Soon after, we boarded BO-AT (Buoyancy Operated Aquatic Transport). As we were boarding they gave us “wet-suits”, to prevent us from being cold. It was a sunny day, so I didn’t felt like I needed one. Soon we departed and were traveling with much higher speed than I anticipated from a boat this size, I started to regret my decision of not taking a wet-suit as cold winds started to blew.

We sailed alongside beautiful landscape, full of small islands and stopped after about 20 minutes. The “captain” and his “first mate” gave us 5 (big) fishing rods and thought us how to fish. Soon after, to my greatest disbelieve, fishes started biting. And not some small fishes, no they were big, very big. We caught around 7 of them in about 10 minutes, then we were on our way again.

We continued between two big islands. Landscape here (all over Lofoten to be precise) was very interesting. Despite being near the sea, there were little to no trees and majority of vegetation was alpine, on higher grounds there were only grass and rocks. On the shady sides of “mountains” (the highest being less than 400m high) there was snow, a lot of snow.

After about an hour of sailing we turned in to a small fjord. There they served us fish stew, which tasted surprisingly good (as I don’t like fish that much). If nothing else it warmed us up, since we were mostly in the cold shade (fjords).

After meal we started heading back. This time we took a different route. Instead of going between islands, we went around southern one. Not long after we reached other side of the island, “first mate” started throwing bread crumbs in to the water. Seagulls soon started flying closer and closer, picking bread from the water. More and more gathered and closer and closer were they coming up to the point when they started landing on people and picking bread from their hands.

While this was spectacular to watch it wasn’t the main reason we went this way. As we soon learned, big screaming flock of seagulls attracted something else, something bigger. A big shadow fell on the ground as big eagle covered the sun. 🙂 At that point we threw some of the fishes we caught in to the water. Eagle slowly started to circle the site, descending until he plummeted in to the water, grabbing the fish. Surprisingly (?) he wasn’t successful on his first run, which was good for us, as we got another chance to watch him at his attack dive. Sadly by the time he caught the fish we were just a too far for my camera lens to get a 1M$ shot. But still, I managed to get some decent pictures.

Shortly after we arrived back to the port. Whole boat trip was about 4h long and I think worth every penny. I would go again to Lofoten just because of this trip. It was really an amazing experience that you just don’t get, if you travel alone.

After we came back to the camp, we decided to go canoeing. Three person were able to fit in to one canoe and as soon as we figured out how to put them in to the water, without getting wet, we were off. The lake was big, long to be exact. It took as around an hour to reach other end. There were no houses this far in to the mountains, nothing to make noise, just calm mirror-like water, trees, mountains and nothing else; surreal.

After almost 3 hours of canoeing we landed at camp and prepared for BBQ. More on this in my next post.