The day after the dragging anchor incident, we visited the fjord above and saw the magnificent glacier. After waiting for a big cruise ship to leave, we anchored by this little wooden shack and went ashore.
This shack was the famous Texas Bar:
To be honest, I have no idea how it end up to be called this, but the ever informative Cruise Handbook for Svalbard described how it came to be built by over-winter hunters in 1927. It could be the most northerly bar in the world but there are no serving staff.
It operates on an honour basis by which visitors leave offerings which give them the right to drink from bottles left by others. For example, we found the following on the shelf inside:
And yes, that is a bottle of the SV Delos's famous moonshine, which we found in a little hut towards the north of Spitsbergen.
For it turned out that the Delos crew had recently been sailing in these very waters on the 59N yacht Isbjörn and you can read about their visit to the Texas Bar on this blog entry. It says how they found a "a cheap plastic bottle of Vodka" left by Mats the previous year. Mats was our skipper and he had been emailing Delos and been told to look out for their moonshine.
Not having brought anything I felt I couldn't have a taste but did uncork it to smell its lovely aroma.
Then we all had a tipple of choice from those bottles that other crew members had brought, which included one of my favourites, namely Bruichladdich.
Cheers!
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