Wow, today is the penultimate (second to last) day of full expedition for all of us. Tomorrow we will be doing a wall dive near Longyearbyen and the following day is aerials and packing. As clichéd as it may be, I can hardly believe how fast it has all gone by. That sense of impending farewells is starting to grab hold of the trip, yet everyone is avoiding the topic. We have the web crew with us on this trip and they interviewed me last night. One of the questions they asked was, “what have you taken away from this series?” While there are many professional things I have learned and discovered, I think that above all, I have had the privilege to work with a group of amazing people, people who a year ago, were total strangers and have now become like family. In many ways, that is the best part of this past year. Now, as we all face the end of not only this shoot but of the entire series, we are all very sad. We leave this place in three short days, bound for London where we have some press work to do and various other odds and ends before I head home next week.

More on that later though, today is the focus of this blog and what a day it was. We returned to the walrus site this morning and quickly ascertained that there were walruses in the area. The goal was to film the walrus underwater and so Paul and Tooni set out in a zodiac to film them. Walruses are quite curious creatures and they were very interested in the small boats spending more than an hour surrounding them just off shore. From the bridge, we could see them circling and everyone was thrilled that they were willing to come so close. We never chase animals in this program, we only present ourselves at a respectful distance and hope that the animals are willing to come to us. The walruses were willing and those of us back on the Lance were sure that the away team must have captured fabulous footage.

After about two hours they headed back and we all crowded around them as they came ashore. Unfortunately, what we couldn’t have known was that the visibility underwater was terrible, only about 2 feet, so despite seeing loads of walrus on the surface, Paul spent over an hour in the freezing water and had nothing to show for it. Everyone is disappointed, especially after all the work that went into making this happen, but that is the way it goes when one is filming in the wild, nothing is predictable.

Tomorrow Lucy and I get in the water and we are both very excited…and sad. This will be the last full day of diving and the last dive of the entire series for any of us.

Until then…

To view all of Philippe’s video blogs from Oceans, visit EarthEcho’s Youtube channel: www.youtube.com/earthecho1

To learn more about the BBC/Discovery Channel co-production Oceans, visit: www.bbc.co.uk/oceans
These blogs are the express product of Philippe Cousteau and represent his own experiences and opinions during the expedition. The views and opinions within are in no way representative of the BBC and do not necessarily represent the views of the BBC.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 2:00 pm and is filed under BBC/Discovery OCEANS, Expeditions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.