… really depressing night last night. We hit a few strong waves round about 04:00 and that awoke me. I couldn’t go back to sleep and so ended up making a visit down the corridor for the usual reasons. I must stop drinking tea late at night.
But after that, I managed to go back to bed and to sleep, only to wake up 90 minutes later.
Despite the early awakening it was still a struggle to leave my stinking pit and I only just managed to beat the third alarm call.
Upstairs on deck it was cold and windy, and really foggy too. We had somehow managed to negotiate the entrance to the harbour at Heimaey here on Vestmannaeyar without having to turn round at the harbour mouth and reverse in as we did last time. Instead, we turned round inside the harbour.
After breakfast I had a little relax and then took Rosemary to visit the old buildings down by the lava flow. She had missed them last time.
Later on, while Rosemary went for a walk to the museum, I went for a really good stroll around the town and right around the other side of the harbour and the fishing docks. And if you think that I smell bad, you should smell the air when you have a fish-processing plant on one side of you and a colony of seabirds on the other.
One of the things that I did was to make some kind of story of photographs involving a returning trawler, a couple of fork-lift trucks stacking boxes full of fish, another fork-lift truck loading them into a shipping container, a huge lifting truck loading the container onto,the back of a lorry and finally the lorry disappearing into what passes for the sunset around here.
There is a ship repair yard here too and it makes the one in Granville pale into insignificance. They have a kind of internal railway system to move the ships around from the slipway and although it wasn’t being used it was still something interesting.
But I was surprised to learn that one of the largest customers for Icelandic fish is Nigeria. I wasn’t expecting that at all.
Back on board ship I started to edit the outstanding pile of photographs but didn’t get very far because it was time for lunch. And time for an argument too (it didn’t take long, did it?) when someone asked me if I would be reaping the benefits of Brexit.
This afternoon I had another good crack at the photos and managed to edit quite a few dozen, although I was interrupted by going to crash out for a good 90 minutes during the afternoon. I’ve not been having such a good day.
But I’m impressed with some of the photos that I have taken. editing them, cropping and enlarging them has produced a good few that are quite spectacular. Investing in this camera was a very good decision.
Bad news though in that we aren’t going to go near to Surtsey to have a close look at the island. The sea is too rough and the weather is too bad for us to approach it with anything like the proximity that we need to have a good look.
After tea we had a singles party but there were only a few of us there. The weather has really got up now and the waves are not to everyone’s liking. But there was one person too many – a young guy who had been everywhere and done everything, a German who blamed the French for all of Germany’s problems.
I really don’t know where they dig up these people.
The evening soon came to a close as people disappeared quite quickly. I stayed up to do a little work and to organise myself better. We gain an hour tomorrow so we aren’t in too much of a rush to go to bed.
