Talbot

  • 1915 Prelevements eau baie de Talbot ©France Pinczon du Sel
  • 1743 Amarrage banquise ©EB
  • 1928 Jeremie et Leonie devant glacier Wykeham ©EB
  • 1054 Leonie entend le mouillage oceano installe en 2019 ©EB

Talbot inlet. This huge bay surrounded by glaciers is the scene of our mission. Animal life abounds here, well protected by an accumulation of ices, some more or less old icebergs or young sea-ice not yet melted - will they melt? - brash, pack, all kind of shapes, colors, heights. sailing and squeezing through that is exhilarating. The first objective is to recover the oceanographic mooring deployed from Vagabond's deck two years ago. This is Jeremy's challenge: after having listened, located the beep beep emitted by the pinger from the bottom of the sea, he presses on "release" but the acoustic release is not doing anything, nothing goes up! We tire our eyes by browsing the perimeter as best as possible but at the end still nothing, just disappointment. Is the acoustic release battery too low? However the mooring is closeby, 600m under Vagabond's hull. Will the Amundsen manage to recover it by sending an ROV to cut the ballast cable during the summer campaign?

The weather is perfect and we must take advantage of it. We do CTD transects and hydrographic stations, we collect water samples and do a lot of filtering. Days, nights without night, with watches shifts or steering in the maze of ice, a strange labyrinth where we are never sure to reach the next point. But at the end, we can approach the glacier fronts much more than in 2019!

Then we rest nearby the coast, go to shore to look for an untraceable weather station and meet 3 then 5 bears around! We can even observe the female with her two cubs nursing.

The locations selected for coralline search are difficult to reach. We can only wait or drift, moored on some big sea ice floes, we even let ourselves locked down inside the entrance of the bay by some huge multi-year ice floes drifting from the North. At the end we can only explore a small amount of the coralline sites planned.

When it's time to come back to Grise Fiord, Vagabond is escorted by ice fields for a long while, the magic never ends!

See Ellesmere 2021 photos.