Yesterday was one of those outstanding days you can never forget. Crystal blue sea, flat as a mirror, leaving lonely and snowy Hopen Island in the morning. Before I started to work with Greenpeace, I did a lot of research with Cetaceans; whales and dolphins. So all the previous times I spotted these beloves creatures, I was in the middle of making an estimate of their abundunce for amongst others the Whales and Dolphins Conservation Society (WDCS) . So the first pod was quite easy to define: at least 12 white-beaked dolphins, feeding and breaching, later porpoising and changing direction towards the Esperanza, riding our bow wave, than travelling slow while heading off in a 94 degrees direction. At least two juveniles in this pod. When the sun travelled higher and the day grew older, after a short time of no spottings, we sailed right into Cetacean paradise. Dolphins in whichever direction, jumping, breaching, visiting us, leaving again and that game time and again. And as I can never take my eyes off them, I was very happy that I didn´t have to yesterday. There was no sound out there in the Arctic waters beside the breath of the dolphins and the blowing of some Minke-whales around.

White-beaked dolphins are quite stocky and robust. They have to be so, as they only occur in the cold waters of the Atlantic, including this ice-free Artic waters during the summer. Lagenorhynchus albirostris have a short, thick beak, usually white, which gives them a kind of cute look. They also have a prominent, sharp, clear-shaped dorsal fin, all black, which make them easy to define. Their diffuse coloration with the broad and grayish-white blazes on sides look like good pieces of art work. One more miracle in nature, that each of them is different.

Their behaviour fits in this environment. They are a bit slower and not as curious as the common dolphins I saw last time in the English channel, but not at all as shy as the little harbour porpoises I worked with in the North Sea. They are leisurely and pleasant. They come in groups of 5 to 50 and occasionally in pods of several hundred. They sometimes segregrate into age groups, which means that the juveniles form seperate schools from adults with calves, Indeed I saw groups of only youngsters yesterday, who seemed to have a lot of fun and were jumping higher than the adults. They hunt together with seagulls. The birds are spotting the fish from high above and splashing in the water. The dolphins sense those vibrations and come over to encircle the fish shoals to compress them. Then they feed joyfully together. Sometimes the dolphins bite into the feet of the gulls without hurting them, just to play. The outraged seabirds give quite a shrill anwer, which sounds really funny. Those dolphin-days are the best, where you always feel their presence around, sharing the same environment. The last things I saw was the huge blow spray of some big whale I couldn´t recognize, three times in the setting sun. The night, which followed, was also bright, no clouds, just sparkling stars. And as if to make the impression of the day complete, northern lights appeared in the lonesome frosty night, travelling through the sky like ghosts who had gotten lost, turning from white to green and red. Today the stormy weather is back. Very hard to recapture yesterdays feelings in this weather. But its in my memories... forever.

- Steffi