We stopped in the small town of Bodo (sounds like Buddha) after lunch on this day. It’s a small town but a local guide told us that Nikita Khrushchev threatened Bodo with a nuclear bomb attack in 1960 as a result of Russia’s capture of the U.S. U-2 spy plane flight that was shot down. Evidently, it was headed for Bodo. I’ve never heard that story before but since we denied the U-2 reconnaissance flight, I’m not surprised. At any rate, Russia never nuked Bodo.

We had about three hours in Bodo and we spent over two hours taking a rib boat out to Saltstraumen to witness the “Norwegian Maelstrom”, as our guide called it. A whirlpool is a rotating body of water produced by opposing currents or by a current running into an obstacle, like in your bathtub or kitchen sink. More powerful whirlpools such as in seas or the ocean may be termed maelstroms.

Saltstraumen is a small strait with perhaps the strongest tidal current in the world. Our tour guide called it the strongest in the world. This narrow channel connects the outer Saltfjorden to the large Skjerstad Fjord between the islands of Straumova and Knaplundsova. In this channel, up to 520,000,000 cubic yards of seawater forces its way through a 1.9 miles long and 490 feet wide strait every six hours. The vortices or maelstroms can be over 32 feet in diameter and over 16 feet deep. As the sea level height difference between the ocean and the fjord reaches over three feet, the rushing water attempting to equalize the difference can reach about 25 miles per hour.

We knew some of this information but we weren’t really sure what it all meant as we boarded our rib boat for our ride out to the maelstroms. You can see Vicky in the first photo. Pete is to her left and Nora behind her. I had the front seat, right in front of Vicky. In the second photo, you can see one of the other boats that joined us. We are just north of the Arctic Circle, so plenty of snow on the mountains. On our ride to the strait, we saw a pod of porpoises, eight sea eagles, and lots of beautiful scenery.

It is a bit hard to understand how it all worked. There are whirlpools or maelstroms all across the strait. They appeared and disappeared. One minute we were in smooth water and in a few seconds, we were crossing a whirlpool. Looking across the strait, we could see a handful to more than a dozen at any one time. It was all very spontaneous and chaotic. I would even say that it was a bit concerning as when we hit a whirlpool at the wrong time, it would twist our boat and throw us a little bit. But somewhere in the middle of our time in the strait, we saw two mallard ducks swimming along feeding and all of a sudden, they were in a large whirlpool. The ducks just swam on and kept looking for food and didn’t seem bothered by the maelstrom at all. After seeing the ducks, I felt much more relaxed.

It was hard to get good photos. Our boat twisted and turned at times. The whirlpools came and went. They appeared and disappeared. We moved along but the whole thing was hectic. I’m sure that we could have gotten far better photos from up on the bridge over the strait. But we had a lot of fun doing this.