Michaela Strachan to sail on a Saga Sapphire cruise to Iceland

TV presenter Michaela Strachan is to sail on Saga Sapphire on a cruise to Iceland to celebrate her 50th birthday next year.

The bubbly TV presenter’s 50th birthday on 7 April 2016 means she will be eligible to travel with Saga and will sail on Saga Sapphire’s Ice, Fire and Fjords cruise from Dover on 20 July.

Michaela Strachan appeared on the BBC children television show The Really Wild Show in the early 90s and more recently on Springwatch, Winterwatch and Autumnwatch. She will be presenting two talks on the 720-passenger ship and will join tours to look for wildlife and to explore the dramatic lava landscape.

Michaela Strachan said: “I really want to see some whales! I know Iceland is a great place to see them. I visited the island many years ago for The Really Wild Show but it was only a brief stop and I always wanted to come back. I would also love to plunge into those amazing hot thermal pools. My mum and her husband did this same cruise with Saga a couple of years back and absolutely loved it.”

On planning her presentations she said “I will firstly take the listener on a journey of my career with photos and there’ll be a lot of me talking. It will be a mixed bag from the early TV shows through to conservation, including the fight against the bear bile industry in China and the Borneo Orang-utan Survival Foundation which rescues, rehabilitates and releases orang-utans back to the wild. The other will be video-based and much less of me talking! It will focus on my experiences with whales and dolphins including when I went to Mozambique for Michaela’s Wild Challenge. I was heavily pregnant and went swimming with dolphins to see how they reacted to a foetus. It was a bit of an experiment as they are meant to know and pick up on the two heartbeats.”

Michaela, who originally comes from Ewell, Surrey, is now based in Cape Town, South Africa, with her partner, cameraman Nick Chavallier and son Ollie, 10. She has sailed on a resort-style cruise ship before and on a Russian icebreaker in the Antarctic but has never sailed on a small cruise ship such as Saga Sapphire.

Representatives from the whale and dolphin conservation charity ORCA will also be on-board observing marine life and supporting whale-spotting sessions.

During the cruise guests can join a boat trip to Eyjafjördur Fjord to watch for blue, fin, humpback, minke and sei whales as well as dolphins and porpoises. A boat from Stykkishólmur will also take guests to see puffins, cormorants, black guillemots, kittiwakes and fulmars plus, a possible chance to see white-tailed eagles and seals.

To compliment the wildlife adventures there will also be an opportunity to relax in Reyjavik’s Blue Lagoon and the Myvatn Nature Baths with its mineral-rich waters and rising steam created by a deep fissure in the earth’s surface.

(Photo credit to Saga)