8:00 Wednesday morning, our second day in Reykjavik, the PA chimes ring.  Captain Paul Adams comes on.  Our string of luck with the weather is about to run out.  A North Atlantic low will create high winds, heavy seas and will move ice around to approaches to our ports in Greenland.  He’s extending our Reykjavik stay by 13 hours to better assess the situation.  We’ll leave at 6 AM tomorrow.  We should adjust our plans for the day accordingly.

The day in Reykjavik is glorious.  Blue skies, temperatures in the 60s.  We have had a string of unusually good weather.  Predicted rain and wind in Tromsø and North Cape turned into sunshine.  Iceland is having a record run of warm weather, the fairest spring in 30 years.  Our plan for Wednesday is to visit the Blue Lagoon for a soak and a swim. (There will be a separate post).  Thie extension — a bonus — and I know how to use it.  The Mulinn Jazz Club at the Harpa Performing Arts Center has Wednesday night gigs.  We’re going.

After the lagoon and before dinner Captain Paul is on again to confirm that we will be sailing at 6 AM, and we will skip our first port, Nanortalik, Greenland because it’s congested with ice.  That’s sad news, but we’ve been there before.  He said he was going to guest service with maps for anyone interested in the details.  Maps always catch my attention.  Looking at them I get it. The combination of 90% ice coverage and strong winds will make getting into Nanortalik impossible.  Captain Paul gives me the URLs for the ice and weather charts so I can follow the situation myself.

Each of the ports on a map. You can see how our first port is iced in, the third port, now our first port, is fairly clear.

After dinner on the ship, we take a bus to the concert hall.  The venue is at the top of the Harpa.  It was designed for meetings and dinners but makes an intimate performance venue with a killer view behind the musicians.  Possibly the second best concert backdrop in the world.  Sigmar Matthiasson is a bassist. His band includes a string quartet (2 violins, viola and cello), piano, oud, clarinet, drum, vocalist with Sigmar on bass.

The Harpa, our Jazz Venue. I don’t know why the Cairns outside the hall.

His music is a fusion of jazz, classical chamber, Icelandic poetry, Balkan and Klezmer.  One piece of music entitled East River is an ode to his time playing jazz in New York.  He went West to learn jazz and discovered the East.  Afterward we talked and he told me his inspiration was an Albanian musician from Kosovo.  This is exactly the kind of mix designed to appeal to Suzi and me.  We are so lucky in our travels, a change of plans gifts us with delight.  We are bringing home CDs and permission to play his compositions on Raven Radio.  Stay tuned.

The clouds rolled into Reykjavik giving us a nice sunset. Back on the ship I checked the websites and could see that there would likely be further change in store. 

On Saturday Captain Paul told us that there would, indeed, be further changes.  Not only were we skipping Nanortalik but we would be sailing further south than anticipated to avoid rough seas, they were going to be rough enough already, and would be switching the order of our two remaining Greenland ports, calling at the more northern port Paamiut first and Qaquotaq second.  The wind was driving the ice south so Paamuit would open first.  He told us he would be on the main stage at 2:30 with maps and a briefing.  He had the ice pilots join him.  We not only got a briefing but a lesson in ice navigation. 

That night we had our masquerade, just in time. 

After the party the seas picked up and we had some rocking with the promise of more pitching and rolling the next day.   As I write this the winds and seas have picked up, stay tuned.