What happens on a king crab safari, hour by hour

You arrive at a quay in the middle of Tromsø, a short walk from the main street, and the first twenty minutes are spent getting dressed. The boats hand out a one-piece thermal flotation suit that goes over your own clothes, with boots, gloves and usually a hat. It is buoyant, it is windproof, and it is the reason a king crab safari runs comfortably in January as well as July.

Wear wool or a fleece underneath rather than cotton, and keep the layers thin: the suit does the work, and a thick jacket beneath it makes the zip a fight. Bring a strap for your phone. Everybody photographs the crab, and the rail is where phones go over the side.

The briefing that follows takes five minutes and covers the boat, the rail and the crab itself: a red king crab has a shell the width of a dinner plate, legs that span more than a metre, and it holds on hard. The crew show you where to take hold of it, which is across the back of the shell, well behind the claws. Every king crab safari Tromso runs begins this way, whichever boat you booked.

Tromsø sits on an island with deep water on both sides, and the king crab grounds are minutes from the quay. That is a piece of geography worth understanding, because it is unusual: the red king crab was brought from the Pacific to the Barents Sea in the nineteen sixties, spread west along the Norwegian coast on its own, and the dense population reaches as far west as Tromsø and stops there. Water further south is warmer than the crab prefers, and the crab likes it between two and eight degrees.

So a king crab cruise tromso operators run is not a long haul out to a distant bank. It is a short crossing to a shelf where the pots were set yesterday, in water one hundred to two hundred and fifty metres deep, on the western edge of everywhere this animal lives.

On the way out the fjord does the entertaining. In winter that is dark water, snow on the peaks of Kvaløya and, on a clear evening, a chance of the aurora overhead. In summer it is the midnight sun on the same water at eleven at night.

The boat slows, the crew find the buoy, and the line comes up. On smaller boats it comes up by hand and you are on the rope; on the larger vessels a hauler does the lifting and you take the pot over the rail. Either way the pot arrives streaming water, and for a second or two nobody can see what is in it.

Then the crab comes out: usually several, sometimes a dozen, legs everywhere. The crew sort them on deck. Norwegian king crab fishing works to quotas and size limits, so undersized crab and females go back over the side, and the rest stay. This is the part of the day people describe afterwards, and it is why the question of whether you catch the crab yourself matters so much when you are choosing between listings.

Then everyone holds one. A big male weighs several kilograms and the legs reach past your elbows, so the photograph takes two hands and a bit of nerve. The crew take the shots for you on most boats.

The standard portion on a Norwegian king crab safari is one crab shared between two people, and that is more food than it sounds: the legs of a single large male fill a platter. The crew boil it in salted water, crack the shells and serve the meat warm, usually with bread, butter or mayonnaise and a lemon.

Our top pick serves it in a restaurant ashore with a red fish soup alongside, which makes it a genuine lunch rather than a tasting. $310 serves seafood on board at sea. Both Kirkenes trips cook the crab where they catch it, and the winter one serves it in the Northern Norwegian style with the boat, or the sled, parked on the ice next to you.

If shellfish is difficult for someone in your party, write to the operator through the booking when you reserve. The boats carry soup and bread as well, and most have arranged something for guests who ask a few days ahead.

A king crab safari Tromso boats run works like this. You meet at a quay in the town centre, put on a thermal suit, cross twenty minutes of fjord, help haul a pot from two hundred metres down, hold a crab the size of a bicycle wheel, watch the crew sort the catch to quota, and then eat one crab between two with bread and butter. That is the whole of it, and it takes between two and four and a half hours.

The choice between listings is a choice about how much of that you do with your own hands and where you eat afterwards. Our top pick at $265 gives you the rope and a restaurant table. $310 gives you the bait, the traps and a meal at sea.