By Corey Sandler
Sailing out of the capital city of Reykjavik, we’re off on a partial circumnavigation of Iceland and from there to the islands of Faroe, Shetland, Orkney, and the United Kingdom.
Ísafjörður, the Ice Fjord, is the furthest north port we will visit on this cruise, at 66 degrees 4 minutes North, 23 degrees 7 minutes West. That is just 55 kilometers or 34 miles below the Arctic Circle.
It’s a pretty small town—most places in Iceland are—with a population of about 2,559 close friends and sisters, cousins, and aunts.
We arrived this morning to a glorious day under blue skies and a warm sun. Here is some of Ísafjörður without the ice:
Vigur Island and The Birds
I went with a group of guests on a boat trip deeper into the fjord to visit Vigur Island, a privately owned speck of land that is home to three families…and tens of thousands of birds.
We saw puffins and guillemots and eider ducks, who were quite well behaved. And then there were the terns, who don’t much like people or other birds; they are very protective of their nests. It was straight out of a scene from The Birds.
Alfred Hitchcock (and British author Daphne du Maurier, who wrote the novelette on which that great movie was based) would have been delighted, or terrified, or both.
We will cross the Arctic Circle—while at sea—on Thursday night after we depart Ísafjörður, and then drop below it to Akureyri. After we leave Akureyri we will go back into the Arctic for a few hours as we round the northeast corner of Iceland early Saturday morning.
A month from now, our plan calls for us to cross back over from London to the east side of Iceland and then to Reykjavik. In doing so, we will have accomplished an aqueous circle of Iceland.
All photos and text Copyright 2019 by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. See more photos on my website at http://www.coreysandler.com
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