3 Days of Upwind

From Lovund, the navigating got pretty interesting as the route for the next few days would take us through thousands of islands. We could have sailed on the outside of these, but with strong SW winds forecast for the next 3 days, it was going to be much more realistic to sail upwind through the islands where the sea state was better. As we left Lovund, the plan was to sail upwind through the slightly wider channels as the breeze built until it was too strong, then duck into the tiny passages between islands where we could motor with no waves. This worked surprisingly well as we made good ground beating in the sunshine, but after 5 hours of beating, the wind was over 25 knots and we weren’t making much ground with the waves, so we dropped sails and found our tiny passages. Considering the size and complexity of Norways coast, it’s surprisingly well charted, but they have a habit of not keeping power lines and floating objects in the water up to date. So we were a bit stumped when we came to what was supposed to be quite a low power line (we would just squeeze under with our mast), but found the power pole lying in the water and the lines strewn over the island. We could track two of the lines that had been half coiled up on the shore, but the 3rd still led into the water and out the other side. We figured that it should have sunk enough in the middle of the channel so we very slowly motored on over, and luckily didn’t pick up the line! The rest of the day motoring to the islands of Brasøy was uneventful, but very involved with the navigating!

The following day was still very windy, and the only realistic route south was through more tiny channels, so it was a full day of motoring that eventually led us to the island of Ylvingen. Luckily there were spells of sunshine to make us feel better about motoring an entire day…unfortunately that didn’t last as the rain rolled in with even more wind, luckily the harbour was relatively sheltered as there was a warning on the dock that it was forbidden to use in over 30 knots of wind!

Getting to Ylvingen was great, but it set us up for one hell of a slog the next day. The aim was to get to Skei, on an island called Leka. This was a 35NM leg, which isn’t too long normally. However, it was going to be the windiest of the last few days and we still had lots of islands and rocks along the way to navigate. Oh, it was also going to rain all day. This was a slog. It was quite interesting planning the navigation through all the rocks. Thankfully, the wind did as it was supposed to and clocked a little further west through the day so we weren’t sailing directly into the wind, but it was still 10 hours of hard slamming up wind. Our poor boat…
We were pretty exhausted and cold when we got to Skei, and it was a busy dock! But luckily the harbour master was there to show us a spot, and another Norwegian moved his yacht a little for us. He said this is the worst summer they’ve had for 40 years…
God we were happy we invested in good offshore sailing gear. Apart from some water running up our arms, we were almost completely dry after 10 hours of rain and waves breaking over us - impressive! Unfortunately, our yacht turned out to be less waterproof than our clothes - we may have pushed her a little too hard. So we had to tear the interior up and dry out all the bedding etc as best we could before going to bed. We were very thankful for shore power for our little heater.
Morale has certainly been higher!Read more