Following in the wake of Eric the Red; Brendan the Navigator and the Bismarck before it was sunk…….today we travelled through the Denmark Strait, which connects the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, and separates Iceland and Greenland. The waters are of strategic importance as part of the Greenland/Iceland/UK gap and the economic importance of rich fishing grounds. I seem to remember a few politically tense incidents in the 1980’s between Iceland and the UK about fishing rights….Iceland won (the US put pressure on UK to accept Iceland’s terms in order to keep NATO forces stationed at Keflavik….well it was still tense times with the USSR).

We didn’t get off the ship today……so there was time for ‘stretching with Claire’ :), a Greenland history presentation with Henning, Captain Leif Skog’s welcome aboard cocktail party and dinner and after dinner, a film ‘The Deep”, about a fishing trawler that sank in 1984 in the Westmann Islands and it’s sole survivor.

 

A small group of passengers saw a blue whale surfacing 3 times off the port bow this afternoon, and as soon as an announcement had been made, the rest of us scrambled to the observation deck….sad to say, whale didn’t surface again…..too many paparazzi obviously!!