exciting takes us in another direction. This can be strange at first for owners or charter guests who are used to leading quite scheduled lives, but once they see the rewards of this flexibility, they are converted to expedition style cruising.
BASE CAMP Back at the computer in Stockholm, much of my day is spent planning what can be planned in advance and talking with clients and brokers about how to prepare for an expedition. At the moment I’m working on projects as diverse as The Northeast Passage, Polynesia, Iceland and Madagascar. I’m involved in a lot of operational planning and answering questions based on my experience in the field; what the ice conditions will be like at a certain place at a certain time, where can the clients land in their aircraft, where can we resupply with helicopter fuel, what is the best time of year for a certain wildlife event, or which locations might be best for diving the submersible? Our team packages all of this into a plan for the Captain, crew and our guides to work from, but ultimately it is always the experience of the team on board that decides exactly where they will go and what they will do, which in term determines the quality of experience for the owner or guests.
In the afternoon I’d rather be heading aft to the helicopter to scout a mountain landing for the planned heliski operation, but instead I’m back at the computer as our team in the US is coming online and I’m settling in for a few more hours of video meetings. It’s an exciting time to be in our niche of yachting, with so many amazing new expedition yachts coming online including the SeaXplorer La Datcha, a yacht that we spent years working on the design with Damen Yachting.
and a change of course, ETA is confirmed, the crew starts preparing the tenders as we prepare to brief the guests over breakfast. But then a polar bear with a fresh kill is spotted on an ice floe in the distance, another course change, new ETA, the bosun is told we need the tenders sooner, since the guests have been called and they begin arriving on the bridge in their bathrobes peering through binoculars and telescopes as we approach the bear. Soon breakfast is forgotten as everyone bundles up and heads on deck and then down to the tenders to go out and take a closer look at the bear.
THERE IS ALWAYS A PLAN B The planned landing for a glacier hike will now happen a little later and fortunately the interior team aboard expedition yachts are used to this kind of spontaneity, so they forgive the bear spotter about breakfast being interrupted and are soon out on the bow taking photographs themselves!
It’s this kind of excitement that makes expedition yachting unique; we never know exactly what each day will bring, and every day is an adventure. We always have a plan, but we almost never follow it because something more
ONBOARD | SPRING 2021 | 127
At the moment a lot of my time is spent working on plans for the upcoming Arctic season, which is more complicated than usual due to some of these areas being closed to visiting vessels this summer. But we have managed to continue operating throughout the pandemic and it’s nice to see a message pop up from our team in the Pacific that they are en-route from Guam and on time to arrive over the Marians Trench in a few hours to deploy the sub for another dive to the Challenger Deep, 11km down to the deepest point in the world’s ocean.
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