Sail's Pace: A Slow Float from the Arctic to the Caribbean: Å to Oz, #1

By Martin Edge

'Sail's Pace' describes my trip, on a number of different boats, over quite a few years, from Arctic Norway of to the Guna Yala islands of Panama. It's the first volume in a series, entitled 'Å to Oz', which documents my very slow, sporadic attempts to sail from north of Tromsø to Australia.

It, and its companion volume, 'Nautical Tortoise', are about the sort of sailing that anyone can do, given enough time and an appropriate boat. They are definitely not about superhuman feats of endurance. There are no near-death experiences, cyclones or sea monsters. All of it was done the prosaic, easy way. 'Nautical Tortoise' goes on to describe my journey as far as the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia. To my eternal shame, the rest of the trip, from Tahiti to Oz, has yet to be completed.

My previous writings have been about sailing my own wee boat. But this, and the volume that follows, is mostly about bumming lifts, as crew, on a number of other people's boats.

So, if you want to read about people braving mountainous seas and hurricane force winds, you'll need to look elsewhere. If you like your rugged, indomitable heroes fighting nature, tooth and claw, you'll be disappointed. If you get your kicks from stories about people barely surviving, against all the odds, by clinging to the wreckage of their tiny, upturned coracles, so emaciated after months at sea that the circling great whites can't be arsed even to nibble at them, you're in the wrong place.

If, on the other hand, you want to find out how a congenital nautical wimp might get his or herself across oceans, with the minimum of expense and hazard, by the easy, puny, pedestrian route, you might take a chance on 'Sail's Pace'.

I have to confess that Part One of this volume is disgracefully shambolic. It dots back and forth, in both space and time, as I try to piece together a collection of unconnected jaunts into a single story. Parts Two and Three, however, are at least single stories, told in the right direction and the right chronological order. So please feel free to skip forward to them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Martin Edge
• Release date: May 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223523956

Book preview

Preface: Å to Oz

More or less inevitably, the main draw for tourists was a museum of fish. Bus loads of touros, of assorted nationalities, were decanted from coaches. They gazed in awe at the garlands of rotting cod corpses, strung out, over acres and acres, between the almost painfully cute, red painted wooden houses. Any number of intrepid Italians and Germen had driven their identikit camper trucks thousands of miles, to north of the Arctic Circle. Here they worshipped at this shrine to dead cod, in the Lofoten Islands of Northern Norway. I had cycled my folding bike two or three miles, from the harbour where my boat was moored.

Cod is more than just a mainstay of the economy in Lofoten. It’s absolutely central to the culture. Imagine if you lived in a community which subsisted mainly on the manufacture of, for example, cement. Perhaps you do, and don’t have to imagine it. Imagine if the cement works permanently exuded a dusty pallor and the stink of lime. If your whole world was pervaded by cement dust. Would you proudly nail a Portland cement bag to your front door, as a status symbol? As a statement that cement, to you, was the whole world. I doubt it. Yet the denizens of Lofoten routinely nail the grotesque, grey, ghost-like heads of dried cod above their portals. Like a badge of office and a statement of pride. ‘We are dead cod! What are you going to do about it?’

This defining business of Lofoten, and the rest of coastal Arctic Norway, has been going for over a thousand years. Nowadays and for the last few centuries, the main market for smelly old dead cod has been, oddly, the countries of Southern Europe. The Mediterranean and Portugal. Particularly Portugal. Here, bacalhau is a national dish. Perhaps the National Dish. It is ubiquitous and quintessentially Portuguese. Redolent of holidays by warm, southern waters and parched, sun-soaked beaches. Yet all of it; absolutely all of it; comes from the drying racks of arctic northern Norway.

The Lofoteneers are particularly extreme in their love affair with cod. But most Norgians seem to share something of the same condition; an obsession with fish. I will write about an example of it in Part Two of this volume. A conversation between two Norwegian strangers, a thousand miles from land, in the middle of the Atlantic, which turned immediately, wistfully, nostalgically, to fish. But more of that later.

The village I’d cycled to was terribly aesthetically pleasing to the eye. This helped to make up for the fact that it was not at all aesthetically pleasing to the nose. But I wasn’t really here for the fish. I just wanted to visit somewhere which sounded like everyone’s starting point. The village was called ‘Å’.

It wasn’t my starting point. I’d sailed there from Edinburgh, that summer of 2008, at least partly to justify a sort of pun. As I headed out to cross the North Sea from Scotland, it had struck me how low the boat was floating in the water. This was due to the prodigious stocks of beer I was carrying. Beer is, as I expect you know, stupidly expensive in Norway. Immediately I had two thoughts. The first was that ‘Floating Low to Lofoten’ would be a good title for a book about a cruise to Norwegia. The other was that, in order to use the title, I’d have to sail thousands of bleedin’ miles, up into the arctic, to Lofoten, then write a sodding book about it. I was immediately hoist by my own punning petard. So here I was in the Lofoten Islands.

Now, here in Å, I had four more thoughts. Which is usually at least a whole month’s worth. The first was that it would be fun to write a book about snailing from Å to somewhere called Ż, or Ž, or Z. Or at least Zed.

My second thought was that there was unlikely to be anywhere called Z to which it was possible to sail.

When I got round to looking for one online, I felt a brief thrill of possibility. I discovered that there was a city called Z in South America. The possibility was quickly dashed when I discovered that Z was a) deep in the centre of Brazil, at the headwaters of the River Xingu, b) the ‘lost city of Z’ and c) fictitious.

I had even less luck searching for a Zed. Nobody seems to have had the foresight to name a place Zed, anywhere in the world, which is careless, to say the least.

My third thought was to look for the next best thing. A lot of people call Australia ‘Aus’, or often ‘Oz’. Perhaps that would do. ‘From Å to Oz’ would be quite a good title for a book about sailing from Arctic Norway to the Antipodes. My fourth thought was that now I was going to have to sail to sodding Australia. Bugger.

Any Norgian will tell you that Å isn’t a starting point. Å is not the first letter of the Norwegian alphabet, which is A. Å is in fact the 29th, and last. But it’s good enough as a weak pun for monoglot English speakers and, what the hell, it’s reason enough for me to waste years of my life, sailing to Australia. To further weaken the pun, my journey won’t even start at Å. Rather it will start some 170 miles further north, at the northernmost place I’ve ever sailed from.

By the way, just so that you know, and so as not to annoy Norgians, I should say that ‘Å’ is not pronounced ‘A’. It’s actually pronounced approximately like ‘awe’, for most of the English squeaking world. If you’re a south Englander it could also be ‘or’, ‘ore’, ‘oar’ or a host of other vague vowel noises, accompanied by unpronounced consonants. If you are an American ‘Å’ is pronounced like the ‘O’ in ‘orange’. In fact, it’s more or less the whole of the word orange except the ‘N’. Naturally, if you’re a Scandiwegian, ‘Å’ is pronounced ‘Å’. Since ‘Å’ is not ‘A’, of course, the whole premise of my years of nautical effort, and of three volumes of this nonsense, is weakened to the point of collapse. Frankly I don’t know why I bother.

So now I knew where I had to sail to. But how the hell was I going to get there? Though my boat is probably perfectly capable of sailing to Australia she is, at 27ft, rather small. Plenty of Vancouver 27s have crossed oceans and circumnavigated. But most of them have been skippered by hardy souls, who seem not to mind spending a month at sea by themselves, snatching a ten minute kip every day or two. I’m afraid I’m made of less stern stuff. I like my sleep far too much to go without it for weeks at a time and am, frankly, too wimpy for solo ocean crossings.

I could take a crew of course. I have done in the past, for crossing the North Sea and suchlike. But hot-bedding with a couple of smelly individuals for a two or three day crossing is one thing. Spending months at a time, crammed into a single, tiny cabin with them, is quite another. If I survived the passages, the coral island idyll would be somewhat compromised by having to share it, in incredibly close proximity, with some dirty great sweaty bugger with smelly feet.

Another factor is that Anna, my other half, though keen on wee snailing holidays, refuses to countenance spending months on end in a floating plastic coffin. Neither is she keen on me disappearing in one for several years at a time.

I decided on another option. I would try and get to Australia by bumming lifts on other people’s boats. So that’s what I attempted, with mixed success. It proved surprisingly easy to hitch lifts on boats. It was surprisingly difficult to put up with some of the folk in charge of them.

Most of the yachts I hitched on were significantly bigger than mine, but none of them was bigger than about 38ft. On the very first passage there were four of us on board. But on all the others there were either two or three of us. So it was proper sailing, on relatively wee boats. It was also, more or less, proper hitching. That is to say, though of course I paid my share of stuff like food and fuel costs, I never paid a penny for an actual passage. The folk I sailed with were needing crew, not running a business. Sometimes it became abundantly clear why they were struggling to find crew. It became blindingly obvious why nobody who knew them was prepared to sail with them.

I think it’s fair to say that, in my previous writings about sailing trips, I’ve not gone that easy on the skipper. If he’s been an arse, or done something stupid, I’ve been quick to point this out and unflinching in my criticism. To date this has not involved any serious accusations of libel. The primary reason for which is that, thus far, I’ve been the skipper and have been loath to sue myself.

Before I began this trip, I really believed that I had a special, unique talent for idiocy. In some ways it was refreshing to find that this was far from the case. That a lot of the people who buy boats and sail them round the world are, in fact, surprisingly cretinous. To an extent It boosted my confidence in my own abilities. On the other hand, describing the crass stupidity of some of the morons I ended up snailing with, is bound to end up with accusations of libel. None of what follows is actually libellous because it’s all true, and libel involves making false statements. But one of the key, defining features of idiots, is that they don’t know that they are idiots, so they’d doubtless consider a lot of it libellous.

Happily, the skippers in Parts One and Two of this volume were, with one minor exception, sensible. So hopefully, when I start describing the incompetent, eccentric and downright insane behaviour of the skippers in Part Three, and in Volume Two of this series, you’ll not think it’s just me being unreasonable. Indeed sometimes, when I’ve been gasping in disbelief at the lunatic behaviour of the madmen you’ll meet before we’ve finished, I’ve had to remind myself of these earlier, more sane times, with people who had at least a vague grasp of how to sail a boat.

Anyway, to avoid litigation I will change some identities a little in what follows, to make some people slightly less recognisable. But It’ll hopefully be obvious when I’m making up names of people and their dodgy boats.

The original idea was to write one book about sailing from northern Norway to Australia. Most hard-bitten adventurers, after all, would bung an ordinary circumnavigation into one chapter of their gripping yet understated memoir. Two factors got in the way of this plan.

Firstly, an excess of verbal diarrhoea meant that the trip as far as French Polynesia expanded and expanded until it became two volumes. This one and ‘Nautical Tortoise’, which was published at the same time.

Secondly, two devastating pandemics, covid and Brexit, are conspiring to make it difficult to sail as far as Oz. But I’m three quarters of the way there and hopefully Volume Three will follow, in not too many more years.

‘Sail’s Pace’ takes me from seventy degrees north, in northern Norway, to nine degrees north, seventy nine west, in Panama. Part One of it is particularly episodic, patchy and out of chronological order. But Parts Two and Three, from Portugal to Panama, are at least in chronological order and on only two different boats.

It took me nine years to get from Å to Panama. That’s a total of 7,870 nautical miles, at an average speed of 0.103281 knots. That may not sound fast, but it’s almost twenty times the sprinting record for a garden snail. So up yours, snails.

The first seven chapters of this volume are a particularly massive departure from your archetypal tale of adventure on the high seas. In them I describe pottering about on wee coastal cruises, in various boats. Including trips as mundane as navigating Scottish canals. They are erratic in chronology, direction and mode of conveyance. Less Homeric Odyssey and more sporadic oddity. So don’t feel bad about skipping a few chapters if you want. My trips across Biscay were also done in the wrong direction, but at least they were across a proper bit of sea.

Should you have the stamina to get that far, ‘Nautical Tortoise’ is all based on a single trip, on only one boat. It takes me from Panama to Nuku Hiva, one of the Pacific Marquesas Islands, at around nine degrees south and a hundred and forty degrees west.

The dead fish route, the one taken for centuries by bacalhau, from Arctic Norway to the dinner plates of southern Portugal, makes up Part One of this book. I sailed it piecemeal, over a number of years.

Part 1: The Dead Fish Run

Chapter 1: Seventy

I was joining the boat in Tromsø, in northern Norway. At almost seventy degrees north, Tromsø is at the latitude of halfway up Greenland. Only small parts of Siberia and tiny bits of Alaska and Canada are further north than this. It’s the proper Arctic. One of their winter nights, just the one, lasts nearly two months. It makes Iceland, all of which is south of the Arctic Circle, despite popular cultural references placing it squarely in the Land of the Midnight Sun, look like Thailand.

The single-engined bi-plane shook violently in the force ten crosswind, as it made its unsteady way, crabwise, through the white-out blizzard, to the ice sheet which had been cleared as a make-shift runway. The whisky-sodden pilot, a grizzled veteran of two months flying up here, in a land where frozen death was an unremarkable daily occurrence, peered out through the cracked windscreen, at the unrelieved whiteness. Somehow, more by instinct that anything, he found the random patch of snow which had been designated as a landing strip.

The plane shuddered as its landing skis bounced once, twice, three times on the ice surface. It skidded to a slow, slewed halt, blown sideways to the edge of the airstrip. A group of three or four polar bears scattered from the path of the plane. Their vicious maws bloodied and dripping, as they gorged on whatever carcasses remained in the wingless wreckage of the last aircraft to attempt a landing. But they didn’t go far. They gathered round, inquisitive about what snacks might be on offer this time.

The pilot struggled to open the door against the howling gale and the polar bears pricked up their ears in anticipation. Then there was the loud report of a gunshot. One of the polar bears flinched. Had it been hit? They moved rapidly a hundred yards or so away and turned back to face the plane, more wary now, but still hopeful of a meal.

The man responsible for the shot hove into view. He might have been a bear himself. A huge, bushy bearded figure, swathed in sealskin and reindeer hide boots and clothes, with only the tip of his nose showing through a massive furry hood. The dim shape of a sled could just be made out through the blizzard behind him. Wolf-like howls and discontented canine growls, from in front of the sled, were a clue to its means of propulsion.

He slung the rifle over his shoulder. ‘Come, quick!’ He shouted and led me to the sled. It was a rough but solid structure, of timber runners held together with reindeer hide. I clambered awkwardly aboard. The bear-man tossed my huge, heavy rucksack, laden down with Ambre Solaire factor fifty and snorkelling gear, lightly onto the sled behind me. With one foot on the back of the sled he let out a guttural yell, cracked a long leather whip over the six pairs of huskies and we were off into the blizzard. The horizontally blown snow lashing my face painfully, as we sped through the featureless snowdrifts, towards the sea and the waiting boat. The bears followed us listlessly for a while, then returned to their vigil, waiting for the next arrival at Tromsø Airport.

At least, that had always been my vision of the far north. In reality, of course, the foregoing was a total pile of bollocks. I know what you’re thinking, and I agree. It can’t be good practice to start a factual account with a load of pure fiction. That’s no way to get your readers engaged and sympathetic, telling them lots of lies. Fair enough. So let’s start again.

The comfortable Norwegian Air 737 landed, dead on time, at Tromsø’s large, modern international airport. The spacious, minimalist, white arrivals concourse could have been in any international airport, anywhere in the world. Except that it was quite a pleasant environment, so it couldn’t have been Heathrow or Gatwick.

I hopped into a taxi and asked the driver to take me to the marina. He gave me my very first lesson in Scandinavian yachting by asking me which of the ten or so marinas in Tromsø I meant.

This was in 2006 and the first time I had ever sailed in Scandinavia. Whilst the nonsense above about polar bears and huskies was, I admit, over the top, my expectations of this part of the world were simplistic and clichéd. I really did think I was on top of the world, literally as opposed to metaphorically, and at the very end of civilisation.

So, finding a modern, liveable city, with about ten times the number of marinas as the capital of Scotland was a genuine surprise. It was a revelation which would in some ways change my life. It would afford me more pleasant, easy adventures and experiences, over the next sixteen years or so, than I could have imagined.

I didn’t say all this to the taxi driver of course. I just gave him the name of the passage harbour in the town centre and off we went.

To my naïve mind the most remarkable thing about Tromsø, seen from the taxi and on my wanderings on foot the next day, was its absolute unremarkability. It was, of course, nothing like Drear Old Blighted. For a start everything was in good repair and quite spick and span. There were more timber buildings than we would expect at home, but that’s typical of Scandinavia. There seems to be a general understanding that things will turn to shit if they are not maintained. So the wooden houses are painted, white or red ochre or deep yellow, every few years. This is a principle which has never seemed to penetrate the British Psyche.

But otherwise, the trip across the wee island that Tromsø is on showed it to be a remarkably normal sort of suburbia. There were lawns and deciduous trees in full leaf and gardens and hanging baskets full of just the same flowers I’d expect to see about fifteen degrees further south. It was August the tenth, so everything was about as much in bloom as it would ever be. Tromsø’s two month long summer day had officially ended around the end of July, so there was a night of sorts. But the sun still didn’t disappear far below the horizon and though I’d arrived quite late in the evening, it was still perfectly light.

I reasoned that, though it was a rather nice environment in August, it’d be more or less untenable in February. Surely nobody would want to be here then. Later I found out that, in fact, hotel rooms in Tromsø; it’s Norway, so they’re exorbitant at any time; were actually twice the price in the winter as in in the summer. Bizarrely, people congregate here for the skiing, despite the fact that the town is in a state of permanent darkness. Much later I realised that your average Norgian is such an outdoor nut that they wouldn’t be seen dead in a hotel in the summer. This is a time for camping, boating, trekking and generally mucking about outside, in the countryside.

Tromsø was not a wild frontier but just an ordinary town. This fact would of course not come as a surprise to any Scandians. But I was a denizen of Britain. I had spent a lifetime being told that anywhere north of about 56 degrees, with a population of less than half a million, was doomed to failure. That no economy could be supported so far north. So finding the streets not full of rampaging polar bears and huskies came as quite a surprise.

It was a sort of inverse culture shock, which I should have been used to by then. Our culture sells us the idea that foreign environments are peculiarly alien and different, but the fact is that, when you get up close, nowhere is as alien as it looks from a distance. Except Manchester, of course.

The taxi arrived at the posh, purpose-built visitor marina, handily placed in the dead centre of town and next to the museum. I would come to realise that, like the town of Tromsø itself, the fact that the visitor marina was placed at the very centre of a Scandian town, was entirely unremarkable.

I wandered along to ‘Solstice’, the Moody 38 belonging to a guy I knew from Edinburgh. He had been looking for crew for various legs of a very ambitious summer trip. I’m not sure if the boat is named after the summer or winter solstice, so to play safe let’s plump for exactly halfway between them and call the skipper Vern, after the vernal equinox.

With a motley, varied crew of volunteers, Vern had sailed from Edinburgh to Svalbard in his plastic bucket. She’d been one of only two yachts, that year, to sail round the north end of Svalbard’s main island, then down between it and the eastern island. In doing so, he’d taken this very ordinary fibreglass production boat up to above eighty degrees north. The sea ice had retreated a previously unprecedented amount in 2006, to allow this. Of course, in subsequent years global warming has resulted in the polar bears wearing Ray-Ban shades and floating about on lilos.

Unlike my misconceptions about the northern end of the Norgian mainland, Svalbard genuinely is the province of polar bears. There are rumoured to be particularly backward places, over the Atlantic in America, which are so dangerously pugilistic, that local laws require you to carry a gun. Places called things like Haemorrhoid Hills Georgia, or Scrotalhernia Oklahoma. Such stories may be apocryphal. It was, however, actually illegal to go to Svalbard without a gun. In Hammerfest, Vern had been directed to a gun shop, to hire a rifle. Obviously, like all normal people, neither he nor any of his crew had the slightest clue what to do with the bloody thing. But, to land anywhere in Svalbard except the capital, Longyearbyen, they had to have one, to protect themselves from big white bears.

There was an amusing bit in a home video he later produced of the trip. Well, it was amusing for anyone who wasn’t actually there. The crew are walking across the ice, looking for some fabled warm springs. On the way, one of the lads casually says ‘Oh, look at that rock, it’s just the shape of a polar bear’. The camera remains pointing steadily at the rock. ‘Is that rock moving?’ ‘Ummm... yes, I think it is’. The camera starts to wobble a bit. ‘Ummm... it’s coming this way.’ ‘Ummm... let’s keep going this way’. The camera wobble increases as four blokes hurry, as fast as they can, from the oncoming bear. Each of them trying to appear like they are just casually sauntering, whilst actually going almost as fast as their trembling jelly legs can carry them.

They had a gun, but I suspect no one knew how best to use it. What do you do, if you are the one with the gun and a polar bear’s bearing down on your wee gang? You shoot the fattest bloke. That should give the bear something to keep it occupied, as the rest of you beat a retreat.

Vern’s summer had been a genuinely challenging, adventurous one. I was only joining up for the mundane task of bringing the boat back, down the mainland, as far as Bergen. I wasn’t even doing the North Sea crossing. At the time it seemed adventurous enough for me. But there was no doubt that those who hadn’t faced down a polar bear, were considered second class citizens. And fair enough.

I had a warm welcome aboard, from Vern and his two remaining crew, who had travelled with him from Svalbard. One, an Edinburgh engineering student, was to continue with us to Bergen. The other, a Norgian who had previously taken his own old wooden boat to Svalbard, was to fly home the next day. I would however meet him again a couple of years later, in Part Two, when I would find out some more disturbing things about him.

When I say ‘his two remaining crew’, don’t worry, the others hadn’t been eaten by bears.  Another crew member had already flown back to Edinburgh. Or at least that’s what Vern told me. I’ve never seen any evidence or met this person, so their fate is uncertain.

An evening of nattering and a small amount of whisky (not a big boozer, Vern, as I would eventually find to my cost). Then a day of ushering out one crew member and welcoming another; a PhD student girlie from Edinburgh; and preparing the boat for a comfortable coastal passage.

There wasn’t a terrible amount of organising and provisioning to do. So, after an hour or so of frustration, trying to fold Solstice’s massive, solid floored dinghy, into a space barely large enough for a child’s lifejacket, I explored the town. With a population of about 70,000 Tromsø is a substantial place, but most of it is low-rise, wooden suburb. I wandered about, trying to get used to the, to me, surreal sight of verdant lawns and hanging baskets, bursting with flowers, at 69.65 degrees north.

Back on the boat, the skipper arrived, babbling excitedly. The source of his pleasure was a weather forecast. He’d managed to blag his way into the Norwegian Met Office building, at the top of a hill. He’d persuaded the folk there to print out detailed forecast maps for the next eight days. It shows just how long ago it was that he could be excited by such a thing. For about the last decade, he’d just have gone online with his phone, from practically anywhere in Scandinavia, and accessed any one of about a thousand different forecasts. In 2006 he was like a wee boy on Christmas morning, brandishing his sheets of A4.

Vern ran an organised ship, but did so without the militaristic posturing and order shouting which is common amongst megalomaniacal, older yachties. He never shouted pompously ‘Well I don’t care what you do on your boat, but there’s bloody strict rules on mine!’ Which they can tend to do. Vern would tell you what to do by asking you to do something. Which is nice, because we weren’t teenage squaddies and didn’t need military discipline.

He was also always open to suggestion, even if it implied slight criticism of something. The way he’d set up the rig, or how we’d organise something domestic, for example. This made for a nicely relaxed ship. An engineer by trade, he was a quietly spoken, but organised and practical bloke and a good sailor, without claiming to be any sort of sail-tweaking racing expert.

The following morning, we cast off and motored down the sound leading out of Tromsø, to the north. As so often on other people’s boats, I was surprised how far he was prepared to motor before hoisting the sails, but eventually we were motor-sailing north-west, with the main up.

I had sailed on Solstice, very briefly, once before. Ever organised and the embodiment of forward planning, Vern had taken out his volunteer crew for a burl round the bay, back on the Forth that spring. Ostensibly to let them check out the boat, but probably more to ensure that they weren’t complete incompetents. So I knew something of how the boat was set up.

When I’d had my go, we were testing out the large and unwieldy sea anchor he’d bought, in case of nasty big storms. Even though we tested it in a flat calm on the inner Forth, the thought of the kind of conditions which might make us want to deploy the bloody thing in earnest, gave me the willies. As a general rule, I prefer the approach of busking it, as opposed to massive amounts of forward planning. I’d rather just go one step at a time and trying to block out thoughts of potential nastiness at sea. My problem is that I find it only too easy to imagine the horrendous survival conditions created by the unforecast, but almost inevitable hurricane. Vern was much more organised and pragmatic. An excess of imagination can be something of a burden. Best not to have too much.

Solstice had come from the north, and we were obviously meant to be heading south, but there was method in the madness of heading north. Quite thoughtfully, Vern had it in mind to head up to seventy degrees north, before turning south, so that the two of us who had just joined the boat could say that we’d sailed as far north as the seventy degree mark. Though at the time this seemed a bit of a waste of daylight and a breeze, in retrospect it gave me a title for Chapter One of this book, so ta Vern.

Tromsø, like most Scandiwegian towns, lies in perfect shelter a long way from the open sea, behind the islands which fringe most of the coast of Norway and make it a pleasant, easy cruising ground. We motor-sailed the twenty five miles north and west to the open sea, then sailed on a fine reach about another fifteen miles north west. In other, more domestic circumstances you wouldn’t dream of snailing forty miles out of your way just for the hell of it, but this was now passage making and the odd seven or eight hours extra made little difference.

We watched the GPS tick over to seventy degrees, celebrated with small, half-hearted and rather anal cheers, then gybed the boat round to port and pointed her at Bergen, eight hundred miles to the south-west.

Chapter 2: Reality Telly

I must confess to being a bit of a wimpy, fair-weather sailor really. If you’ve read any of this rubbish before, you’ll know that I revel in pottering up backwaters.  I enjoy exploring wee sheltered creeks far more than being battered by a storm-tossed briny. This does rather raise the question, ‘why the hell are you trying to sail to Australia then?’ To which I have no real answer. I do very much enjoy arrival and the sense of achievement of passage making. Perhaps it’s just a more pleasurable version of the relief of stopping banging your head against a brick wall. But I’m still struggling, after all these years, to achieve a proper Zen state whilst at sea for weeks at a time.

Vern, on the other hand, is very much a long passage sort of bloke. He’s of the RYA school of Very British Snailing, which has it that the sea is supposed to be cold and uncomfortable. If you’re not being tossed about on large and choppy waves you aren’t doing it right. The only real danger to be avoided is the land.

So, instead of taking the inshore, wimpy but scenic route, behind the islands, we kept about fifteen miles offshore. We headed, on a broad reach in a pleasant north easterly, the hundred miles or so to the start of the Lofoten Islands. But in this sound and fjord riven land, even a passage taking the outside route meant that only about half of our first trip was out at sea. The other half was down the sounds.

The first evening Vern outlined the watch system. There were two watches, each of two people. Four hours on, four hours off. This would be my first ever proper night passage, except for a wee bit of spotting lights in the late evening on RYA courses, so I was both flattered and trepidatious to be told that I was a ‘watch leader’. It was Vern and the girlie student on one watch, me and the laddie who’d been all the way from Svalbard on the other.

We had a good, easy passage to the Lofoten Isles, then mostly motored down the deep sounds between the islands. Most of the coast of Norway is not particularly beset by tides. Even here in the north the tidal range is no more than a couple of metres. But this far north there can be strong currents, in the narrow sounds between islands. Annoyingly, information about tidal flow all over Scandinavia is rather sketchy and I found myself getting quite British about the lack of it. That’s one thing we are quite good at on wee idiot-farm island.

The latter part of the trip through the islands gave me my first inklings of how well developed this northern part of rural Norway is, and how much money they have spent on infrastructure. Every time we turned a corner into what, in Scotland, would have been a windswept, abandoned glen with the remains of a few old stone sheep pens, I was surprised to find a neat, brightly painted little town. Between every island, where it was remotely possible, there were brand spanking new bridges. The fact that these massive, expensive engineering structures, were between islands with a combined population of about fifty, did not seem to enter into the equation. I was reminded of the decades of debate about the construction of the crappy wee bridge, over the narrow stream to the huge, populous island of Skye. In Britain that sort of engineering is the thing the Victorians did. We’re much more modern now and prefer using our oil money to give rich people tax breaks.

Late on the second day we tied up on the visitor pontoon in the stupidly, insanely aesthetic wee fishing village of Henningsvaer. The village sits on its own island, joined by various causeways to the large island of Austvågøya.

The village of Henningsvaer gave me my first taste of just how madly twee your Scandian coastal village can be. At first sight you’d think it must be a one-off. Perhaps it’s just maintained as a museum, or a film set. As you see more and more of them, you realise that the whole massive length of coastline of Scandinavia is littered with working communities, all of which would be perfectly at home featured on a chocolate box.

But I’ve banged on about these two features of Scandinavia; the rural development infrastructure and the tweeness; quite enough elsewhere, so I’ll leave it at that. If you want more ranting about these issues, try ‘Floating Low to Lofoten’ for the Norwegian coast or ‘Bobbing to the Baltic’ for lyrical waxings about Swedonia and Finland.

The next day we headed off, for the hundred and twenty mile overnight trip to Svartisen Glacier, just above the Arctic Circle. That’s right, glacier. That’s a bit more arctic than lawns and flower baskets, isn’t it? It was a gentle sail, on a broad reach most of the way, then a motor-sail in the morning, for just under 20 miles, up sheltered fjords to Svartisen. The glacier is quite a spectacular sight. In this part of the world it’s famous for the end of it, the melty bit, being the lowest glacier in mainland Europe. The closest to sea level that is. Elsewhere in the Arctic a glacier at low altitude would not be seen as remarkable.

As at Henningsvaer, Vern had been here before, on his trip north. It was obvious that, despite his driven nature and the desire to make long passages, he was keen to show off a couple of the tourist spots to the crew. Which was nice.

We tied up, next to a couple of other boats, on the visitor pontoon in the extraordinarily azure waters at the head of the loch. We gazed at the glacier, which looked like it was a couple of hundred yards away. Vern declined to join the rest of the crew on a stroll up to it. The reason for his wimping out became clear about an hour later, as we continued hiking along to take a closer squint. It became obvious that the bloody thing was not very close at all, just very big. After more than two miles we arrived at the jumbled mass of melting blue ice at the