bed tea followed soon afterward by a lazy Sunday breakfast. It's a hard life in the wilderness.
It was a perfect day so we pulled on our walking boots and set off across the bogs and followed streams gushing with meltwater towards Geldingafell via the col to it's east. Bog quickly gave way to boulders strewn with exuberant growths of lichens, mosses and squelchy mud. We climbed up onto the snow patches and watched a plume of fog temporarily engulf the boat a couple of hundred metres below us. Mostly though the air was clear and views spectacular.
The last three hundred metres to the col were a trudge up softening snow until we regained the ridge where the wind had blasted away all but the rocks and lichens. The summit itself was another one hundred and fifty metres of rock, mud and snow. To the north below us was a snow filled valley and a rescue hut on the shoreline then the blue Arctic Ocean stretching away to the fog belts lurking offshore. To the south fjords and snowy mountains, their tops scraped soft by ancient ice, marched inland to the Drangajokull Icecap. A fantastic place to be.
We descended quickly down the now soft snowfields and some of us were soon back at the shore washing away the sweat in the frigid meltwater streams. Afternoon tea back on the boat ended a perfect expedition.
We pulled in a forecast which mentioned mid week southerly gales so we have decided upon an early Monday departure for Isafjordur 25 miles away. That should give us plenty of time to settle the boat onto her mooring and prepare her for the next phase of her summer adventures.
On 15th July we will fly back to Isafjordur and set about an ambitious cruise to Tasilaq on the East Coast of Greenland then south and through Prins Christian Sund and then north up Greenland's West Coast to Aasiaat in the Arctic. That is if luck, the weather, the ice conditions or the boat maintenance trolls don't decide otherwise!
