Wild swimming in Lofoten

Braving Arctic waters, eagles, terns and jellyfish on a wild-swimming adventure in the Lofoten Islands.

The Norwegian islands in the Arctic circle are the place to see white-tailed eagles

Tipping my face upwards, buoyant thanks to my wetsuit, icy water filled my ears. Floating on my back, cradled by a silkily cold sea and rocked by small wavelets, barely moving a muscle, I watched.

Directly above, a kaleidoscope of Arctic terns wheeled and swirled, slicing the sky in a dizzying aerial ballet. Slight, precise and determined, the terns dashed themselves into the sea’s surface, fluttering upwards again and again to soar on angled wings, thin as paper knives. Below the waves, unseen, I imagined small fish darting desperately downwards, swimming for their lives as the birds’ scarlet bills stabbed hungrily at silvery flesh.

Mesmerised at the graceful whirling and turning up above, it was tempting simply to lie there, the slapping of water inside my ears the only sound. But I was swimming in the Arctic Circle, and in just a few minutes my extremities had chilled to numbness.

Chill factor

“Get going,” yelled our guide John from the motorboat. “Head across the bay!” The rest of our little group of six swimmers had already forged ahead. “You can’t hang around in water that’s 12˚C,” he added. John was keen to get me moving. A hugely experienced open-water swimming guide, he knew that a human body loses heat fast when it’s not moving in cold water. Chilled extremities were acceptable. A cooling core body temperature was not.

I took a deep breath, rolled onto my front and pushed my face back into the ice-creamcold as I began my stroke. It was hard to leave the wheeling terns behind. They are the most northerly nesting species of tern, beginning to lay as soon as the snow melts. And they make some of the longest migrations of any bird, having travelled from Antarctica to reach these breeding grounds, so certainly deserve a moment’s admiration.

Swimming in the Arctic Circle was very different to any swimming I’d done before. I had come to Lofoten in northern Norway

in the hopes of seeing wildlife from a different angle than that afforded by my usual land-based (5ft 8in) vantage point – to experience this cold-water environment from in among the seaweed, peering up with a prey’s eye view at the white-tailed eagles that might, with luck, be spotted soaring overhead.

Lofoten is a spiny archipelago of six large and two small islands jutting out into the Norwegian Sea. Their location above the polar circle means that between the end of May and mid-July the sun never sets. Much loved by hikers and climbers, it is just emerging as a wildlife-watching destination, with a variety of cetaceans viewable from high cliffs around the islands, and spectacular white-tailed eagles resident yearround. There are almost 100 breeding pairs of these magnificent raptors in Lofoten.

Heading inland

Away from the coast there are also golden eagles, as well as birds such as Slavonian grebes, willow grouse, ptarmigan and a handful of songbirds, including bluethroats and ring ouzels. On the mammal front, the rocky shores are home to otters and grey seals, with elk (known to North Americans as moose) further inland on the bigger islands. These browsers and bark-nibblers, the world’s largest deer, have been known to swim between islands – even in the presence of strong currents. Despite appearing ungainly and unsuited to swimming they are, in fact, among the most aquatic deer, with broad, paddle-like hooves.

The name Lofoten comes from the ancient Scandinavian for ‘lynx’s foot’, apparently because of the shape of the archipelago if seen from above. There were once lynx on the islands, but they have long since gone. When the smaller islands were connected in 2007 by bridges and tunnels to the larger Hinnøya, which is in turn linked to the mainland by a bridge, it was hoped by some that the cats would one day return, though a paucity of prey and the opposition of livestock owners have made that unlikely.

Cetaceans can be seen all year round, but it’s from November to February, according to resident marine biologist Stephanie Milne, that ‘super-pods’ of up to 60–80 individuals arrive with their young. They gather there to feast on vast schools of herring that congregate on the north Norwegian coast in preparation for the spring spawn. Orcas are resident in Norwegian waters, though they travel a lot following their food sources; almost half their life is spent on the move.

“Orcas are so charismatic,” Stephanie tells me, speaking from her home on the tiny island of Skrova. “They’re curious, frequently ‘spy-hopping’ to get a good view of what’s going on.”

Up close with the orcas

Stephanie conducts her scientific surveys in collaboration with the University of Oslo and the Norwegian Orca Survey, which collaborated with the BBC on its epic orca sequences for Blue Planet II. She runs wildlife safari groups on the side, following the path of migrating herring as that’s where the orcas are to be most reliably found. Stephanie is a passionate advocate for tour operators and recreational boat users abiding by voluntary guidelines, ensuring these and other cetaceans are not crowded while feeding in the fjords.

Humpbacks sometimes turn up and associate with the orcas, seemingly attracted by the commotion. Both species are expert at corralling the panicked fish. “One day we came across more than 30 humpbacks in what’s known as a resting line,” Stephanie recalls. “It was impressive to see so many whales simultaneously coming up to breathe. Sometimes we see fin whales, too, and minkes. Wherever the whales go, I go too.” Though whaling still takes place in Norway, its annual self-allocated quota of minkes is rarely met and the growth of the country’s whalewatching industry is a positive development.

In summer, the Gulf Stream keeps the Lofoten islands’ climate relatively mild for

Much loved by hikers and climbers, Lofoten is emerging as a wildlife-watching destination.

their location so far north, warming the sea to a temperature just about tolerable for swimming. When the sea calmed, we could float face down alongside small island outcrops a kilometre or so offshore, home to shoals of tiny green and blue fish that swam out from swaying kelp forests. Pushing hard from one headland to another, we’d often find ourselves swimming over perfectly round, bright purple jellyfish that hung suspended in the water, thankfully always a few feet below the surface. Rather more sinister-looking were the tattered orange lion’s mane jellyfish that we encountered as they were hunting, their long, wispy tentacles spread out in a vast, stinging net, catching the unwary swimmer with a nasty nip.

The eagles have landed

Each day I scanned the skies for white-tailed eagles, whose wingspan is so big and broad they’re nicknamed flying barn doors. But after three days of swimming along the eastern coast of the island of Austvågøya, I’d seen nothing. So I headed for the main town, Svolvaer, and hopped onto a fast motorcruiser that headed down the dramatic, 2km-long Trollfjord. This fjord is so steep and narrow that much of its water was deep in shadow. I stared up at rock faces that rose over a kilometre high, eyes aching for a white-tailed eagle. But nothing.

As we emerged back out of the shadowed fjord and into clear sunlight, our guide spotted a lump on an islet. The lump, he assured me, was an eagle. With binoculars, I could see it crouching on a boulder, head turning slightly, scrutinising its surroundings. Wings hunched, it looked fed up – maybe it was digesting a meal. So I’d seen an eagle, but not soaring high, not thumping its wings in the air, not scooping fish from the sea with its sharp talons. I tried to be phlegmatic as we scudded further out to sea.

Then, suddenly, when I was properly cold and starting to shiver, in they came, those flying barn doors, first far away but soon much closer. We spotted four birds singly, and finally a pair flying wide circles around each other, coming nearer and nearer to the boat. Their hugeness filled my binoculars’ field of view as they wafted overhead. We followed them for a while, the entire boat party grinning with eaglefuelled glee, until the skipper said we should leave them be.

Back at base, the rest of the swimming party greeted me with slightly bashful expressions. It turned out they’d glimpsed two eagles just as they finished their afternoon jaunt around the bay, swimming right underneath the birds. They were gutted I’d missed them. But I had already bettered their eagle count by five – and while heading home for a sauna, perched on the edge of our trusty speedboat, I spotted another.

I may have cheated a bit with my trip on the motor-cruiser, but eight white-tailed eagles, a whirligig of diving terns and just about escaping the tentacles of hunting jellyfish over five days swimming in the Arctic Circle didn’t feel too bad.

FIND OUT MORE

See Norway’s orca on BBC’s Blue Planet II: tinyurl.com/y8zdcjcy