When I got my open-water certification in the Florida springs as a college elective (followed by a drysuit diving course in Egypt), I couldn’t have known that I’d one day put those learnings to use in the Arctic. These are the places scuba diving can take you.

During the summer of 2015, I joined an international crew on a friend’s 37-foot sailboat for the biggest adventure of my life. Together with four men (I was the only American, not to mention the lone woman, among the Norwegian, German and Russian crewmembers), I set off aboard a sailboat named Barba on a five-month adventure. We left port in Southern Norway intending to sail as far as the Arctic ice surrounding the North Pole would let our fiberglass boat go. Our plan was to circumnavigate Svalbard, an archipelago home to more polar bears than people. We made it to 81 degrees north latitude, where the ice threatened to close in around us. Then we sailed around and back south to Stavanger, covering some 4,500 miles in total.

We had drysuits and a gasoline-powered compressor for filling scuba cylinders. We also had weapons—the norm for protection from polar bears beyond Svalbard’s main settlement, Longyearbyen. The adventurous Norwegian captain and I were the divers. The rest of the crew was tasked with polar bear watch topside. They were armed with flare guns (and heavier rifles if necessary), both to scare off any swimming bears approaching our dive site and to signal for us to linger during our scheduled safety stop (polar bears can only dive so deep). The worst-case scenario plan was in place, although we never had to use it.

Once, we woke up to the captain calling everyone to the deck. A young polar bear was attempting to board Barba. We kept it at bay by shouting, “Hey! Bear!” and swinging wooden poles (normally used for pushing ice) in its direction.

As for the diving, we didn’t do as much as we’d planned. The water hovered slightly above the freezing mark, the air just a bit balmier. Even in a drysuit, it was frigid—but it felt cleansing. I managed to get enough bottom time to ogle the undersides of ice floes and marvel at bommies covered with crabs, sea slugs and bright-orange and yellow anemones. As we hustled back onto the boat after one dive, we heard a walrus noisily exhaling clouds of breath off in the distance.

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On my last dip into those wild waters, I pulled on my drysuit to float beneath cliffs covered with thousands of squawking guillemots. As the seabirds soared above landscapes where polar bears prowled, I rolled onto my back like a sea otter, taking in the cacophony of life overhead in that vast Arctic wilderness. I thanked the universe that I’d somehow found my way there.