White-beaked dolphins greeted us and played around the ship as we were sailing across the big bay of Breiðafjӧrður this morning. Shortly afterwards we were near the cliffs of Látrabjarg, the largest sea cliffs in Iceland as well as the westernmost point of the country. The cliffs teem with birds; auks of all kinds, fulmars, and various gulls. Every ledge is packed with breeding birds, large flocks are swimming on the water, and big numbers are flying past the ship. It is an incredible sight.
In the afternoon we landed on the island of Flatey. The first thing we saw were two fishermen cleaning their fresh catch of cod, the gulls waiting impatiently for a snack. Some of us went on a birding walk with the naturalists, the redshanks, snipes, and phalaropes were everywhere. Others joined the photography instructors and still others went independently.
The church on top of the hill was built in the early 1900s and on the outside it is not different from many other country churches in Iceland built in that era. But it boasts the most unusual and beautiful murals in the ceiling painted by the Spanish-Icelandic artist Baltasar Samper some decades ago. The pictures show how people lived on the island in the olden days; fishing, farming sheep, hunting puffins, and collecting eider-down. Behind the church is the first public library in Iceland from the late 1800s in a tiny little building.
The village itself is an idyllic place where time seems to have stopped a century ago. Most of the houses, all made of wood, were built around 100 years ago when this was still a thriving fishing place, but times have changed. Boats got bigger and there was no harbor to accommodate them. So, people moved to the fishing towns on the mainland and now there are only five year-round residents. But the present owners of the houses in the village—the descendants of the former owners—use them as summer homes, different branches of the family staying there for a week, one after the other.
After a great afternoon we returned to ship to prepare for the Captain’s Welcome Dinner. Always an enjoyable start to a most wonderful expedition.
