Floating Low to Lofoten
Martin Edge
Copyright Martin Edge 2012
Published at Smashwords
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Published in Great Britain
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Floating Low to Lofoten
Zophiel’s Cruise in 2008
Martin Edge
This nonsense is dedicated to my Dad, Myles Edge. When he started sailing it was a properly difficult and uncomfortable activity. He’d have loved to have made a trip like this and would have made a better fist of it than me.
Table of Contents
North to the Independent Republic of Shetland
Preface
This is the holiday journal of a floating, ranting wimp. It is the tale of that wimp’s progress round the seas of northern Europe.
In 2003 I bought a small and slightly scruffy yacht called ‘Zophiel’. Though rather small for long distance cruising, the cutter rigged Vancouver is a seaworthy heavyweight. The first one was designed for a couple of nutters who were emigrating from Canada to New Zealand and wanted to do it in a 27ft sailing boat. Other Vancouvers have crossed oceans and sailed round the world.
My ambitions are rather more modest. Actually that’s not true. I’d love to join the ranks of the fearless ocean navigators and sail round the world. But, as I’ve already mentioned, I’m a bit of a wimp.
So over the past few years I’ve spent summers cruising around parts of northern Europe from Zophiel’s base under the Forth Bridge near Edinburgh. Most of these journeys have been sailed solo but sometimes I’ve had a crew, particularly for the longer sea crossings. Again, I’m no Robin Knox-Johnston.
‘Floating Low to Lofoten’ is the tale of the second of these trips, in the summer of 2008.
I started out writing a straightforward description of the trip, but the account grew arms and legs and kept on expanding. The problem was that the coast of Norway is entirely gorgeous and the further north you go the more fabulous and surprising it gets. I couldn’t stop myself from waxing lyrical.
It’s not just the landscape that’s surprising. In Scotland we are constantly being told that we’re too small a country, too far north and with a landscape too barren to be productive. We are conditioned to think of our northern and western fringes as windswept wastelands where there’s no prospect of a proper economy or thriving communities. The drain of migration from the north and the west is supposed to be as natural as a river flowing out to the sea.
Then I went to Norway, with a smaller population and a much, much longer and more remote coastline than Scotland. Right up to seventy degrees north, way above the Arctic Circle, there’s a thriving town round every headland. There’s people and industry. There’s numerous ships plying the sheltered waters transporting goods and people and fish and bits of North Sea oil platform. Ten degrees north of the last viable tree in Scotland there’s deciduous forests sheltering the suburban streets of proper little towns.
So I hope this account of a sailing trip, as well as being reasonably entertaining, will give some pause for thought about a few issues, even though it’s just the ramblings of a holidaying wimp.
Floating Low to Lofoten is the follow-up to “Skagerrak and Back”, which described Zophiel’s 2007 North Sea circuit. A third volume, “A Gigantic Whinge on the Celtic Fringe”, is an account of Zoph’s 2011 circumnavigation of Ireland.
Martin Edge
December 2011
A Day-Sail on the Forth
Having done a sort of circuit of the North Sea the previous year – starting by crossing to Bergen and going south and clockwise, I’d determined that the west coast of Norway was to be my cruising ground this year. I thought I’d head north this time. Early on I was discussing my plans for the trip with a friend at Port Edgar marina on the Forth when he asked me how far north I’d go in Norway. Desperately dredging my brain for it’s limited knowledge of Norwegian geography I said ‘Oh, I don’t know, probably up to the Lofoten Islands’. He seemed surprised and impressed. It wasn’t until I’d bought the hundred or so charts necessary to get to Lofoten that I realised just how bleedin’ far it is up the coast of Norway.
A 27 footer, however well designed for ocean crossing, is a relatively small boat to do the trip on and the previous year Zophiel had seemed pretty small amongst the forty-plus footers of monied Scandinavia. Vancouvers are also not Norway’s commonest yacht. This year she was to seem even smaller and yet more obscure. In my three months spent cruising the length of Norway in 2008 only one person recognised the Vancouver for what she was, though it was a person of some discernment. But more of that later.
In early May 2008 we’d had the usual easterlies and a haar - the seasonal sea fog that plagues the east coast for some time. I was waiting for a weather window to begin the trip. On May 6th we still had easterlies but there was no fog forecast, so I thought I’d make a start moving Zophiel north in stages. I told Anna, my other half, that I’d probably be back home that evening – or at the latest the following night – and headed down to Port Edgar for a wee sail. I beat out through the Forth Road and Rail bridges with the last of the falling tide against a rising easterly and wondered if I might just sail four miles round the nearby island of Inchcolm and back.
I didn’t really mean to end up in Shetland. I had intended to start shifting Zophiel northwards in preparation for a crossing to Norway in June. I thought perhaps at the most I might do a couple of day sails the thirty miles to Anstruther and another twenty five or so to arbroath, where I could leave her for a week or so until the next wee push north. However with a rising easterly to batter into that morning it was most likely to be a wee day sail and back to Port Edgar. It certainly didn’t feel like the auspicious start of a 2800 mile cruise. As I was casting off I told the guy on the boat next to Zoph in the marina that I’d probably be back that evening after a wee sail, and headed off.
But in the second week of May 2008 every day dawned bright and sunny with anything from a moderate south-easterly to nothing at all, so every day I kept going and ended up unexpectedly at over 60 degrees north in Lerwick.
Perhaps that’s the best way to start a cruise – casually and without even letting on to yourself that the odyssey has started. Just let it creep up on you and suddenly find that you are hundreds of miles from home. That way you can fool the weather gods who would otherwise fling two weeks of contrary gales your way if you were properly organised and had announced that you were heading out on a particular date.
The other way to guarantee good weather, of course, is to be in league with the devil like Gordon Campion. Two years previously Gordon had sailed his Moody 38 ‘Equinox’ from the Forth round Spitzbergen and Back, reaching over 80 degrees north. I’d crewed for him for the leg from Tromsø to Bergen. This trip, a lot of which was offshore and didn’t involve a lot of stopping, had given me a taste for northern Norway.
Unlike most of us, Gordon seems able to run a sailing cruise like a Swiss train timetable. He plans ahead for up to two years and leaves and arrives exactly when he says he will. Crucially the weather - and this is the bit where he’s in league with the devil - always behaves for him.
When I joined him in Tromsø he was proudly waving a ten day forecast he’d just got from the Norwegian Met Office up the hill in town. Some eight days later, at sea, I suggested that it was about time we had a look at a weather forecast. Puzzled, Gordon waved the ten day forecast, now more than a week out of date. “But we’ve got the forecast” he said. “On Tuesday afternoon it’ll be blowing force 3 from the north east”.
I protested that this isn’t how the world works. You can’t rely on an eight day old forecast. But Gordon can. He proved the point by sailing Equinox round the world between 2008 and 2010. Again he set the schedule long in advance and stuck to it rigidly. The weather consistently dealt him it’s proper seasonal average conditions everywhere he went.
For ordinary mortals it’s better not to be too categorical about our plans. One of the best reasons for imaging the existence of a god is so that you can make the joke: “What’s the best way of making God laugh? Tell him your plans”.
That first morning the tide and a beat under full sail took me out past Burntisland. As the tide turned, the wind increased to a high force 4 or low 5 on the nose and time started pressing. So this turned into a wet blatter of a motorsail into the five foot swell. But on a sunny day a few wee splashes of salt water aren’t the problem they can be on a grey, overcast one.
I was heading for the attractive Fife town of Pittenweem on the recommendation of John Murphy, the skipper of Port Edgar’s biggest boat, a Jeanneau 49 called Erin. He had assured people on numerous occasions that, contrary to the warnings in the pilot book, they’d receive a warm welcome there.
“This is a commercial harbour, yachts are not allowed in. Anyway, you wouldn’t stay afloat. Go to Anstruther” said the Harbour Master when I phoned him a couple of hours before arriving. Even when I lied a little and said I mightn’t make it to Anstruther before the tide fell I was told it wasn’t his problem and, politely enough, to bugger off. Perhaps it’s Erin’s well stocked cellar that appeases the Harbour Master, but I think John tends to look at all the wee harbours on the Forth with somewhat rose-tinted cheeks.
The last time I was in Anstruther, a few years ago, it was to lean against the harbour wall. Not any more. The drying harbour is now full of pontoons which make it difficult for fin keelers, particularly at springs. The pontoons are however raised above the thin mud by steel frames, so for a long keeler like Zoph, with a moderate draught, it’s easy enough to lean gently against this platform when it dries out, if you tie the lines right and have plenty of fenders. I had been told – again by Cap’n Erin – who’s champagne flute is always at least half full - that we would sink comfortably into deep mud here. That’s not the case. The bottom is quite hard – hardcore having been laid down when the pontoons were installed according to one local – but the pontoons are designed to be leaned against. Kipping at a 15° heel notwithstanding, a comfortable enough night was had at Ainster.
Part of the reason to plough into the wind to Anstruther had been the forecasted shift to gentle south-easterlies, which would be ideal once round Fife Ness and heading north. So the next morning it was a motorsail on a falling tide north towards Stonehaven. The sun would again have been knocking down the dykes were there such thing as dykes in the sea off the Tay Estuary.
Within five miles of Stonehaven the traditional east coast three bottlenose dolphin escort joined me for half an hour’s frolic around Zoph’s bow. They criss-crossed from side to side, throwing in the occasional leap just to show off, as I sat in the bow 3 feet above them getting burned by the sun. Just occasionally you can sail up the East coast of Scotland thinking ‘Pah! The Caribbean, who needs it?’ and mean it.
In Stonehaven I tied up in the outer harbour near an eight metre speedboat which had conspired to take up most of the mooring space usually available to about four boats and which, apparently, had broken down. Later I was joined by a fine 45ft steel Dutch yacht.
The next day I headed north for Peterhead in another scorcher, sailing part of the way but motor-sailing once Zoph dropped below three knots. Having lived in Aberdeen for 16 years it’s always a surprise to sail in full sun past some of its shittiest bits and realise that none of the poor sods that live there ever experience how nice it can be only a mile or so away out at sea.
As I approached Peterhead harbour a wee motor boat zipped past me – unnecessarily close I thought – and I recognised it as the one which had been broken down in Stonehaven. He contacted port control on the VHF to request entry - making a bit of an arse of it – and I followed suit.
Any brief feeling of jealousy I might have had at the speed with which he could get there from Stonehaven was quickly dispelled by the ensuing dramatic and daring sea rescue. He came on the radio again to say that his engine had broken down and that he was anchored in the middle of the harbour. Harbour Control suggested that the yacht which was following him in – that is Zoph - might like to assist and I called up to say I’d give him a tow. I only just got there before a couple of wee fishing boats who’s crews, I suspect, scented salvage and weren’t there out of the kindness of their hearts. I chucked him a tow line and waited while he disentangled his anchor from a load of lobster pots, then towed him into the marina.
I thought I recognised the skipper and it transpired he was the same bloke I’d helped with his lines a couple of times in Port Edgar. He suffered repeatedly from two problems – a lot of windage on his top heavy, shallow draft boat and the complete inability to work out which rope to tie where to stop her blowing away. Tied up in Peterhead marina I pointed out to him that his bow was actually repeatedly banging up against one of the electricity and water towers on the pontoon. Though unconcerned he did say that he’d sort this problem out. A while later I was incredulous as I noticed that he’d simply taken the step of tying a fender to the bow, so that now the fender smashed repeatedly against the leccy tower. It never seemed to enter his mind that perhaps the lines needed adjusting. A relaxed approach to tying a boat to a pontoon reminiscent of Norway. I began to feel I was almost there already.
It did strike me that heading up the east coast with a single engine and no backup motive force was asking for trouble and that he had been extraordinarily lucky to break down in Peterhead harbour, as opposed to a mile out to sea off some rocks. When he went off to the pub I went over and retied his boat for him, mostly to prevent him knocking over the leccy meter and causing a blackout.
The rest of the day was spent trying to find a shop that sold food in the desolate, ostensibly post-apocalyptic streets of Peterhead. It is a universal truth that you can’t buy food in the centre of cities, only shoes and clothes. The entire economy of a planet written about by Douglas Adams collapsed because the urban areas relied entirely on shoe sales and the situation on planet Earth isn’t much better. If you want food, tie up in a wee village, not a town. If you want to buy anything at all, don’t go to Peterhead. In the evening I entertained a work colleague to a couple of beers on board. I happened to meet him in the street. For some reason he, apparently voluntarily, lives in Peterhead.
The forecast looked fine for rounding Rattray head the next day, with gently south-easterlies increasing during the day. Of course the tidal window meant leaving at bleeding four a.m., but doesn’t it always? Having motorsailed round Rattray Head by seven a.m. it struck me that I’d be in my chosen destination, Whitehills, by about eleven in the morning and I might as well keep going. So I changed course for Wick and was soon barrelling along with what became a force six up the bum. This was all well and good until, once I’d got a good way across I looked at the entry in the pilot book for Wick, which says “do not attempt entry in easterly winds over force four with a swell running”. This was a force six running straight into the harbour.
I managed to get the harbour office on the phone and asked if entry was likely to be a problem. The nice old lady at the other end of the phone told me that the Harbour Master was out and about but that she was sure it’d be OK and there was plenty of room ‘so just come on in dear’. I explained that it wasn’t space in the harbour I was worried about, but being battered to death on the harbour wall by the massive breakers. She was momentarily confused but explained again that there was plenty of room and they didn’t mind me coming in. She also explained that when she left at five p.m. she put the phone through to the Harbour Master’s mobile. She did not explain why she couldn’t put me through before five.
By five I had little choice – it was either Wick or another 50 miles to Kirkwall, so I took a chance on Wick. In the end it was OK and the Harbour Master talked me in, but I suspect it would have been difficult if the force six had been blowing for a day or two and created more swell. My worries were assuaged a bit by the fact that it was gloriously sunny all day. It may be irrational but you never feel you can come to much harm if it’s nice and sunny.
There’s a big new guest pontoon in Wick. Unfortunately it’s in the outer harbour and subject to large amounts of surge and scend in even quite gentle conditions. A huge, substantial concrete affair the pontoon is apparently lifted out entirely over winter, when the whole harbour becomes untenable by any craft. Lovely.
Though it remained resolutely sunny, it was still early May and the evenings a tad chilly, so Zoph’s charcoal stove came into its own. Started in Wick it ran continuously for a record three days and kept the chill off. Later Ian Cameron, a friend for Port Edgar and one of my crew for the North Sea crossing, expressed some nervousness at having a solid fuel stove on board, convinced of the certainty of carbon monoxide poisoning. It’s amazing how many people, many of whom live in substantially wooden houses with soft furnishings, find the concept of a wood fire on a plastic boat difficult to come to terms with. Just to reassure those people, the stove itself is actually made of steel, not in fact wood.
North to the Independent Republic of Shetland
Wick being, if anything, an even less appealing and more depressed town than Peterhead, I was glad that the forecast was good for the following day’s passage to Kirkwall. Last time I went to Orkney I had thick fog all the way across the Pentland Firth into Scapa Flow. This time I took the easier and less fraught route in a big easterly arc, staying eight miles off the Pentland Skerries. That way you are well clear of the dodgy tides and dangerous seas. Again it was full sun, this time with a gentle south-easterly that allowed me to sail about half of the 50 miles. Once again, of course, there was fog right in the middle of the main shipping lanes, where ships from half of Europe batter through on their way across the Atlantic.
The AIS (Automatic Identification System) was as usual reassuring, showing all ships over 300 tonnes on the laptop chartplotter. I tried to put to the back of my mind the possibility of being mown down by a ship of less than 300 tonnes.
A day’s rest in Kirkwall included a cycle on my folding Brompton bike across Orkney’s South Mainland to one of the few churches in the world which is actually worth visiting for the emotional experience – the Italian chapel at Lamb Holm. Though just a couple of Nissan huts bolted together, this construction by Italian prisoners of war in the early ‘40s is actually quite moving.
Kirkwall has a fine posh marina with a few boats on passage. One such was ‘Tarka of Lorne’, a 40ft, flush decked Hallberg Rassy and probably the boat I would plump for if ever I traded up from Zoph.
Chatting to Tarka’s skipper I discovered that they were also heading for the Lofotens, but direct from Shetland, not the long, wimpy way round like me. Mind you they were fully crewed. I wished them luck and joked that I’d probably see them there.
Hallberg Rassys are of course famously high quality Swedish cruising yachts. I’d recently read an article about Christoph Rassy, the elderly founder of the brand (Mr Hallberg ducked out early on), who was circumnavigating in his Hallberg Rassy 62. A 62 foot boat was a bit big even for my fantasy life, but perhaps one day I’d have a forty footer like Tarka.
I had thought I might leave Zoph in Kirkwall for a while, but of course the forecast continued to be for sun and light winds, boringly enough, so the next day I sailed the twenty miles to Stronsay in preparation for a couple of hops to Shetland.
When sailing in Orkney you always need to plan for the tides. Just for once, surprisingly, perfect timing seemed to demand leaving at about half nine in the morning to pick up the tide north out of Kirkwall. I would then arrive at the edge of Stronsay Firth at slack water and again pick up the tide to Stronsay. Not only was the timing right but with a force four easterly I sailed all the way, partly on a fine reach and partly close hauled. There were some very odd bits of choppy, swirly sea which gave a graphic inkling of what conditions could be like in strong winds and full spring tidal flows.
Stronsay has a single guest mooring between it and the nearby island of Papa Stronsay which, I was assured by the bloke in the shop, was both well maintained and free, so I picked it up. There were two small problems with this mooring – it was a hell of a row to the pub on Stronsay and a bit too close to Papa Stronsay, an island populated entirely by an eccentric brand of Christian monk most of whom, predictably, seem to be American. They had the habit (pun intended) of ringing the bloody church bells at god-forsaken hours of the morning, which would have woken someone who had not taken the precaution of consuming large quantities of alcohol in the pub.
Avoiding Monky Island I took the Brompton ashore and cycled half way across Stronsay and back. The green, pastoral landscape of Orkney is in stark contrast to the heather clad, uncultivated territory of the western isles. Presumably this is to do with the different land ownership pattern, the relative lack of major estates and the fact that, as far as I’m aware, the clearances never happened here. This means that many relatively small islands have what appear to be viable and economically active populations. It also means that most of the Orkney islands are spectacularly green. In the sun it was all bright green ground and bright blue sky, as artificial looking as a Microsoft screensaver.
At first sight it would appear that many of the economically active people are incomers. Stronsay’s pub, shop and café are all run by English couples. All are twelve month a year operations and none are particularly aimed at tourists. They are just operating local businesses and keeping the place going. There’s various brands of English incomers in rural Scotland, some of whom on parts of the west coast are not exactly adding anything – absentee landlords and holiday home owners driving property prices up – but as an Englishman who has lived in Scotland for 30 years it seemed to me that the incomers to Stronsay were a wholly positive influence.
I was pondering this as I cycled along and became aware of a traffic jam building up behind me, albeit only one car long. Stronsay is only seven miles across, so if you drive at more than twenty miles an hour the experience is soon over. People seemed to enjoy crawling long behind me at seven knots on a two lane road, waiting for the island’s longest straight to open up so they could zoom past at a heart-stopping fifteen knots. It passed a bit of time and they could imagine they were in a five mile tailback into work on a Monday morning. A bit of nostalgia for the incomers.
Practically everyone I saw here – and on Mainland Orkney – waved at me as they passed. I assume that, even if they don’t recognise you, they think they probably ought to, so wave just to be on the safe side so you don’t think they are rude. Very nice anyway.
The forecast, of course, was OK for the 42 mile hop to Fair Isle. Perfect weather but not quite a perfect breeze this time, with a north-easterly force three to four on the nose. Still, there wasn’t a lot of sea running and the motor-sail in the sun was pleasant enough. As I approached Fair Isle from the south I saw a sail approaching from the North and accelerated to grab the best spot, not knowing how much room there was. As I did so the other boat dropped sail and appeared to do the same. This other boat turned out to be a 32ft catamaran which had tried crossing to Norway but given up half way when they heard the forecast of contrary winds.
The little harbour on Fair Isle is an idyllic wee place and pretty sheltered given that it’s on a speck in the north Atlantic. It is a bit subject to swell from the north-east, which was exactly where the wind was, of course. However a new mole (why are lumps of rubble dumped in the sea called moles?) gave a bit of extra shelter so it was fine. It was all very cosmopolitan in the harbour, with a Norwegian boat and a Swedish one, as well as the cat and ‘Boomerang’, a Port Edgar boat just completing a whistle-stop tour to Bergen and returning to Port Ed. Impressive going for so early in the year, it being only May 13th. It was, I suppose, appropriate that Boomerang was coming back so promptly.
I was about to raft up on Boomerang when a bloke in a wee open boat zoomed over and said that I could raft up on the Fair Isle ferry, the ‘Good Shepherd’, since it wasn’t going anywhere for the next day or two. So I had my own massive steel pontoon and a door opening onto the deck of the ferry from my cockpit. Such a thing would be unthinkable on the west of Scotland where the execrable Cal Mac rule the waves and monopolise the harbours. A nice friendly start.
Fair Isle is famous for its bird life but is actually quite pastoral and – at least in May’s gorgeous weather, civilised and benign. Physically it reflects it’s position half way between Orkney and Shetland. The northern half – nearest Shetland – is wild, heather clad and rocky. The southern half – nearest Orkney – is farmed, green and pastoral, dotted with houses. All in all a very pleasant environment and I Brompted from one end to the other.
As I wandered around, Gordon McEquinox phoned and said he’d pencilled me in as crew to cross the Atlantic in the ARC (Atlantic Rally for Cruisers) on Equinox in November and December. Once I got back from my 3000 mile trip to Lofoten I had another 3000 mile trip to look forward to.
Fair Isle is half way between Stronsay and Lerwick and there being no particular tidal gates I left at 9.30 for Shetland’s capital. With a force three north-westerly we had a good sail for a while, but then the wind backed and headed us so the motor went on. One Norwegian yacht sailed past heading south. Sumburgh has a reputation for dodgy seas in some conditions but today it was benign.
I realised that the last time I had seen the lighthouse at Sumburgh was two days after my eighteenth birthday in 1975. When flying to Shetland I looked upwards (yes upwards) through the plane window in a break in the thick fog and saw the lighthouse looming very near. I often wondered if we nearly hit the bloody thing as the pilot banked steeply round it and hoped nobody on board had noticed. I flew there then to take my first ever job, labouring for the summer with the company that dug all the holes for the Sullom Voe oil terminal. At it’s peak constructing Sullom Voe employed 5000 people, but in 1975 it was just 150 Irish blokes and me and my mate Dave. What a baptism of fire that was. We only worked a 79.5 hour week, the Irish lads did 89.5 hours, four weeks on one week off. Me and Dave got no days off as we worked seven days a week for three months. That summer taught me how to smoke 40 roll-ups a day and drink 10 pints a night, which was something of a mixed blessing.
Thirty three years later and near the end of the life of Sullom Voe oil terminal there was a fair amount of oil-related shipping traffic around busy Lerwick harbour, where I saw my first clouds for ten days. Arriving on the visitors’ pontoon I tied up behind a couple of Norwegian yachts in town for the booze. There would seem to be a lot more Scandinavian boats in Shetland than visiting ones from elsewhere in the UK.
By the time I reached Lerwick I’d done 345 miles in eight trips over nine days. A fair old way really and averaging 43 miles a day.
The Shetlanders famously claim close kinship with the Norwegians. I can only presume that the tall, blond, tanned Shetlanders are all indoors every time I hit the streets, since none of them were in evidence. Pink, overweight, fleshy and quintessentially British ones yes, but none of the ones of overtly Scandinavian stock.
Lerwick seems basically to be run by a bloke called Bert. His principal source of income seems to be selling booze to Norwegians. His modus operandum is to appear in a van at the guest pontoon in the harbour and enquire whether you might be leaving the European Union. If you reply shiftily that you might possibly be heading for Norway, he offers to fill your boat to the gunwales with duty free booze and fags. And this is not your old fashioned 20% off airport duty free. I’m talking a pound a packet for fags and whisky at £3.50 a litre. Suitably loaded up you then head off into the sunset promising that yes, honestly, you are going to Norway, honest. You might, of course, if you were of a dishonest bent, simply nip back home to Port Edgar or somewhere with a year’s supply of cheap hooch, but I know you’re a law abiding citizen.
Even if you do go to Norway – and the large majority of Bert’s customers are Norwegian – there is absolutely no correlation between the amount of ‘duty free’ he will sell and the amount Norwegians are allowed to import. Incredibly, this fantastic dodge seems to be legal, at least at the UK end.
When I was there four Norwegian lads in a scruffy yacht had arrived from Bergen at six am. At midday they started drinking. They woke me with loud music at 6.30 the next morning. They finally hit the sack about 7.30 am after boozing for a solid nineteen and a half hours. At one p.m. the same day they sailed back to Norway. Happily they wouldn’t have been hung over. They would still have been absolutely pissed.
I had enquired about a marina berth to leave Zoph for a couple of weeks and of course the man in charge of Gremista Marina was Bert. He gave me a U-shaped pontoon designed for a 45 footer in a perfectly sheltered marina filled with privately owned berths. The price? £15 a week. Not per day, per week. Gremista marina is not the most lovely of spots - right next to the power station. But at £15 a week it’s quite possibly the world’s cheapest marina.
I wandered to the ferry port to buy a ticket to Aberdeen on the very plush, comfortable, practically empty and reasonably priced ferry.
“What do you mean I need a passport to get on the ferry?! I thought Shetland was part of the UK. It’s just more evidence of the bleedin’ police state!” I complained to the woman at the ticket desk. I was however grateful for the spur of the moment decision I had made ten days earlier to stick my passport in my back pocket on the way down to Port Ed. Though I hadn’t been heading abroad I thought I might as well put the passport on board ready for the trip to Norway. It’s easy to forget your travel documents when travelling by boat, because nobody ever asks for them. Had I not done so, I would be stuck on Shetland for life.
Shetland is now effectively the only place you need a passport to travel to within the UK, unless you travel on your own boat. The ferry company demands photo ID on the grounds that, apparently, people have been suspected to be travelling under false names. “What if I want to travel under a false name? Why shouldn’t I?” I demanded petulantly of the check-in woman as security guards shifted about nervously and began eyeing me up for a strip search and a spot of anal probing. They couldn’t tell me what criteria they were using to decide what was an acceptable name and what they would do to people with unacceptable names. Presumably the private company that runs the ferry would deny them access to this part of our fair country, or stop them leaving.
So if there’s anyone out there with a name deemed unacceptable for travel to Shetland, just let me know and I’ll try to arrange to run you up there next summer on Zoph.
Floating Low to Bergen
Having sorted out a crew for the North Sea crossing back in Edinburgh (Ian Cameron of the Dufour 25 ‘Psyche’ and another friend from Port Edgar, Fiona Harrison of the Sadler 32 ‘Moonwhite’) and anxiously scanned the forecasts for nearly two weeks, I returned to Shetland on the self-same ferry, clutching my passport in an angrily clenched fist. The forecast looked to be set fair for the next two or three days, with a respite in the constant easterlies which Sod’s law had ensured we had all spring and early summer. I was anxious to leave for Bergen as quickly as possible while the weather held.
Back at Gremista marina Bert tried to charge me only £15, believing I’d only been in the marina for one week. In a rare bout of honesty I gave him the full £30 for two weeks as I took delivery of a small booze top-up amounting to no more than 40 or 50 litres of beer and whisky in the main town visitor harbour.
The boat club bar seems to be just about the only decent pub in Lerwick and has good showers. Like a lot of places round the harbour, the signs are all in English and Norwegian – an indication of the connections – albeit perhaps not genetic – between Shetland and Norway. With the recent demise of the ferry from Rosyth on the Fort to Zeebrugge, the seasonal ferry between Lerwick and Bergen is, I believe, the only direct passenger sea link between Scotland and mainland Europe. It is telling that it doesn’t even depart from mainland Scotland.
Ian arrived on the morning ferry from Aberdeen and we paced the dockside waiting for Fiona, who was flying in (on an aeroplane, not under her own steam). We barely gave her time to get one foot on the toe rail before we cast off and headed out into a rather dreich North Sea with a force 3 on the nose. We motored past Out Skerries, a small set of islands with a good natural harbour. We headed out in a northerly curve towards Bergen. The wind was forecast to come back from the north at possibly up to a force 6, with the stronger winds to the south, so it made sense to put in as much northing as we could.
As we motorsailed towards Out Skerries - fully crewed for once - and Zoph dug her stern in as I opened the throttle, we noticed that there was a good 6 inches of water in the ‘self-draining’ – or in this instance self-filling – cockpit. She was certainly floating well below the official waterline. I suggested that this might have something to do with the number of pies consumed by the crew over the years. The crew, in their turn, pointed out that it might have something to do with the 450 cans and 250 bottles of beer, 40 litres of spirits and 30 bottles of wine on board. Laughing hysterically at the idea that we should jettison some of these bare essential supplies, I considered briefly what we could get rid of. Perhaps all the water, a spare anchor or one of the crew.
But no, wet though it was in the cockpit, she was still floating with plenty of freeboard. Donning wellies we continued on our way, ‘floating low to Lofoten’, I thought. Bugger. As soon as I’d hit on the title I knew that now I was committed. There’d be no swanning about in southern Norway for weeks for me. Now I had to make it up well beyond the Arctic Circle to Lofoten so that I could legitimately use the title.
Most of the way across to Bergen we got some push from the sails but though we did turn the engine off for a fine reach in a force four the next morning, the breeze died after a couple of hours and the engine, I’m afraid, went back on. All in all it was a pretty easy and unremarkable crossing. Just as the previous year, the weather went from Scottish dreich to Nordic niceness, but this time we were followed during our last few hours by lowering dark clouds and thunder. All very portentous and always worrying when you are essentially clinging to the only big metal stick for miles around jutting out of the water. Ian gave us his physics teacher lecture on lightning science and boats.
We added a few miles with my northerly curve, but negotiated a narrow channel in behind the islands on the outer approach to Bergen. I had intended to press on to the proper big harbour at Bergen, where we would have arrived at about three a.m. But I was forgetting that this was Norway. In Norway everyone has a boat and every village has a perfectly sheltered harbour. So when we saw the lights of a village a couple of hundred yards in from the exposed sea we just headed for them. We picked our way down the narrow channel into the small, deep harbour, tied up to a wall in an uncharted village that turned out to be called Kjobmannsvagen and cracked open some beers. It was twenty to midnight on May 31st, twenty minutes before June. We’d done 195 miles in exactly 34 hours, to the minute, from Lerwick.
Happily both were able to stay on for a few days and experience a wee bit of idyllic Nordic cruising. The previous year my crew had to fly pretty much straight back, so got to experience the fraught, difficult bit but not the fun holiday bit.
We woke the next day to glorious full sun and Fiona woke to a slight hangover I think (she’s a bit of a lightweight when it comes to beer, if truth be told). The sun stayed, with a brief four hour period of twilight every day, for the next 8 days. Fiona’s hangover, happily, didn’t.
We had a nice gentle motor down behind the sheltering islands to Bergen, the crew suitably appreciative of the fantastic cruising environment and Fiona plotting how to skive off work all summer and get Moonwhite across the North Sea next year.
Rafting up in the centre of Bergen against a Norwegian 40 footer with two French blokes on it, we were soon rafted upon in our turn by a speed boat with a fantastically pissed crew. The holiday atmosphere was palpable and the number of ‘Kiss’ tee shirts was quite alarming. Apparently 20,000 people were to attend a Kiss concert that night and most of them seemed to have chosen speed boats as their preferred mode of transport. Presumably the further outposts of Scandinavia are the last places on earth where tired old rockers like Kiss can find an audience. One imagines that the more rural bits of Norway might have more than their fair share of head-bangers.
But though we were promised uncompromising partying until dawn and people did get proper fall-over drunk, this was after all Scandinavia. All the crowds dissipated quite meekly and suddenly at exactly 1 am. The crowds snaked back through town and everyone went home to bed in their speedboat or, exceptionally, their house.
After a day’s sightseeing round Bergen and a trip on the funicular railway to see the spectacular view, we had a gentle sail and a motorsail down to the island of Tyssoy, to give Ian and Fiona a taste of Nordic fore-and-aft mooring. Astonishingly, I managed to deposit the stern anchor in about the right place and bring the bow in to a rock without hitting it, allowing Ian to hop ashore on Edge’s patented Bow-Plank. All this was done without undue shouting or cock-ups. Much, much more by luck than judgement.
British boat builders are the only ones in the world who never envisage anyone hopping on and off the boat over the bow. They therefore manufacture pulpits which curve all the way round the bow, effectively preventing anyone from boarding there. This is a hopeless arrangement for practically everywhere outside Britain. Hence Edge’s patented plank arrangement, consisting of a makeshift and temporary bowsprit made of a plank of wood from B&Q. Stylish.
All the other boats in the anchorage – three or four motorboats – upped anchor and left before sunset. Speaking to the skipper of one it seems that, given suitable weather, they do all just leave work in Bergen around four, hop into their boats and spend six hours or so in any one of a choice of hundreds of idyllic anchorages, all less than half an hour from their homes. They do this on every decent weekday of the summer and it’s a tradition that goes back generations. They’ve got something right about their summer lifestyles, these Norgians.
Left alone in this calm anchorage, more perfectly sheltered than anything in Scotland, we had a wander the length and breadth of the little island. Which of course, being half a mile long, has a commuter village on it and a series of bridges linking it to the mainland.
Next morning we put in at Hjellestad Båthavn, our port of arrival in Norway the previous year, so that Fiona could sort out a taxi and stuff for the airport the following morning. Norway seems to be full of Båthavns and it’s nice to see the Norwegians providing so many havens for their flying mammals.
After an hour or two we sailed and motored to Lyssoy Island, where we anchored in the most sheltered pool imaginable. A hundred yards across, with a flat bottom five metres deep and an entry about ten metres wide and two metres deep. It’s sometimes hard to believe that these places just occur naturally in Norway.
After dinner I decided on a swim, since a load of sprogs were diving in off a boat nearby. Teacher Ian became very teacherly indeed, with dire warnings about the certain death that would ensue if you dived in the pool within three hours of eating. I’m afraid I ignored him however and, though undoubtedly cold, it wasn’t the shock to the system that diving into Scotland’s perishing seas usually produces, especially as early in the summer as June the second. In fact I’d almost say it was quite pleasant, though brief. By August the water in these sheltered pools gets positively tepid and I recorded sea temperatures of up to 20°C.
Fiona needed to be away frighteningly early in the morning, so in the evening we motored – with just a little sailing – back to the marina at Hyellestad. She nearly avoided waking me as she left at about four a.m. and I grumpily nodded off again for another six hours or so.
Ian was staying another couple of days, so we took a side trip, sailing ever so slowly the twenty miles or so down to Godoysund, where a defunct hotel provided pontoons and there were fifty or sixty sheltered, tree lined bays providing yet more perfect anchorages. We sailed under jib at one knot up the canal-like passages between wee islands. We finally settled on a spot where we could drop a stern anchor and tie the bow to a tree, then take another line from the stern ashore to a tree on the other side of the bay. So attached we could happily have ridden out a hurricane.
There wasn’t a hurricane however and therein lay a small problem – we were slightly beset by midges. I’d been going on about how jammy the Norwegians were 'cos they didn’t have midges, but undoubtedly there were a few in Godoysund. Not anything like in proper Scottish west coast numbers, but a few nonetheless.
I proposed going ashore and blew up the Avon Redcrest dinghy. Ian was very dubious about boarding it and gave me quite a long physics teacher lecture about air pressure. To summarise, we’d certainly die if he ever attempted to board the dinghy again. I therefore left him on board and went for a row around the lovely creeks and islands.
The following day was another phew what a scorcher and Ian’s last. We sailed and motored and motorsailed in flat calm waters under a baking sun back towards Hjellestad, poking into a couple of perfect anchorages just to have a look, but not stopping. Often, perversely, the best wee breezes seemed to be around and coming off the land, whilst the more open stretches of sea were particularly glassy. A couple of racing yachts were out for a spin. It must be a particularly frustrating part of the world to race round the cans in and one in which I imagine local knowledge generally wins through.
The next morning – or rather that night – Ian left at the same time as Fiona had. Needless to say I selflessly didn’t shift from my pit to see him off.
The Way North
Now I knew that the proper travelling part of the north-bound Norwegian leg of my journey had to begin. Though I had all summer, it’s a bugger of a way up the coast of Norway and I had to put in a decent average day’s passage. The forecast was set fair for another three days, then the long period of beautiful settled, sunny weather the Norges had been enjoying was due to break. The most famously dangerous bit of the Norwegian coast – the headland at Stad – was 150 miles away. I decided to put in two or three largish passages – well, largish for me motoring solo up tortuous twisting channels – and race the weather.
I remained unconvinced, by the way, by Norwegian claims of dangerous headlands and particularly dodgy bits of water. The fact is that the large majority of the coast of Norway is fantastically sheltered by the string of islands designed, Douglas Adams tells us, by Slartibartfast to protect the motor-boating hordes. Most Norwegians zip about in the seagoing equivalent of a Ford Focus in these sheltered waters. So as soon as there’s a bit where they actually have to go into the open sea the Norwegian Hydrographic Service stamps ‘Dangerous Waves’ all over the charts and an ‘escort service’ is provided for small boats. Presumably those ones that can’t get dates for themselves. Bring a Norwegian over to Scotland and stick him in the Corryvrechan or the Pentland Firth and he’ll soon learn what dangerous water is.
From Hjellestad I went 57 miles to the predictably fantastic natural harbour of Hardbakke, via Bergen, the Radfjord and Sognesjøen. Since there was no wind and I had to motor I thought I might as well take the inshore – or inland – route.
It’s a perverse and unlikely fact that there are apparently very few fjords in Norway. At least not many worth taking a boat up. A fjord is, of course, an inlet of the sea. Taking a quick look at a small scale chart of the Norwegian coast would suggest that there’s fjords everywhere. A closer look at a large scale chart, however, reveals that, in fact, most of these apparent inlets actually pass right through a chunk of Norway to create islands. Further inland there are of course, dead ends. These are, however, often many tens of miles inland from the open sea, surrounded by mountains and with fickle winds. There’s very little reason to travel up them in a slow boat.
Reading the charts – or rather the chart plotter – is like reading a road map for some of these channels. Looked at on a small scale you’d swear there was just land. Then you zoom in and see bits of water. Zoom in a lot more and you realise they are all connected channels between islands. In Scotland we are used to lochs stopping at the end. In Norway most of them don’t. They just keep going right on through. But though the channels are narrow they aren’t that difficult to pilot your way through. Most of them are well marked with the simple buoyage system that runs from south to north. The most common mark is a steel stick with a green or red mark and a metal ‘flag’ letting you know which side of it to pass. In the most inland channels these are really just like road markings and the channels are easy to follow.
So Zoph headed north up a series of intricate ‘sounds’, as opposed to fjords. I motored up channels not shown at all on the Admiralty 1:50,000 charts. Across Fensfjord, up Anneland Sundet, across Sognesjøen and into Indre-Steinsund. Occasionally with a little help from the jib but mostly under motor.
Zoph is fitted with a wind vane self steering system (called Leo for hopefully obvious reasons) which is great in the right context but hopeless in windless conditions and up tortuous channels. The previous year my tiller-pilot, mercifully, broke and I bought a new one, called Techno-Leo. What a revelation a half-decent tiller-pilot was! Ideal for cooking your three course dinner whilst motoring up narrow glassy sounds.
Ian had used the phrase ‘cute overload’ to describe the landscape around Bergen and the scenery, tweenery and wee buildings on the way to Hardbakke were indeed massively, almost painfully twee. Apparently ‘cute overload’ is a web site dedicated to the extraordinarily twee. I didn’t dwell too much on why Ian frequented it.
I tied up for free on a private pontoon just outside a pub in a harbour again more perfect than any natural harbour in Britain, secure against a hurricane from any direction and pictureskew to boot.
Next day there was actually a bit of wind at times. A harbinger of the break in the weather that was expected. At times it was up to twenty knots apparent. At other times it was down to bugger all. By and large it came from the north west, but it couldn’t really make up its mind where it wanted to come from. It increased as I skirted the approaches to the town of Florø and the engine actually went off for a while. However the wind often headed us and the jib was furled and unfurled about five times.
I had a fast motorsail down Frøysjøen but then met a two to three knot contrary tide as we turned north-west towards Måløy. Strong tide was not something I was used to in Norway. I would have to face the fact that as I went further north the tides got a bit more Scottish in strength and height. Happily, you have to go as far as the North Cape and well over 70° north before the tides become as ferocious or as high or the landscape gets as bleak, treeless and unpopulated as most of the west of Scotland.
Another phenomenon I wasn’t used to in Norway and thought I had escaped for the summer was fog. Often it looks rather aesthetic from a distance and it looked beautiful as it rolled in from the sea up the high sided fjords. It billowed in pure white rolls between the dramatic cliffs that formed the entrance to Måløy. As it swept majestically in from the sea I swept rather less majestically towards Måløy from the landward side, having taken the inside track up the coast. Unfortunately the fog won the race and soon it looked rather less aesthetically pleasing since I was in the middle of thick, damp fog feeling my way towards a strange port up narrow channels.