We had visited St Kilda before on 2 different legs of our Barbados to Svalbard trip on Silver Cloud. Once after a struggle against bad weather. And once with no adverse weather to contend with.
Friday, 20.June. St Kilda
We had the earliest breakfast possible in the restaurant and then went by Zodiac to land on Saint Kilda around 8:30 am. There were two organised hikes but we had got permission from Werner to go off by ourselves. The island was covered by low cloud and we walked past the buildings of the Ministry of Defence and up the road until we were well into the clouds. Then we decided it was futile continuing further and retraced our steps down out of the cloud. We then with a little difficulty cut across country to get to the end of the row of cottages on the old main street of St Kilda: This involved crossing a stream which I managed successfully. We visited the graveyard and the museum house and then walked on to the gun which have been installed at the end of World War I. Then back to the church and schoolhouse which were pleasantly empty.
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There was a long queue for the zodiacs so we sat near the gabions for a while and enjoyed a banana. Then back to the same queue but it dispersed fairly quickly and we had a zodiac cruise round the bird filled cliffs for about half an hour with Nikolai, a Norwegian who in fact worked on the Ecuadorian Silversea ship. He remembered us from our Galapagos trip in April 2024.
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We had lunch in the restaurant and then coffee back in the room: I preferred this to the coffee served elsewhere in the ship. But we discovered that the coffee cups and the coffee machine were not really compatible - the cup was too big for the machine. Later the butler changed them for cups that fitted. We sat out on the balcony as the ship headed around the stacks of Boreray. Here there were something like 60,000 gannets covering the stacks, a rare site. It was quite cold outside and we obtained two blankets for later use if we wanted to sit on our balcony. We also got the Butler to attempt to get someone to glue one of my boots which was falling to pieces, which they did manage to effect quite successfully.
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After afternoon tea we listen to Malcolm‘s lecture on Puffins and Penguins, quite amusing. This was followed by recap and briefing and then we had a shower before going to the captains welcome drink. The captain thought he was returning to Dublin down the other side of Scotland. We then enjoyed a cocktail up in the lounge and almost had a dingdong with a restaurant manager in La Terrazza who was not too keen to let us wait for a table with a nice view, but he seemed to come round to our way of thinking in the end. An average meal and then a glass of desert wine up in the panorama lounge until driven out by the thought of Verana, the entertainment manager hosting yet another of her events in there.