 On his return from Franz Josef Land in 1897, Bruce worked in Edinburgh as an assistant to his former mentor John Arthur Thomson, and resumed his duties at the Ben Nevis observatory. In March 1898 he received an offer to join Major Andrew Coats on a hunting voyage to the Arctic waters around Novaya Zemlya and Spitsbergen, in the private yacht Blencathra. This offer had originally been made to Mill, who was unable to obtain leave from the Royal Geographical Society, and once again suggested Bruce as a replacement. Andrew Coats was a member of the prosperous Coats family of thread manufacturers, who had founded the Coats Observatory at Paisley. Bruce joined Blencathra at Tromsø, Norway in May 1898, for a cruise which explored the Barents Sea, the dual islands of Novaya Zemlya, and the island of Kolguyev, before a retreat to Vardø in north-eastern Norway to re-provision for the voyage to Spitsbergen. In a letter to Mill, Bruce reported: "This is a pure yachting cruise and life is luxurious". But his scientific work was unabated: "I have been taking 4-hourly observations in meteorology and temperature of the sea surface [...] have tested salinity with Buchanan's hydrometer; my tow-nets [...] have been going almost constantly".
