Saturday - day 9 - almost Djúpivogur, Iceland

On Saturday, we were supposed to visit Djúpivogur (Dyoo-pi-voh-gur), which was a little bit of a backtrack from our route around the north side of Iceland (I started making a travel map here: https://journeyinamazinggrace.travelmap.net/2026-travels but it only shows straight lines between ports so it looks like we're going overland... we are not!). We were supposed to arrive at 7am, and we got to the area where we were to anchor out by 7am. But the captain came on to announce that the waves were 4-6', the wind was blowing strongly from the northwest -- which would be perpendicular to the route that the tender boats would need to traverse to get us in to port. So, for the safety of the passengers and crew, the captain decided that we should not make the stop in Djúpivogur, but rather continue on toward our next port of call, Akureyri. Thus, we had a "bonus" sea day.

I ran up onto deck to try to take a picture of the town -- I don't know whether the ship had already moved far enough away or the town was very small (it did have very few residents), or that it was far enough down within athefjord and I couldn't see it, but this was the best picture I got! I think that the town is somewhere along the middle of that picture.

I did see some crop land along the fjord as we were moving away.

What was very fascinating was how quickly the crew turned around and prepared a sea-day's set of activities for us -- 

....updating the schedule online as well as providing a new printed calendar of events.

Even a letter from the captain was printed and provided to each cabin!

One of the added activities for the day was a lecture from a fellow from England, Tony Lee Moral, who had worked on David Attenborough's staff -- he had been scheduled to do this lecture later in the cruise, but he did it on our unexpected sea day instead. (He has other lectures that he will be doing later on the cruise.) We had honestly never known David Attenborough's name before (we are obvious uneducated rubes) but when we heard snippets of his shows, we recognized his voice.

Travel guide Gage did a presentation on "The World Up Close: The Wizard of Wireless" about Marconi and advances in communication with the use of wireless.

Another guest presenter, David Perry, presented on "Paddlewheels, Steam, and Speed" about the evolution of boat travel and amazing advances made during the 1800s.

One of the slides he shared told of a ship that crossed the international date line and equator at precisely midnight on December 31, 1899, thereby having different parts of the ship in two different days, two different months, two different years, two different seasons, and two different centuries, all at the same time! (He also said that it was possible that the ship wasn't in the exact location at the exact correct time, but it would be at least theoretically possible.)

There were a couple of venues that were scheduled to play country music on Saturday evening, so we went to listen... at one of them, I joined some other folks doing a line dance, and Carl and I danced to one song. (We're both fighting colds so we weren't feeling like being too energetic.)

Later in the evening, cellist Darius Uhl was back on the World Stage, so we enjoyed listening to his music.

Our ship was to cross for a short time into the Arctic Circle on this part of our journey. Because the ship had started on it way to Akureyri earlier than anticipated, the captain let us know that we'd be crossing into the Arctic Circle at about sunset, 10:05pm. We looked out off of our balcony at that time, and we didn't see any blue (or any other color) line, but the next day, we both...

... got certificates recognizing our accomplishment!

Aren't you impressed?!?!?

We have certificates from our cruise last year for crossing the International Date Line and the equator; one more certificate to add to our collection!