This Is My Secret: The Blog and Website of Writer Kristin Cashore

In the coming weeks, I want to blog about a typical day on board; tell little stories of routines and big stories of adventures, in pictures; introduce you to some of the characters from my journey; familiarize you with the beautiful Antigua; and talk a little about my writing work on board.

I want to start, though, with a simple series of landscape photos, just to give a sense of atmosphere. For two weeks, with the exception of one day when we docked at the research station in Ny-Ålesund, we were alone on both land and sea. At the beginning of our trip, on October 1, we had about 10 and a half hours of daylight. As the trip progressed, we began to lose daylight steeply, as much as 40 minutes per day, such that when we returned to Longyearbyen on October 15, we had about 6 and a half hours of daylight. Can you imagine such a change, over the course of two weeks?

It made for some dramatic and moody skies.

Notice, in these pictures, how often my camera would reach for the Antigua in the…

On a cold morning on the last day of September, we flew into Spitsbergen, the western-most island of the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. We were having rare sunny weather, so the pilot changed course a bit to give those of us on the right side of the plane a beautiful Svalbardian view.


We landed in the town of Longyearbyen, which is one of the few permanently populated places in Svalbard.



The moon you can see, big in that sky, was a permanent fixture for the first week of our journey. It never set, it just circled the sky, always low and big against the horizon. Then, with the new moon, it set -- and never came back again.

Our time in Longyearbyen was brief, but I did manage to pop over to the library :o).


The next morning, with our suitcases in hand and a stomach full of nerves, we went to the pier to board our new home, the Antigua.


Personally, I thought she looked pretty small for 40+ people. And for two weeks on the Arctic Ocean. And for not puking the entire time. What was I th…