Into the Unknown

It was a relatively lazy start to our second day sailing. Another stunning day, and a little breeze for us to sail past Vardø and round the corner onto the northern side of the Varanger Peninsula. Now we really were in the Barents Sea! When you look at the charts, this coastline is riddled with more wrecks than I’ve ever seen thanks to a shelf out from the coast where it goes from 300-400m deep to ~60m deep over very little distance, amplifying the swell and creating some extremely dangerous conditions.
We however, managed to get a day of glassy water and a breeze that slowly died to not a breath of wind. For the whole day, we were mind blown by the scenery and the weather as we made our way to Makkaur-Sandfjorden. We had a great time soaking up the sun, the views and guessing all the new sea birds we were seeing - Auks, Puffins, Eider ducks, the list goes on.
As we were pulling into our bay, which happened to be the most spectacular bay we’ve ever seen, a whale appeared again, though this one was much more shy than the one we saw while sinking.
Watching the bottom come up to greet us through the crystal clear water was very cool, and slightly terrifying because of just how clear the water was, and the charts seem a little uncertain of themselves through a lot of this coastline. So we explored the shallows a little before dropping the anchor where we were happy, and watching it set in 6-10m depth.
A quick trip ashore to explore before it got too late revealed that even here, on top of the world with not a boat in sight, the effects of humans is very evident. There was rubbish all along the shoreline. From gumboots to whole fishing nets, there was easily several hundred kilos of rubbish that we could see from a very short explore - pretty sad. We wished we had a bigger boat to be able to collect it all, but all we could do was take some photos and head back to our yacht.Read more