Greenland & The Arctic Circle

Today we arrived in Ilulissat early in the morning. It was very foggy and she ship had to maneuver slowly to avoid the icebergs, growlers and bergy-bits (that's a thing, look it up). Once we arrived in Ilulissat the crew launched the Zodiac boats. We are not using the tenders today, but the smaller 10 person Zodiac inflatable boats to get from the ship to the shore. There was also another ship already here outside of the bay that we saw in Nuuk, so they must be following a similar itinerary to ours.
The first excursion was a 'hike' along a boardwalk from the museum, along a valley covered with natural summer flowers, berries and vegetation. Then up to the rocky cliff on the edge where the glacier descends from the mountains into the bay. They glacier moves extremely slowly and breaks off, or calves, off into the icebergs that float out into the bay and then finally the ocean. Unfortunately we cannot have sunny days every day, so today was foggy and drizzly, so we had to wear our waterproof pants, boots and jackets. Where the glacier meets the bay is an immense wall of ancient ice many centuries old created by millennia of snow packed on top of snow that eventually makes it was down to the ocean. It was an amazing sight of nature.
Then we had a visit to a Greenlandic sled dog home where they raise native Greenland dogs that pull the sleds during the winter for ice fishing on the frozen bay. It takes 13 dogs to pull the sled. Once they finish with fishing it is about 1,500 pounds of fish. So the dogs pull all the fish, fishing gear, people and sled back. They do this almost every day to fish for their own use for eating and to sell to the fish factory near the bay. This is how the locals that have sled dogs gather their own food and make money selling them for export to Denmark. Only a few of the locals have fishing licenses that allow them to do this and sell the fish for export. The dogs are considered adults when they are 6 months old and are trained to pull the sleds. They are not pets, but working dogs. They live outside all year long. We were able to visit with the husband and wife that own the sled dogs, breed them and use them for their fishing business. They train the dogs in the summer using the same sleds to prepare them for the winter. We were able to handle some new puppies that were just 14 days old. There were some older pups that were near the age to begin as sled dogs. We could not play with them since they are not 'pets', but working dogs.
Once we were back onboard the ship, the skies cleared up some and the sun came out finally. We were able to see more icebergs and also a few humpback whales in the bay. They we set sail for our overnight trip to the next port.Read more