Scalloway

After a very leisurely start we drove to Scalloway. It is a smaller town than Lerwick but a bit more colourful.  Not all the houses are grey or brown. We wandered around and found the memorial to the Shetland bus.  The Shetland bus was a Ww2 operation involving the movement of agents , refugees and supplies to and from Norway and the shetlands using norwegian fishing boats and crews.

As we were looking at this memorial 2 other people came up and we got talking. B was from St Andrews and C was from Oban.  After we said we were going to have lunch, but the options were very limited, they invited us to join them for lunch where they were staying at a large marine research establishment nearby.   We spent a very enjoyable few hours chatting to them over some  lentil soup.  Turned out C was doing her PhD,  supervised partly by B , looking at the action of a particular micro algae that live all over the world that are eaten by shellfish , causing them no harm, but when humans eat the shellfish the story is different.

We had found out there was an agricultural show at a town further on which we had intended to go to after lunch but by the time we left C and B it was 3.30 so we went to the scalloway museum instead.  There was an interesting display on the ways they have fished for different species of fish over the years  and a lot of information about the shetland bus and some of the people involved.  The operation was carried out in the winter  months  for the boats to have maximum chance to avoid detection, but the winter month have the worst weather.