Seglvik. What I Had Forgotten to Plan For.

There’s something you sometimes learn too late on a journey: what matters most isn’t what you prepared for, it’s what you forgot to anticipate.

I had prepared everything. Everything except what mattered.

The idea was simple: go observe orcas and humpback whales in the Norwegian fjords in December, and photograph them underwater. I had bought a housing for the Canon 5D Mark IV—found by chance secondhand, which sealed the fate of this journey. I had ordered the accessories, the seals, the handles. I had spent hours reading about underwater photography, the settings to use, the pitfalls to avoid. I had contacted Valhalla Orca Expedition in Seglvik, booked the outings, organized the trip: flight to Tromsø, bus heading north, all the way to this small hamlet at the end of a fjord where orcas winter with the herring.

I was prepared.

But before Seglvik, there was Tromsø.

Just one night, time to transit. I had already been here in 2019—and finding these streets again, these shops, these cafés where the light is warm and the coffee burning hot, it did something to me. A city you love, you recognize it immediately. The same painted wooden facades, the same harbor, the same Arctic cathedral on the other side of the bridge. I walked around, I went into the same café as in 2019, I watched the people. There was nostalgia in all of it, and a bit of sorrow too—the kind you don’t explain to passersby, that you keep to yourself at the bottom of a cup.

I left the next morning heading north, by bus.

What I had forgotten to ask myself: what light, in late December, at this latitude?

In December 2024, I was in the Faroe Islands. Little light, short days, but light nonetheless—that low Nordic glow that can be magnificent when it deigns to show itself. I had kept that in mind as a reference. Seglvik couldn’t be much different.

What a geographical mistake.

The Faroe Islands are at 62 degrees north latitude. Seglvik is at 69 degrees. Seven degrees more doesn’t seem like much on a map. In reality, it changes everything. In December in Seglvik, the sun doesn’t rise. Not at all. The polar night begins in late November and doesn’t end until mid-January. What you get instead is a twilight—bluish, uncertain—that appears around nine in the morning and disappears around two in the afternoon. Five hours. Five hours of diffuse glow that comes from nowhere, without cast shadows, without direction, without color. No dawn, no sunset. Just this pale clarity that settles in and leaves without warning.

Now imagine what that means underwater.

I had bought a waterproof housing to photograph in the dark.

The Canon housing stayed in my bag for a while. Then I took it out, on principle, for the snorkeling. It was -5 degrees Celsius on the zodiac. Maybe colder with the wind. You dress accordingly: survival suit, thick polar gloves, balaclava, goggles. This outfit has one main virtue—it keeps you warm. It has one crippling flaw for a photographer: with polar gloves, it’s virtually impossible to handle a camera. The controls, the rings, the buttons—nothing responds. You take off the polar gloves and put on thinner gloves. Within minutes, your hands are frozen. So you put the polar gloves back on.

I spent part of the zodiac outings watching orcas with my hands in my pockets.

Orcas are fast. This isn’t new information, I knew it intellectually. What I hadn’t grasped is what “fast” actually means when you’re trying to photograph them from a zodiac bouncing on the waves, with gloves that make your fingers independent of any intention, in a twilight that forces you to push ISO to indecent values—and even then, only during a five-hour window, provided you went out at the right time. Humpback whales are more cooperative—their movements are slow, almost deliberate, they blow for a long time before diving. You have time to prepare. With orcas, it’s different: a dorsal fin cutting the surface, two seconds, it disappears. You trigger too late, or too early, or in the wrong direction.

I’ve been a photographer for a long time. This journey reminded me what it means to reach your limits.

The snorkeling deserves a paragraph of its own.

The idea is beautiful: get in the water when the whales are close, see them from below. The guide jumps in first, we follow, we swim toward the animals. In theory, it’s an extraordinary experience. In practice: the water is a few degrees above zero, and below the surface, the five hours of bluish twilight from outside no longer matter. It’s darkness. Not dim light—darkness. You can see a few meters in front of you, no more. I had my weight belt around my waist, over the neoprene suit, the housing in my hands. A humpback whale passed by—massive, slow, indifferent, just a few meters away. I pressed the shutter.

The images are there somewhere, in a RAW file. A gray smudge in black water.

And then there was this moment.

I was at the surface, looking down—the dark water, almost nothing visible. And suddenly, she was there. Below. A humpback whale, motionless at first, then she began to move. To advance, turn, move through the black water with a slowness that didn’t belong to our world. Not a quick pass. A dance. Slow, sweeping, complete. I watched her for a long time.

At some point, I stopped trying to film.

I don’t know exactly when. There was no conscious decision—just the understanding that the camera would be useless here, and that what I had before me deserved better than being watched through a viewfinder. I lowered my hands. I watched.

That’s the clearest memory I bring back from Seglvik.

So a word of advice, if you’re considering this journey: if you’re not an experienced photographer with real expertise in marine photography, in suitable physical conditions—leave the camera behind. Take your time. Observe. The spectacle is magnificent, unforgettable. And come back to photograph when there’s more light.

I’m 64 years old.

I mention this not to complain, but because it’s a fact that matters in what follows. After thirty or forty minutes on a zodiac at -5 degrees Celsius, putting the weight belt around your waist over the suit and jumping into the water: doable. Swimming behind the guide trying not to lose sight of the orcas: doable. Holding the camera in the cold water with hands that are starting to not really obey anymore: barely.

Getting back into the zodiac.

That’s when I understood that I should have done more physical preparation before leaving. A zodiac has no steps. You have to pull yourself out of the water with the neoprene suit weighing you down, the weight belt, arms already tired from the cold. The guides help—they’re efficient, used to it, they know exactly how to grab, pull, stabilize. It’s doable.

But “doable” and “prepared for” are not synonyms.

One morning, on the way back, the weather changed.

The storm wasn’t forecast—weather is never 100% certain in these waters. We couldn’t return to the Seglvik base. The zodiac moved forward in the dark, the waves harder than on the way out. It was noon. Noon, and it was night—black, complete, without nuance. Because outside the twilight window, there’s nothing. That’s also what December is at 69 degrees north: total disorientation, time losing its meaning, the impression of navigating toward midnight when you haven’t even passed lunchtime.

It’s in these moments that you understand the worth of the people guiding you.

They were calm, decisive. They knew exactly where to go—Valhalla’s second base, accessible from where we were. We arrived. They dressed us again, warmed us, fed us. Things moved very quickly despite the unexpected.

I spent the night in a local resident’s small summer house. I don’t know who he was. The house was simple, clean, quiet. Outside, the storm, the fjord, the Arctic darkness. Inside, warmth, calm, and that strange feeling of being exactly where you needed to be—even if it wasn’t where you had planned to be.

What I brought back from Seglvik photographically isn’t up to what I had imagined. That’s the honesty required here. There are images—dark dorsal fins on dark water, puffs of white vapor disappearing into the blue twilight of eleven o’clock, a few silhouettes of snow-covered mountains before the darkness reclaims its rights. There’s something in that which is true, which perhaps says better than anything what the Arctic in full polar night really is. But it’s not what I went looking for.

What I had forgotten to anticipate: that on December 26, at 69 degrees north, the sun doesn’t rise. That five hours of bluish twilight don’t replace light. That the speed of orcas is incompatible with polar gloves and frozen hands. That getting back into a zodiac at 64 after an immersion in icy water requires preparation you can’t improvise. And that a storm, a night at a stranger’s house, and guides who don’t lose their heads—that’s part of the journey, whether you planned for it or not.

One last thing, and it’s important.

Everything I experienced there—the zodiac outings, the snorkeling in icy water, the storm, the improvised night, and also those moments when a whale dances beneath your feet in the darkness—none of it would have been possible without Valhalla Orca Expedition. These are passionate people, and you truly have to be to do this work. Passionate, competent, and above all conscientious—because you quickly understand how difficult it is to supervise people from all backgrounds, of very different ages and physical conditions, in such conditions, and to remain available and attentive after a long exhausting day in the cold.

I want to thank from the bottom of my heart Jeff, Diego—whose photos and videos are magnificent and worth checking out—and of course all the others. The welcome in Seglvik would deserve an article of its own.

(Diego’s Instagram: [link to add])

I’ll come back. Not right away—I have other projects in mind. But surely later. In January, when a few hours of real light return. With better knowledge of what this terrain demands. And with a few months of serious physical preparation behind me.

But I’ll also keep this journey for what it is—not the journey I had planned, but the one that showed me exactly where my limits are. And which, one stormy morning at eleven o’clock in the night, put me in the hands of people who knew theirs perfectly.

That’s valuable information. You won’t find it in travel guides.