Getting to Bodø marked the start of our trip back south. We run out of Schengen days in mid-July and so need to be back in Trondheim to drop the boat off for the winter. A weird feeling – dropping the boat for the winter in July ….. Just when the Norwegian sailing season is starting ….
Step one in the passage south is Støtt. We stayed for a couple of days on the way up and met a lovely Norwegian woman when we helped take her lines. She was a resident of Bodø and had just bought her boat (an Arcona 32) from near Oslo, spending the last month sailing it north, mostly single-handed and learning as she went along. Some things can engender a slight feeling of inadequacy in one when you see the things others are achieving. All the more remarkably, we bumped into her three more times in Bodø – twice while we were eating out at the local Ramen restaurant and she walked past the window, so she must have made some assumptions about our cooking skills!
The unfinished business at Støtt was the restaurant. Anne had nipped in there on the way up and was immediately struck by the historic nature of the building, but unfortunately the restaurant was not open then except for a visiting group. Friends had eaten there on the way up and recommended it, so we were determined to stop there. We booked a table through their website the evening before, but had no response or confirmation of booking, so our first job was to head over there to check. Just as we were tying up though were were approached by a smart looking woman in a red jacket. My immediate assumption in those circumstances is that we had done something wrong, but in fact, she was the manager of the restaurant asking us if we’d like to eat there ….. Yes please ….
Table booked for 7pm, we headed off for a walk. On the western island of Svenningen (joined by a road bridge to the main island) there are some remains from WWII – a German coastal battery (Støtt kystbatteri). The remains were quite evocative of a previous, more difficult, era and there was enough left to try and imagine what life would have been like for the soldiers manning the battery. Presumably it would be mostly tedium with occasional adrenaline fuelled bursts of activity, followed by further long doses of tedium.
Once back to the jetty we found that another English boat had come in – a Hallberg-Rassy 42. We were apparently the first other British boat they had seen since arriving in Norway several weeks previously and so we quickly fell into conversation. We said we were waiting for the restaurant and they asked if they could join us for the evening – no hesitation required. It was a lovely evening and ….. confession time …. the main course was a whale steak. In our defence, it was a set menu, so it was that or nothing …. but it was ….. (add your own adjective here …!). The English couple were fascinating and the evening flew by. They had sailed round most of the world on the boat as liveaboards (even through Covid in French Polynesia) and now lived on Orkney and kept the boat there, so they had sailed across to Ålesund and made their way slowly north. Støtt was as far north as they were going and they planned to potter slowly south, while we needed to keep moving to meet our ‘winter’ deadline.
