End of March is approaching and spring has made itself felt already around the northern hemisphere. Even in the Bay of Bothnia the highpoint of the ice season has passed and the southern ridge of the ice cover has retreated to approximately Piteå-Kokkola line. The bottom end of the Bay of Bothnia still has a thick ice cover, in some places the fast ice is even up to 85 cm thick. It will take still quite some time for these to melt away and for the ice breakers to return to their summer moorages…

But what about our plastic wrapper, what has it been up to in the past 4 weeks? Well, not that much has happened to it. The area where the wrapper is located, has very close or compact ice, from 40 cm up to 70 cm of it. There is also rafted ice and rigged or hummocked ice in the area, and the wrapper has been drifting under this thick, ice cover. The wrapper might have occasionally hit a channel, which the ice breakers are keeping open for shipping, for the ships heading to and from ports of Kemi, Tornio and Kalix, the northernmost ports in the area. But the wrapper has not gotten that far in the past 4 weeks, it has barely made about 50 km. The wrapper was south of the Haparanda Archipelago National Park and Island of Sandskär in end of February, now it is about 20 km to west from this location. There is still a long way to reach the Swedish coastline, but perhaps it is heading towards southern waters? As the ice cover decreases gradually in the Bay of Bothnia, we might find our wrapper in open, ice free sea in four weeks…

On next week we will get an update of the voyage of our bottle. The bottle had drifted to close to 66 degrees North, when we cast our eyes on it last time, but where has it drifted since then? Has it crossed the Arctic circle or has it been lured again into a fjord, where it is held in captivity? Stay tuned!