First serving: uunaalik

This is what it was all about - food. Good, wholesome, local, natural, food - the same food that made the ancestors of today's modern Iñupiat; not only their bodies but their culture, gave them a unique and deep knowledge base and sense of spirituality. All this continues today. Tools and weapons change, but the fundamental need remains.Doreen prepares to boil maktak into uunaalik to feed and warm the whalers even as they cut, share and divide the whale. It was a small, round, fat, inutuk - prized for its soft, tender maktak and meat: 27 feet, four inches. Now it is packed in big boxes, ready to go home

Whale comes, I get hurt, a prayer is said, a flag flies and there is joy

Seconds after Bryan harpooned a bowhead from Nukapigak 3 boat, I tried to raise myself higher over the windscreen of Nukapigak 1, somewhat more than 100 yards behind the strike. Just then we hit a wave - hard. A severe, sharp, pain ripped through my left groin. I buckled over, lost my balance and tumbled to the floor. Certain the pain was something I could stretch through and keep on shooting, I stood right back up but got ripped again. We smacked another wave, I fell, tried to get up, got ripped again, fell, tried to get up...

"Stay seated!" Edward shouted. "Don't stand up!" He knew I had been hurt but he had to get to the whale as swiftly as possible. Suddenly I knew that even from the midst of the action I was out of it. I could not stretch my way through this. I could not stand up. It hurt too bad when I tried. I had no choice but to stay seated, my view limited.

Fortunately, it was an instant kill. With me hardly able to see anything, EMN Crew secured the whale, Edward prayed over the VHF and I photographed what fragments of the scene I could. Next, Doreen hoisted the crew flag over Nukapigak 3 boat. Extending my camera this way and that as the boats rocked and shifted and the flag disappeared and reappeared in different places before me, I shot not by viewfinder but by internal vision. I captured a few mediocre flag images and then, for the first time since we had left the island, I pulled out my iPhone. From my seat in the still rocking and shifting boat, I shot just a few iPhone frames of the flag, this being the final one. My phone went dead.

It would now be a slow ride back to Cross Island. Suffering pain that alternated from mild to nearly unbearable, I stayed seated but shot pictures all the way back. I felt wonderfully happy. Everyone did. it was joyous in that boat. Another whale had come to the people of Nuiqsut. (Don't worry - just a badly pulled muscle or tendon. I will be sore and restrained for a week or so but I will be fine.)

The ocean awaits our return

The weather is improving. We might be heading back out soon.

Tommy yesterday

Flashback to yesterday: this is one of the three or four iPhone scenes I took with the iPhone yesterday, but was too tired to deal with before catching what I thought might be just a few hours rest before going back on the water. It is Tommy, preparing to swap the bomb on the harpoon and darting gun which he had thrown but missed, with this one.

Fog and wind, snow forecast

We are not on the ocean. I woke up this morning at 4:00 - the time Edward usually starts stirring - and all was quiet. The lights were out. No one was stirring. I went back to sleep, checked again at 4:30 - same thing. At 5:00, I peeked out the window and saw the flood lamps over the whale landing area peering back at me through a heavy shroud of fog. So I let my head hit sink into my sleeping bag until 7:30 when I got up for good. Now the fog is lifting, but a hard wind blows from the south. It is forecast to shift to the west and be gale-force by tomorrow. Snow is in the forecast for tonight. Maybe it will stick, maybe it won't. It's that time of year.