Our 2022 Sky Princess Norway and Iceland cruise had completed the Norway portion following our departure from Ålesund the night before, and now we had a sea day ahead of visiting Iceland by cruise ship for the first time. This wouldn’t be our first time in Iceland as we don’t only cruise (I know it feels like it sometimes) and we’d previously flown up twice for long weekends (see: Iceland (2015) and Iceland (2018)), but it would be the first time not requiring a flight and, with the exception of a stop at the country’s capital, we’d be visiting a completely new area of Iceland for us and several new towns and cities along the way.
Sea days are days to rest and recuperate and watch the blue water rolling past under blue skies.
Usually.
This particular sea day on Sky Princess started with a low, long, familiar sound.
“Was that you?” I asked, risking becoming the subject matter of an episode of Cruise Ship Killers for the sake of a poor and obvious joke.
Fog horns! That meant fog! Quiver in fear at our deduction skills! We know the sound of fog horns well as we live just ten minutes on foot from a port. We’ve experienced fog a few times on cruise ships in the past, too, with notably impressive memories of a foggy Suez Canal and on a red, glowing Scarlet Lady among others, but nothing like the duration we were about to encounter.
Wanting to give our cabin steward plenty of time to clean our room, we headed out for a walk on the open deck after breakfast. The Sky Princess infinity pool took on another feel entirely when looking out into the white, featureless void. For a brief moment it was possible to imagine this was a cruise in a universe where Olbers’s Paradox didn’t exist. Don’t pretend you weren’t thinking that too.
It was mostly devoid of people out on top of Sky Princess. The all-encompassing fog had dropped the air temperature down very noticeably, especially when compared to the warmth of the day before in Norway. One person who was out, however, was one of the ship’s photographers. We’d already encountered him a few times on this cruise, always asking us if we wanted to pose for pictures, us always smiling and replying no, me always pointing to my own camera. On this day, though, I got him to pose for a picture for me instead. And then we performed a quick draw shot of each other. Because we’re adults, that’s why. It was fun, and it wouldn’t be the only time we’d do this, also drawing against each other ashore much to the puzzlement of other passengers and ship’s photographers around when in Iceland. Again, fun. These sorts of interactions with crew are always welcome.
Sky Princess was like a ghost ship, doomed to sail some fog bank that awaited ships passing too close and sending them to the watery grave where all its own missing passengers were assumed to be. Another reason for the lack of people outside was the fog horn itself. We hadn’t realised until we decided upon our circuit of the top deck that it would be quite so deafening. We tried timing the gap between blasts in order to prepare ourselves for the next thunderous honk but spent a good portion of our morning walk yelling “Fuck me!” nevertheless. Probably a good thing we were not in earshot of other cruisers, to be fair.
At least we could see some sea from our balcony. This was the Norwegian Sea and not the North Sea as we’d initially assumed. Sea boundaries are a bit arbitrary, though, and, while seas sometimes feel like they have personalities, you are very unlikely to offend them by calling them by the wrong name.
There’s not a lot else to report about this foggy sea day on Sky Princess. It was a day of reading and eating and drinking and taking part in trivia quizzes. We snacked for the most part, and even our dinner ended up being bits and pieces from the International Café because we weren’t that hungry by the time evening rolled around. In addition, it was a formal night and we didn’t feel like dressing up too much (not that anyone really cares about that on Princess, thankfully). We won the very last of the quizzes – an 80s music one – and snatched up some of that Ship Champagne (spelling and pronunciation important).
The only point of contention was in the Princess Live! lounge. This cruise took part during raised COVID precautions aboard, which meant that you were expected to keep your mask on when moving around and in certain lounges, but not others (for reasons unknown). One where this was required, where announcements were made by hosts to ensure people complied, was Princess Live! We, of course, had no problem with this in principle, right up until the point they got everyone in the lounge to start a group singing contest between two halves of the venue. This ran counter to every precaution. Either enforce the mask rule and don’t do stupid singing events, or don’t enforce the rule and anything goes. This hypocritical approach to health precautions felt tokenistic and ultimately annoying. Whatever.
The view as we headed to bed was still that of thick fog, and the fog horns still blasted out every couple of minutes. An entire day of fog at sea!
In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll arrive at the port of Akureyri, Iceland.