Guest Blogger: Anne Mossman Sunday started with a quick check on the Amalia and a saunter back to the Clarion Hotel for a bit of TLC. After being toiletless and impeded by clambering over 2 other boats every time we wanted to get ashore, this was something of a literal relief. A lazy evening ensued with a video; the ongoing saga of Tokyo Vice (having exhausted our...
The Norwegian weather website which we have been using is yr.no. This somehow feels appropriate as in Norwegian ‘yr‘ means drizzle or light rain, so even the naming of the main weather site is trying to tell us something about the climate in Norway. This seems something of a positive feedback loop: name the weather forecasting site after the main feature...
Our trip today started in the sun and this led to me musing on the nature of optimism. In this case, I optimistically believed the forecast that it would be sunny – it was wrong. Dwelling on this a little further I decided that, as sailors, we are fundamentally optimists. We always believe that we will have a perfect sailing breeze (nope), that the sun will...
A mysterious orange orb appeared in the sky today. A long lost friend had returned for a visit – the sun. It was a short visit, but nevertheless a welcome one and made for a pleasant trip (motor) down to Lysøysundet. As we left Kuringvågen we took another look at the hills surrounding the harbour and were reminded of the story we were told by someone we chatted...
We’re beginning to forget that Amalia has sails. The weather at the moment seems to have settled into bands where there is far too much wind (even for those sails) and then there is far too little. Today was the latter. Once again we headed off early, but this time the strategy was to avoid the rain which was forecast to start after lunch. This brilliant...
Norway is green. A beautiful emerald green. It is a bucolic and serene landscape, generally pristine in nature. However, it is always the green that stands out … and there is a reason it is so green. The main reason is that Norway is among Europe’s wettest countries. This does though give a somewhat distorted picture as there is a large variation in the...
Part of the reason for heading rapidly down to Rørvik was because of the weather forecast. For some days the GFS model had been forecasting a windy weekend. However, there seemed to be some uncertainty as most of the other models were showing quite a balmy quiet weekend. Even the yr.no forecasts from the national Norwegian meteorological office were showing...
With the weather looking suitable, we carried on south. We had originally planned to head for Brønnøysund, but this would have meant a slightly longer passage the next day, so we decided to head back to Berg – a bit further on from Brønnøysund. The weather was light, but we got a chance to try out the Code 0 for a while. It worked well, giving us 4 knots over...
We left Nesna at 05.45am, but any hopes of sneaking out quietly on our own were quickly dispelled. I was focusing carefully on leaving backwards as, during our stop, I had noticed a hosepipe in the water just in front of us. Running over this would probably have done neither the propellor or the pipe any good and would almost certainly have been terminal for one or...
Two hours after leaving Rødøya we also left the Arctic Circle. This somehow felt a little momentous. We have spent the last three weeks or so north of the Arctic Circle, which put us level (in terms of latitude) with Greenland and the northern part of Alaska. We were even north of the whole of Iceland, but not any more ….. Now we are heading south ….. The...