The Crossing to Bergen

As always, with any crossing of 200nm watching the weather and swell for several days before is essential. I was confident in the boat and everyone on the boat. Claire was trying out some behind ear patches to help with sea sickness. The original plan was to leave early Thursday, when the stiff wind in the centre of the North Sea had subsided. And the crossing could be done with only one night sail. As it turned out night doesn’t really happen anymore. The weather patterns were moving quite quickly and it was looking as if there would be almost no wind on Thursday and probably a left over swell. The worst of both worlds. We decided to leave Wednesday afternoon and make the most of what Northerly wind was left. The plan was use the early light wind for the first third of the journey stay north as much as possible just in case the stronger wind mid crossing was very strong and we needed to bare off. Then see what we had left for wind tho make landfall south of Bergen. We set off around 3pm motor sailing on the rumb line. It was time to organise the watch system with almost entirely daylight hours this far north, night experience wasn’t really a factor. I decided that we would have 4 hour watches with 1 hour overlap at each end of the watch. Plenty of sleep and not too long alone. When I went off watch at 1am we were sailing nicely with full sail. A 7kt reach slightly north of destination. By the time I re appeared at 7am we had 1 reef in and half the head sail. About 20knts of breeze still in the north. I put in another reef with nick and let out some head sail. The boat felt better balanced. The sea was building and it was ugly and disorganised very difficult for us to steer and impossible for George the auto helm to get around. The up side it was a totally blue day. The sea continued build and continued to send ugly crescent shaped waves our way. Mostly on our beam but sometimes not. We had about 12 hours to run and it was going to hard work on the helm. Claire offered to make tea before she went to bed, which meant the patches were working. ( Don’t tell Austen I didn’t actually remember to put them on until I went to bed and realised there was only a 20:80 chance at best of managing not to be tipped out if it!) About 4 hours out of Bergen, the sea began to moderate and the wind was dying. We wanted to be out of the swell before the wind completely went. The first sight of Norway was the snowy mountains behind Bergen in a red sun set we eventually entered the south channel to Bergen at about 10.30pm. The sensible thing was to find an Anchorage and head into Bergen and the Customs game the following day. We had a look through the chart and Hummelsund looked like a likely candidate. Wow what a spot . So beautiful and so still, it felt like we anchoring in the village green .Lue lisää