it all looks so easy

Once you board a ship, everything feels effortless: The food is thoughtfully considered and abundant, the design is a perfect marriage of function and style, and the entertainment never misses a beat. But in order for your experience to be this seamless, an astonishing amount of work has to take place behind the scenes. Here, a few stories about what goes into making your time at sea so smooth.

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eat it up

During a sailing along Norway's coast with Hurtigruten, Rick Jordan tastes all the ways the cruise line is harnessing the bounty of the land

THE MOTTLED LANDSCAPE of the Lofoten Islands is essentially an enormous collection of tidal pools, as if the waves had only just departed, leaving behind a tumble of seaweed-covered rocks inter-spersed with puddles. I can see two figures in the ocean, their petrol black skin glistening. They look like seals but wear bright beanies on their heads. When they stand up, they hold aloft tresses of saw-toothed kelp, which they bring back to shore along with a strawberry pink sea urchin. We take turns holding it, as carefully as one would a Fabergé egg.

The pair are Angelita Eriksen and Tamara Singer, who together run Lofoten Seaweed. They use their harvest to supply top restaurants and to make seasoning, pasta, chocolate, and skin lotions. Back at their small store in the village of Napp, we sit down to a feast of sugar kelp tempura, as crispy as popadams, that are embedded with pearls of algae; pickled dulse and seaweed-cured trout; and halibut wrapped in kelp. The butter has been whipped with truffle seaweed, a red algae with a similar flavor to its landlubbing namesake.