Torrential Rain, More Friends, and Mushrooms!

We had a late start leaving our bay in the forest, since Russell had a bad sleep with the strong winds that came through.
We only had a relatively small stretch of just over 20nm planned for the day to get close to where we were picking up our friend Lisa the next morning, who was joining us for the week.
We headed off before the rain hit us, with the clouds making crazy patterns again. Unfortunately we didn’t get to outrun the rain though and Russell got very quickly very soaked. We were again very thankful for our wet weather gear. We sure have had a lot of use out of them!
We hadn’t been having much luck with fishing for the past couple of weeks. In part because we aren’t the most patient fishers and after about 5 minutes declare there aren’t any fish here (5 minutes has often been enough in the north), but we found out today that it was also because we were no longer using the best lure. Angela tried the little hand line we had, and pulled up 3 mackerel!
The first time we have caught anything but cod and pollock in Norway so the mackerel was a real treat, and delicious! Our bay was dead calm, and they rain cleared enough for some beautiful sunset colours.

The next morning we headed out early to meet Lisa at the ferry stop from Bergen. It seemed an odd place for the ferry to stop since there was nothing around, just the end of a road, but made sense as we sailed past seeing the huge oil refinery nearby. Despite that, Lisa was the only one to get off at that stop and started to question if she was in the right place.
Heading off again, Russell had a great time dodging the numerous huge ships coming in/out of the channel. Starting to understand why Norway needs traffic separation lanes on their charts here now.

We started off weaving our way between some islands with some narrow passages. We had both looked at the route the night before and couldn’t see a reason not to make that shortcut, but we had both missed the 12m cable. We are 13.5m above waterline so that was definitely not going to work for us. Luckily we both spotted it as we came out of the corner and at the same time though oh that looks quite low…Not much of a shortcut in the end, but scenic.

We had another relatively short day, mostly motoring but also managed to get some sailing in. For a time the clouds and and rain were so thick and misty that in the channel we were actually starting to use our AIS system properly finally. Very spooky seeing big ships appear and disappear in the fog…The next day was supposed to be quite a strong northerly so we were setting ourselves up to catch the breeze down to the south of Bergen.
Now that we found out we could catch fish again, we made another 5min fishing stop and had more mackerel for lunch, then dropped anchor in a cute very sheltered bay with an already full free floating dock.
We paddled ashore for a little explore and hopefully some berries. What we found was even better than berries - mushrooms! After finding one mushroom it turned into a mushroom hunt, and we were rewarded by at least 3 varieties of edible mushrooms and the biggest porcinis we’ve ever seen.
Norway has a very handy app where you can upload pictures of your mushroom and where you found it and a specialist looks at it and identifies it for you, so we had fun testing this out. Also handy that Lisa is very knowledgeable in mushrooms and could tell us what we needed to cut off and where the worms hide.
We finished the day with mushroom tasting, a delicious creamy mushroom sauce with juniper rice and some wine. Great success!Read more