The End of Lofoten

After the storm blew through in Ballstad, we were pretty keen to find an anchorage again, but guess what? Another storm was on its way. There was one day respite where the wind wasn’t insane so we headed across the fjord to an unbelievably cute anchorage next to the island of Straumøya. We were a little nervous because it was still forecast for strong winds and it was a tiny bay, but luckily it was dead calm when we got there, and proved to be one of the more sheltered anchorages we’ve found. We had a great foraging day as we caught a fish, found lots of blueberries and harvested a bunch of mussels for the next few meals. Quite an odd experience while out picking berries to see a fully geared up hiker trudging through the swamp land in the rain - it made us very grateful to be going back to a (semi) warm and dry yacht for the evening.
Given how beautifully calm the anchorage was and that to get to our planned storm shelter it was going to be a full day beating up wind, we toyed with the idea of staying put for the coming storm. But, all of the places we could run to if the bay decided to not shelter us (we’ve experienced a bay going from completely sheltered, to crazy katabatic winds with just a small shift in wind direction) would have been fairly suicidal to get past the myriad of rocks in 30-40 knots and big seas, so we upped anchor in the morning, said goodbye to our beautiful anchorage, and made our way along the coast to Sørvågen. Even though it was beating up wind, it turned out to be quite a cool sail, with storm clouds rolling through and creating some crazy spectacles in the mountains. The steady increase in breeze meant we slowly reefed down the sails as we made our way along, and became more and more convinced it was a good thing we were going for a sheltered harbour. Sørvågen turned out to be a very cute spot, and we were glad to have power to run our heater. A few small hikes into the mountains during the storm over the next few days kept us mostly sane, and we met a couple of Norwegians at the top of one of the hills who explained one of them was moving to Lofoten because he came up last year and had a month of 30 degrees and sunshine, so he convinced his friend to come along for a holiday this year. They explained this while we were being pelted with ice cold, sideways rain. His friend didn’t look all that impressed…

This spot marked the end of exploring Lofoten for us. If the weather had of played nice we were planning to spend a couple more weeks exploring the area, but we were completely fed up with storm after storm after storm, so our plan was to sail straight across to the mainland once this storm cleared and start making our way south to hopefully warmer weather.

The sun also set for the first time in months on our last day in Sørvågen. It was a good reminder that there was indeed a sun, somewhere behind the thick blanket of cloud.Read more