May 8th - Hurtigruten (Trollfjord)

 There’s been a few short stops today, however, our ‘big’ activity was taking an excursion out for a bird ‘safari’, the main purpose of which was to see if we could track down some white-tailed sea eagles. 

It was a bit of an unusual start to our outing as we had to hop on to a smaller boat without either vessel stopping.  This actually involved our ship opening a ‘side door’ and then us climbing onto the other boat, in theory a little bit ’James Bond..ish’ but in reality not quite as exciting.  


Once on to the ‘safari’ boat though it wasn’t long before we’d seen our first eagle that had obviously been attracted by the fish one of the crew was throwing out as ‘bait’.  These birds are just magnificent and, with a body length up to 1m and a wingspan of up to 2.5m, it’s the largest of all eagles found in Europe.  Over the next couple of hours we were to see many more (34 according to the captain) and, although the temperature was bitterly cold, we had a fantastic time.  Unfortunately though the photos weren’t as great a success as the trip, the birds were just too far and fast to capture with the phone.  However, I did manage to get a couple of video clips.



In addition to the eagles though we’d seen some magnificent scenery and, due to the small size of the boat, managed to get to places where our ship couldn’t reach (sounds a bit like a ‘Carlsberg’ ad!😆).  One spot in particular was the Trollfjord, a fjord with quite a narrow entrance, steep-sided mountains surrounding it, and with beautiful gin-clear water, it’s just spectacular!  




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