Minerva – berthed in the pretty fishing village of Symi, Greece – can get into ports from which larger ships steer clear. (Pictures by Tim Earl)

I’VE become a swan. Not as in a graceful white bird gliding across the water while its feet paddle frantically beneath, but a Swan (Hellenic) lecturer.

My new office, since the sale of the much-loved Hebridean Spirit, is the rear promenade deck on Minerva, another small cruise liner which reaches ports other ships cannot.

I meet keen and would-be wildlife watchers between 6.30 and 8am daily to point out birds and sea mammals, give lectures to the 320 passengers – many of whom know more about my (and the other lecturers’) subjects than we do – and escort trips ashore watching wondrous wildlife in world-class settings.

Thus, on my last cruise, I showed them alpine swifts racing round ramparts at the Acropolis, Athens; lesser kestrels in the Corinth Canal; and a collared flycatcher flitting around the Baths of Hadrian at Aphrodisias, Turkey.

Just before Christmas it was Sinai rosefinches on the red stone tombs of Petra, Jordan, and pink flamingos in the lagoon below the Queen of Sheba’s Palace in Salalah, Oman.

What a life.

In the early 1980s I had a small ground-handling agency which looked after tour operators and cruise lines from around Europe.

We did all sorts for them, from booking hotels and providing couriers to providing special-interest guides for archaeology, botany and bird watching.

It was this latter service that got me involved with Swan Hellenic. I was asked to take a group of passengers from Orpheus, the company’s ship at the time, and give them a bird watching walk that should include Dartford warblers.

The day dawned fine, Orpheus sailed over the horizon to anchor off St Peter Port and I took the birders to Le Gouffre.

Happily we had a great time, with a family of Darties skipping past us almost at our feet. Great pictures and a movie film were taken and the group returned to the ship delighted.

I was asked to do the rest of that cruise on board with the passengers but could not get away. By the following year, I had the contract to provide all the facilities required.

That came about by a melding of personalities.

A collared flycatcher which had taken up residence in the Baths of Hadrian among the beautiful ruins of Aphrodisias.

The shore excursions were organised by a formidable, exacting woman who had an industry reputation for being demanding and difficult. Doreen Goodrich claimed to be the world’s most travelled woman at that time and I believed her.

‘We are coming in at 6am and I want a typical Guernsey breakfast for 300 people at seven,’ she said on doing the reconnaissance trip.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘How about Champagne, strawberries and cream for starters, a full English breakfast and all served in a greenhouse?’ (Guernsey had a reputation for high living and a thriving tomato industry then.)

Ms Goodrich looked aghast, smiled and said: ‘That sounds great.’

It was the start of a super friendship and many exciting scrapes.

One such involved a fleet of buses, each with an itinerary that resulted in every visitor seeing the same places of interest but at a different time. They were to meet at Castle Cornet in time to walk up for the noon-day gun firing.

When I met the drivers at 8.30am, half-an-hour before that particular cruise was due in, the drivers said it was impossible. There was a hill climb that day and the Castle Emplacement was closed to traffic.

Travel Trident had the job of ferrying passengers from the ship to the Sark Berth, where we were waiting.

After a chat with driver Derek Poole – who died recently – we decided to bring the passengers back to the Sark Berth and take them across the harbour by ferry.

‘You are the first group of people to visit Castle Cornet by boat in 150 years,’ I told them, explaining how the castle had once been standing on an island. It was a great success.

Losing contact with Swan Hellenic was a great blow when I was forced out of the business and became a journalist with this newspaper.

So life goes around in circles: I have made it to the hallowed ground (or rather decks) of Swan Hellenic at last.

I had never been to Greece before this latest cruise.The Acropolis is amazing, while going through the Corinth Canal is a bit of a squeeze but gave interesting views of lesser kestrels, which are similar to ours but breed in flocks and feed on insects which they catch on the wing.

Our visit to Delos was cancelled due to bad weather and we diverted to nearby Mykonos instead.

Here we enjoyed a walk ashore, visiting the old pirate town and spotting two preening pink pelicans – they should have been white but were fed so many shrimps by locals their plumage had gone bright pink.

The trip to Aphrodisias, one of the lesser-known Roman sites in Turkey, was brilliant.

The Corinth Canal is a bit of a squeeze even for a small cruise liner.

Besides the stunning settlement with its amphitheatre and colossal stadium (in such pristine condition that games could be held in it today), the place had excellent birds in the form of Cretzschmar’s, corn and Ortolan buntings, a collared flycatcher, hosts of warblers and breeding Syrian woodpeckers.

But the highlight for me was entering Istanbul, one of the most spectacular cities in the world.

Pictures cannot represent the scene: more than 100 bottle-nosed dolphins playing in our wash, flocks of Yelkouan shearwaters going up and down the Bosporus, Asia on one side and Europe on the other, and that breathtaking skyline with its domes and minarets, spires and bell towers. It was quite amazing.

My next cruises on Minerva are to circumnavigate Iceland via St Kilda (starting and ending in Portsmouth, so no international flying) and, backing on to it, the fiords of Norway, which also ends in Pompey.Our wildlife man has a new office – the rear promenade deck of the small, luxurious cruise liner Minerva. Now lecturing on board the vessel, Tim Earl recounts his latest voyage, around Greece and Turkey, and recalls some of the greatest scrapes from earlier in his career…Swanning around