We are now in Sandefjord on our way round the south coast
of Norway towards Stavanger where Ian and Ginny Ross are due to join us for the
final leg of our Norwegian cruise up to Bergen. We reached here via Oslo from Hallangspollen, from where we sent our last Post (RR5).
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| Progress to date |
On our sail north up the Oslofjord from Strömstad in
Sweden, we anchored overnight in both Evjesundet and Hallangspollen – two
beautiful, sheltered fjord anchorages, each surrounded by steep wooded hills
dotted with holiday homes. Quite
different from the low-lying granite and scrub islands, islets and rocks of the
Swedish Bohuslän archipelago. Both are
very attractive in their own way. We
also pulled onto the canal quay of the relatively large industrial town of
Moss, where we purchased a wifi mini-router and SIM card. Moss is home to one of the three airports
that service Oslo.
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| Norwegian holiday homes surrounding anchorage |
On our way up the fjord we passed through The Narrows
between the island of Kaholmen and the mainland. The imposing Oscarborg fortress
at the south of the island dates back to 1600. It dominates The Narrows and
hence the entrance to the Oslo inner fjord. The fortress’s coastal artillery
batteries sank the German warship Blücher there in April 1940. This gave the Royal family and government time to avoid capture
and allowed them to escape to Britain to set up a government in exile. Today the oil and ammunition still on the
wreck represent an environmental concern.
In Oslo we berthed in the Skøyen Boat Club’s marina at Frognerkilen at the head of
the bay. Berthing costs, for the eight
days that we left the boat there, were a third of what they would have been at
the Royal Norwegian Yacht Club on the Bygdøy peninsula or at the Akke Brygge visitors’
marina in the centre of the city.
Equally important to us was the fact that it was well protected,
pleasant, friendly, secure and a more convenient location, being only three
miles from the city centre and an equal distance from the museum complex on the
Bygdøy peninsula. A No. 30 bus ran past
the marina gate in each direction every ten minutes.
Helen flew back to the UK on 29
May to help with the final wedding preparations. She was responsible for floral decorations, an area in which she
would not claim to be an expert. Hence
it was, to put it mildly, a concern!
However, as she walked back and forth from Will and Lesley’s flat to
the church carrying buckets of flowers, she was approached by a young woman who
lived nearby and asked if there was anything she could do to help. To cut a long story short, Victoria was not
only a talented flower arranger but also an expert teacher, who gave Helen an
impromptu masterclass in floristry.
Since then she has become known by one and all, and in particular by
Helen, as The Flower Angel!
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| Floral pedestal created by Victoria, the Flower Angel! |
Mike stayed on in Oslo for a
couple of days longer to sort out the boat, but in view of the fact that we had
sailed, rather than motored, more than anticipated, he didn’t need to service
the engine as planned and instead used his spare day to visit the principal
museums on the Bygdøy
peninsula, namely the Fram (Polar), Kon-Tiki and Viking Ship museums. It’s a great shame that Helen missed out on
these visits, because the museums were excellent.
The Fram museum celebrates the
achievements of Norwegian polar explorers, in particular Nansen and Amundsen,
who beat Scott to the South Pole. The centrepiece of the displays, however, was
the Fram – the beautifully restored ship designed by Colin Archer in an
egg-shape in order to withstand pack-ice.
The boat is reputed to be the strongest wooden boat ever built. It was possible to walk across its decks and
to try to imagine what it must have been like in the Antarctic.
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| Colin Archer's polar exploration ship - Fram |
The Viking museum featured
three boats, two of which had been fully restored, and associated artefacts.
They were all found in burial mounds near Tønsberg. Mike had always imagined that Viking ships were simply used for a
bit of rape and pillage but it appears that the majority were engaged in
commerce and trade. To that extent he
was a bit disappointed.
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| Viking Ship - Oslo Museum |
The Kon-Tiki exhibition included Thor Heyerdahl’s
balsa-wood raft on which he crossed the Pacific from South America to the
Polynesian islands and his papyrus (reed) raft on which he subsequently crossed
the Atlantic. His objective on both these and other expeditions was to support
his theories, as an anthropologist, on early human migration. He argued that it
was possible for the Egyptians to have reached the Americas five hundred years
before Columbus, and for the South Americans to have populated the Polynesian
islands – ideas that ran contrary to contemporary thinking.
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| Thor Heyerdahl's papyrus raft |
Will and Lesley’s wedding and
reception were everything that we all could have hoped for. We entered the
church under cloudy skies which threatened rain, but came out, after a lovely
service, to bright, hot sunshine – ideal conditions in which to stand in the
church garden and drink pints of Pimms while photographs were taken by Niki
Denby, whom we’ve known since she was a baby!
She is now a very accomplished professional photographer with her own
business – see www.nicolaphotography.co.uk.
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| Mr & Mrs Will Norris |
The readings in church and the speeches
at the reception were all well delivered – but then you would expect nothing
else given the number of professional
actors involved! The Happy Couple first
met as young teenagers in 1994 when they appeared together, as Prince
Chulalongkorn and Lady Tuptim, in Harrogate’s St Andrew’s Operatic Society’s
production of The King and I.
In his speech, Will quoted excerpts from Lesley’s diary of the time,
where she described him variously as a “good kisser”, an “amazing dancer” and
“extremely annoying and immature”! They subsequently only met again through
Facebook, four years ago. We're not sure that Will's reference in his speech to our "gap decade's sailing" was meant to be complimentary or not!
Clearly Will and Lesley had a
wonderful day, as did their guests.
Two days later, having come back down to earth, they booked their
honeymoon in Mexico on LastMinute.com, and left the next day.
We stayed on in London for the
Diamond Jubilee celebrations, but have to confess that we arrived late at the
Thames and saw only the tail-end of the flotilla. Being very conscious of the
appalling weather forecast, we cut our losses and repaired to Will and Lesley’s
“local” pub, the Jam Tree, to join them, Henry and Sarah, and friends to
celebrate in the warmth!
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| Today's Specials! |
On the way back to the boat we
travelled on the impressive 210km/hr bullet train from Oslo’s Gardermoen
airport to Oslo centre. Half price for
BOTH of us, thanks to the recognition in Norway of Mike’s status as a
pensioner! Alan and Lynn, whom we first
met while sailing in the Caribbean in 2000, had flown out to “boat sit” and
tour Oslo while we were at the wedding, before joining us for our cruise back
down the Oslofjord. That evening we enjoyed an
excellent reindeer casserole Lynn had prepared for supper.
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| Alan and Lynn |
We left Skøyen Boat Club early next morning to cross the harbour in
order to view from the sea the city’s magnificent new opera house. Much of it is constructed of plate glass in
order to resemble a glacier floating in the water of Oslo’s harbour and is said
to look truly spectacular in the winter when snow provides it with a gleaming
coat and the surrounding harbour freezes over.
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| Oslo's Opera House |
We then motored south back along
the same route by which we’d entered the inner Oslofjord to the Narrows at
Oscarborg, where we again stopped at the beautiful anchorage of
Hallangspollen. After lunch we went by
dinghy to Husvikholmen harbour, from where we walked a couple of miles to Drøbak, a cosy little town of colourful clapboard
houses. Known as Norway’s Christmas
town, it is renowned for its Christmas decorations and has a Father Christmas
road-crossing sign and postmark. Naturally we had to send a few postcards from here.
Since the next day, after an early
start, we were making good progress south from Hallangspollen, we decided to
keep going through the afternoon to an anchorage at Valløy, the entrance to the eastern approach to Tønsberg. After
anchoring we had a well-deserved drink (or two) and supper in the cockpit while
enjoying the evening sunshine.
Afterwards Lynn amused the assembled company by experimenting with the
camera settings on her new iPad. Among
them she took some great thermal images.
When we went to bed at midnight it was still light enough to see across
the anchorage.
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| Mike |
In the morning we left promptly to
catch the first lift of the bridge at the eastern end of the canal through Tønsberg – before berthing on the attractive wooden
town quay, which doubles as a pedestrian walkway, at the west of the town – and
at the head of the Tønsbergfjord. Tønsberg
claims to be the oldest town in Norway, having been founded in the ninth
century. Its naturally protected harbour, fertile plains and adjacent
commanding hill made it an ideal place for a settlement to evolve.
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| Island Drifter on Tønsberg quay |
The highlight of our stay was our
visit to the construction site, only a hundred metres away from the town quay,
where a Viking boat is being built using traditional materials, tools and
techniques. It is a replica of one of
the ships discovered locally, which is now in the Viking Museum in Oslo.
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| Replica Viking ship being constructed in Tønsberg |
Since the weather was forecast to
remain settled, we decided to try to rock-moor for the night in Stauper – a
group of small, tightly packed islets near the mouth of Tønsbergfjord.
We crept, with extreme caution, into the small, sheltered inner pool
through a narrow rocky entrance. When inside the pool, we dropped the kedge
anchor off the stern and, once it took hold, nudged forward to a rock and
attached a slip line through the eye of a bolt that had already been hammered
into a crack in the granite. (This manoevrue was achieved by Alan leaping from
the bow in Kamikaze fashion onto said rock – next time we’ll lower the dinghy
and avoid risking a broken leg!) We then reversed a little way off the rock. Later, in order to provide greater security,
we did launch the dinghy and fixed a safety line, at 90 degrees to the hull, to
a bolt on another rock. The boat
appeared to be adequately secured and we therefore felt comfortable enough to
sleep well – even though the wind increased somewhat during the night.
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| Rock mooring, Stauper |
Next morning, we rowed across the
pool to two of the islets to explore and photograph what has undoubtedly been
our most spectacular anchorage to date.
Lynn also took photographs of the many rockery plants in their natural
habitat to show to her BTech Horticulture students.
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| Island Drifter rock-moored at Stauper Island |
As by now the wind had started to
blow more strongly, we delayed lunch and inched our way out through the islets
and rocks back into Tønsbergfjord. There we continued south under motor into a
strong head wind to the mouth of Sandefjorden before sailing north up the fjord
to a pontoon in the guest harbour in the centre of Sandefjord town – in order to enable Lynn and Alan to catch their
flight next day from the nearby Oslo-Torp airport.
To our surprise, the other yacht
on the small guest pontoon was Helice, which belongs to Jim and Ann
Macdonald whom we’ve now known for some time since they took over the agency
for our water-maker. Unfortunately, they had left only an hour earlier to
return to the UK for a week.
Sandefjord was formerly the
whaling capital of Norway. Its past is commemorated by an excellent museum
dedicated solely to whaling, a steam-driven whaling ship in working order, and
a most striking monument and fountain near the waterfront.
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| Whaling Monument, Sandefjord |
After Lynn and Alan left for the
airport and we’d had some lunch, we headed south for two miles to Lofterød, a well-protected bay off the fjord, behind a
series of islets. The day had started damp but now the sun had reappeared so we
spent the afternoon and evening chilling out in the cockpit.
As we were comfortably anchored we
stayed another day and had a major sort-out on the boat before returning by
dinghy to Sandefjord to each get a haircut and to purchase supper from Berggren
Brothers, the outstanding fishmongers next to the fishing dock.
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| Prawn Supper |
We plan to leave tomorrow morning and make our way
towards Stavanger.
P.S. FOR THE TECHNOPHILES:
P.S. FOR THE TECHNOPHILES:
In Sweden we bought a “3” mobile
"Pay As You Go" USB broadband dongle. We found out, too late, that we could have
bought and also used it in Denmark. The
dongle cost £20 and had four times the data allowance that I get in the
UK with "3". Sweden and Denmark are very well
organised in terms of mobile communications.
Up until we got to Sweden we had struggled trying to connect to marina
wifi which seldom worked efficiently, if at all, (other than in Sixhaven,
Amsterdam, where it was brilliant and lulled us into a false sense of
security).
Staff in the five Norwegian mobile
phone shops we visited in Moss all accepted that Norway was nowhere near as organised
as Sweden. In brief, you have to take
out a contract for voice or data usage, and to do so you have to have a
Norwegian social security number and address. To cut a very long story short, the manager of the shop sold us a new
wifi mini-router and installed his own SIM card (with a whopping 8gb data
allowance on it), which will more than cover us until we leave Norway.
The advantage of the mini-router
over a USB dongle is that up to five devices can connect at the same time and
it can be positioned (if necessary) outside the boat in order to optimise
reception – features which could also be useful at the beach hut. Something to
look into when we get back to the UK.
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