Key takeaways
- The cruise is built around the crab, so anything else you see is a bonus rather than something the boat goes looking for.
- White-tailed eagles are resident along this coast in good numbers and are large enough to spot from a moving boat.
- Eider, cormorants, gulls and auks work these waters through the winter, when much of the land is frozen.
- Orca and humpback follow herring into northern fjords in some winters, and when they do the whole coast knows about it.
Setting expectations first
This is a crab cruise and it should be judged as one. The boat is not looking for wildlife, does not divert to follow it, and makes no promises about it. Anything that appears does so because you happen to be spending two hours crossing productive Arctic water with time on your hands and a deck to stand on.
That said, the odds are better than on most boat trips anywhere, simply because the water here is so rich. A reader who understands what to look for will see considerably more than one who does not, which is the entire purpose of knowing the list in advance.
The white-tailed sea eagle
If you see one thing on this trip beyond the crab, it will probably be this. The white-tailed eagle is the largest bird of prey in northern Europe, with a wingspan that can pass two and a half metres, and northern Norway holds one of the densest populations anywhere in the world after a long recovery from persecution.
They are easy to identify once you know the shape: enormous, broad, rectangular wings held flat, a short wedge-shaped tail, and a heavy head. They perch on shoreline crags and in trees along the fjord and will often sit still long enough for a boat to pass beneath. Seeing one lift off is worth the cold hands.
The seabirds that stay all winter
The fjords hold birds through months when the land offers almost nothing. Common eider are the ones you will see most: heavy sea ducks, the drakes strikingly black and white, riding the swell in rafts. Their down was harvested here for centuries and eiderdown from Norwegian coasts was a genuinely valuable commodity.
Great cormorants and shags perch on skerries with wings spread to dry, which is a fair advertisement for how cold the work is. Black guillemots are the auk that stays through the winter when its relatives go to sea, small and black with a white wing patch and startling red feet. Gulls of several species work whatever the boats stir up.
The fjord shoreline and open water on the sail out from Tromso
Seals on the skerries
Harbour seals and grey seals both live along this coast, and the way to see them is to look at rocks rather than at water. At low tide they haul out on skerries and low islands to rest, and a group of grey lumps on a rock resolves into animals once you look twice.
In the water they are harder, usually just a round head at the surface watching the boat and then gone. They are curious about vessels and it is not unusual for one to follow at a distance. Neither species is rare here, and on a trip that spends two hours moving through their habitat you have a fair chance.
Whales, and why it is a lottery
Some winters, orca and humpback whales follow the herring into the fjords of northern Norway in extraordinary numbers, and when it happens it is one of the great wildlife spectacles in Europe. The herring decide where that happens, and the herring change their minds every few years.
That is why this has to be described honestly rather than hopefully. In a year when the herring are wintering near Tromso, a crab cruise might well pass whales. In a year when they are elsewhere, it will not, and no amount of looking changes that. Treat a whale on this trip as a genuine piece of luck rather than a possibility to plan around.
What is under the boat
The crab is the headline but it shares the seabed with a great deal else. Kelp forest grows along the shallower margins, dense enough in places to be visible from the surface, and it is one of the more productive habitats in cold water: shelter and food for fish, invertebrates and everything that eats them.
Deeper down, the fjord basins hold the community the crab feeds on. Molluscs, worms, brittle stars, sea urchins. There are also cold-water fish that most visitors never think about: cod, haddock, halibut and the deep-water species that make Norwegian fisheries what they are. The pot that comes up is one sample from a busy place.
What you will not see
Worth stating plainly so nobody spends the trip scanning for the wrong things. There are no polar bears in mainland Norway; the nearest are Svalbard, several hundred kilometres north across open sea. There are no walrus here for the same reason.
Puffins are a summer bird and are out at sea or on remote colonies rather than in a fjord in front of a boat, so a winter visitor should not expect one. And the aurora, which is what most people come to Tromso for, does not appear on a cruise that sails from ten in the morning to half past two in the afternoon.
The practical advice, then, is to bring whatever optics you own and to look at the shoreline as much as at the water. Most of what is worth seeing on this trip is perched on rock rather than swimming, and a pair of binoculars turns a distant dark shape into an eagle.
