Last of the Skiing

Both Rob and Russell were flying out from Tromsø on the 17th of May, leaving Angela to keep sailing. Rob was going back home, and Russell back to NZ for his brother’s wedding. Since we have such a small yacht, Russell would take the skis back with him as we are coming to the end of the ski season.
This gave us the week to hopefully get a few more tours in! Of course, as we headed back to Arnøya where we had spied some really cool runs, it started raining. The rain persisted throughout the day, but was forecast to clear up in the evening. Since the sun is only barely setting at the moment, we essentially have 24 hour daylight. So, we decided to have an early dinner and go for a late ski tour. It felt very wrong starting the tour at 20:30, and we actively had to stop our brains from stressing that it was about to get dark! We had some phenomenal views, and the first 5 minutes of skiing down was lovely, but after that we were really just there for the experience…We finished up at around 1:00am, with the sun starting to rise again, and crawled gratefully into our beds.

The next day Rob and Russell planned to go for a paraglide with their skis. After a late morning of coffee and planning, we started getting ready. On the pre-tour toilet trip, we found out the toilet will siphon sea water into the holding tank if left open even at anchor. Inconvenient, but easily fixed with a little trip out of the bay to empty it.

Now here’s a kicker, went to start the engine and…nothing. Again. FUUUUUUUU….I’m sure you don’t need much imagination to know what the reaction was. So, it turns out that if there’s too much weight in the yacht (i.e a third person with lots of gear), then the U bend in our exhaust is not high enough, and it will siphon sea water into the engine, there must have been more swell overnight than we had realised. Now, this happening a second time was unreasonably frustrating, especially given it was a beautiful day and potentially our only chance to get out paragliding with our skis, but at least we had planned for something like this. So we had all the spares and it only took half a day to fix the engine this time. But Murphy must have been annoyed at how prepared we were, because after changing all the oil, draining water etc. etc. and getting the engine running, it did it again. Immediately. In relatively calm water. Russell almost threw a spanner across the cockpit…in fact he may have. So we spent the rest of the day Jerry rigging some anti siphon valves, and carefully skimming and filtering our replacement oil, as the coastguard essentially said we were shit out of luck, sort it out ourselves, or pay lots (a Norwegian lots) of money for a full day tow back to Tromsø.

So, after all was said and done, we at least had an engine than ran, but given that there was still likely traces of seawater in the oil, and we didn’t know if our valve would actually stop the siphoning repeating, our ski sail week had turned into a ski SAIL week.

Thankfully, after sailing off and onto anchor up into the fjord, the weather gods allowed us a window to go for a ski tour up one of the more famous places to ski on the island. Angela decided to sit this one out after the state of the snow on our last ski tour, so Rob and Russell went up alone. A stunning skin up with views up and down the fjord with our yacht in it were compounded by an even more breathtaking view after gaining the ridge. The avalanche risk was quite high for small wet loose avalanches so we were being very careful not to get ourselves over any terrain traps! Even with slushy spring snow, we had a fantastic ski down in muted sunshine, making us forget all about the day before. We even managed to find a tiny finger of snow all the way back down to the shoreline. After setting off a very small wet loose avalanche on one of the steeper, heavier sections though, we were very happy with our route planning, meaning we could sit on the edge of the avalanche going wow - freaky, rather than shitting ourselves.Read more