THE BEAR HUNT
‘In an overnight passage we sailed in 24 hours of daylight’
It’s 0600 and I hear movement down below, our guide Marcel going for his shower. I’d woken a couple of hours earlier when I knocked a pillow covering the window and bright, bright, sunlight came streaming in. I couldn’t get back to sleep, we were in an area where polar bears had been recently sighted and I could feel they were out there right now.
Marcel came up, took one look around and calmly said, ‘There’s a bear.” Where? I’d been staring at the same area for two hours and seen nothing, in fact I still couldn’t see it!
We were aboard the expedition yacht Qilak in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard on a photographic expedition that was originally planned to mark a 60th birthday two years ago, but got rescheduled due to Covid. Qilak is a 66ft purpose-built high latitude expedition yacht owned and skippered by Belgian Philippe Carlier, whose unique concept came about after he bumped into designer Merf Owen in a pub in Hamble.
Built at KM Yacht Builders in Holland in aluminium, and launched in 2016, incorporates many of the skipper’s own ideas as well
