Hurtigruten; Friday, 24 July, 2015

Several overnight stops ensured a slightly disturbed sleep, so I was up early just after the ship left Hammerfest.

With the meal schedule condensed due to excursions in the early afternoon (Breakfast ending at 10, Lunch starting at 10:30); I took advantage of being awake to have an early breakfast, thus putting a reasonable amount of time between that and a later lunch.

A brief stop in Havøysund and then up to the island of Magerøya and the town of Honningsvåg. Here most of the ship, having already consumed lunch, disembarked to go on a trip up to the North Cape. However, as we'd booked to do a breakfast trip on the way back south instead us (and about 20 other people) headed into the now deserted restaurant to have our lunch.

After lunch, and to enable to crew to undertake a training exercise, we disembarked and had a wander round the small town, visiting the small museum which had a very interesting exhibition on the forced evacuation and scorching of the North of Norway at the end of WWII.

Back on the ship just after the end of their training exercise the crew were all ready to go, but as with any excursion, someone had been late back to the bus at the North Cape and now they were running late back to the pier.

Eventually they all made it back on board, but we were nearly 20 minutes late heading out of port. The highlight of the afternoon was supposed to be the rock structure outside of Kjøllefjord called the chapel, but it was upstaged a few minutes later by the massive party of line dancers in full country and western get up who boarded at Kjøllefjord to head up to the next stop of Mehamn.

From Mehamn we continued north into increasingly foggy weather, so that by the time we reached Berlevåg it was really difficult to see more than a few meters. The Northbound and Southbound ships are due to pass just outside the harbour, but because we were running late the Southbound ship had to sit outside port for quite some time, as it wasn't safe to have two ships in port, before finally being allowed in as we left. With the obvious conclusion that midnight fog was considerably more likely than midnight sun, I turned in for the night.