Better Than Awesome.

Max and I went for a walk down onto the beach yesterday, and we saw what is for sure the coolest part of the Big Ice.

It might be nice of me to tell you right away what this amazing, awesome, fantastic sight was... but... I choose suspense. Here's the story. First of all we were walking down to the beach with the plan to go for a walk on the ocean (love saying that). As we got down onto the ice, we noticed a big black thing way, way out on the ice and decided that our goal would be to reach it and find out what it was. We had to walk out about 15 minutes out onto the ice just to get a view that looked something like this:

Well, this is not a very clear indication of exactly what the Thing was... So we trekked on.

Inverness was getting pretty far behind us...

The distance on such a huge span of ice is deceiving. The thing you're trying to reach always looks so close, and then you realize you just walked for 5 minutes and the view barely looks different at all, and you feel like you've been walking in one place for a long time. It kind of felt like we were the guy in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who keeps coming out of the forest over and over again. You'll laugh if you know what I'm talking about, and if not, too bad. So anyway... we realized after a while that the Thing really was getting closer, and that it was moving. The plot thickens.

Okay, I don't have any pictures between now and the next part, so I will now reveal the secret.

IT WAS A SEAL.

This was more exciting than I can even describe in words, and we moved closer to the seal to get a better look. It was moving around on the ice, digging at a hole in the ice with its flippers, and lifted its head a couple of times and barked. Meanwhile Max and I are filming and snapping pictures of it, while creeping forward as cautiously and quietly as you possibly can on ice that cracks and crumbles with each step. Finally, the seal decided it had had enough of just sitting there on top of the ice while we moved closer, and slipped with one beautiful, fluid motion, through the hole it had made in the ice, and into the water. This revealed to us... none other but... BABY SEAL.

Yep, turns out that behind the giant 'mother seal' (as we now started to call it), there was a seal pup, just chillin' (literally - it was cold out - although he did have a lot of thick-looking fur) on the ice. This new twist in the plot just definitely made my day.

It was also a little scary, because we had heard about 'seal attacks' from some of the locals, and we could hear the mother seal scratching on the ice from below every once in a while. But the coolness of the situation took precedence, so we stayed quite a while before running back to tell our housemates the story. Here are some (only slightly zoomed) pictures I took.