Wednesday - day 12 - Seaday

We would have two sea days as we travel from Iceland to Greenland.

We picked up two "ice pilots" at our last port in Iceland, to help with the navigation as we got close to Greenland. 

On Wednesday, the captain was speeding along so we'd be well along the route before coming to areas where there would potentially be icebergs and fog and where he would want to slow down.

We joined cruise director Jai talking with Staff Captain Simen van der Veen. The staff captain is next in line to the captain, and has responsibility over many departments on the ship.

Next we joined a talk by travel director Gage which gave us some insights into life in Iceland -- cute puffins on the screen...

... but most of his talk addressed living in a place where there are very long days for several months (including 24 hour days), and then very long nights. The talk included recorded interviews with two individuals who live in Iceland -- one a city dweller in Reykjavik (southern Iceland), the other a sheep farmer in the northern part of Iceland. 

Similar things they related: in the long daytimes, it is hard to sleep (the farmer indicated that it is hard for them to get their children to go to bed). The city lady indicated that she has blackout curtains and eye masks to help with sleep.

The farmer lets their sheep go out to higher country to graze during the summer. In September, all of the farmers go to the higher country to retrieve the sheep. They bring them to a common location and then sort them into separate pens so each farmer gets his own herd to return to his farm. He also said that they shear them at this time -- the sheep are primarily grown for meat, but they also have a wool processing facility on their farm. I would guess that the meat sheep are processed for their meat at this point rather than keeping them through the winter, but he didn't say that.

In the winter, the city lady said that she has a daylight light in her home and takes vitamin D and fish oil to help with the difficulties of no sunshine. The farmer said that they use illuminating lights on their foreheads/hats to enable doing their chores around their farm. 

We listened to another lecture by Tony Lee Moral about David Attenborough's Zoo Quest years...

He had a copy of David Attenborough's application letter to the BBC -- David was rejected for an "on-camera" position because his front teeth were too prominent. He got a job working for them behind the scenes, but because the "expert" was not very good in front of the camera, he ended up being an on-camera person for BBC. 

Cruise director Jai did a talk about the history of Holland America Line. It was interesting about their entry into passenger travel, and how Holland America embraced the immigrants looking to travel to America. While other lines carried the immigrants as "steerage", not much more than cargo, Holland America had a "emigrant class" on their ships with cabins and they were actually fed 3 meals a day. I think he said that the Atlantic passage was $10/person (and I think he said all the lines charged the same, but that Holland America did a lot more for the immigrants).

We wrapped up the day listening to singer and pianist Kyle Esplin -- from Scotland, self-taught - everything from ballads to classical to rock'n'roll. The picture shows that we could see him and the "Dam Band" on stage, but also had a good view on the screen of his piano playing.

Fog rolled in at about 6:30pm, and the foghorn started blowing every 2 minutes. We had been cautioned that we might hear it in our cabin as we are very close to the front of the ship, but we don't hear it much in our room at all.