Sunday 24th July 2011 – Cheapest diesel so far!
After a leisurely morning and a brief walk around Kaileie boat haven, mainly to find the honesty box in which to leave our payment, no envelopes were provided here, which was unusual and only the second place we have visited not to provide them.
We continued south along the Coast of Huftaroy Island and took a detour into Bekkjarvik (11 nm) situated on the N.E. side of Selbjorn Island opposite the south of Huftaroy. We had been told that it was a popular place to visit and it certainly was quite attractive with the café doing a roaring trade where we had ice creams and for me a delicious apple cake and I thought for Norway reasonably priced. Being Sunday the small shopping centre was closed and there was not much else here to detain us longer than an hour or so. However, the biggest attraction was diesel at NOK 8.95 per litre a whole 2 kronner less than in Bergen and the cheapest so far on this trip, so we took the opportunity to fill up our diesel tank. It was noticeable that the fuelling wall was in fairly constant use and in this country where the motor boat is king that came as no surprise!
During this trip, we have used a blog by Martin Edge written about sailing trips to Norway in 2007 and 2008, which James printed off in its entirety, Martin has a very amusing style of writing but his information and photographs of the places he visited have been very useful to us. One such place was Teloy an island near Fitjar on Stord which is almost split in two by a series of lagoons; he navigated his way into the third and final lagoon in which he anchored in 6 metres of water, with no one else in sight. His visit coincided with a fortnight of hot weather and saw him skinny dipping and sunbathing, also 4 free rolls were delivered by dinghy from the local shop (1 hour away) as advertising.
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| Skinny Anchoring |
We had decided to try and find this idyllic spot, which was across the Selbjornsfjorden from Bekkjarvik. To reach the lagoons one doubles back on oneself into the first lagoon, across the 2 metre bar into the second lagoon which had boats tied to trees and then around a corner dodging a 1.3 metre rock in the middle we crossed the 1.5 metre bar into the final deserted diamond shaped lagoon and found the 6 metre pool in which to anchor, of course for us it was pouring with rain, so I helmed from below whilst James did ‘skinny’ anchoring. We have got anchoring down to a fine art of just hand signals from James and he is very thorough in checking that the anchor is well and truly embedded, with a lot of reversing at different strengths until he is happy that we will not be dragging!
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| Teloy |
It was some hours later after supper that the rain stopped and I was able to go on deck and look at the anchorage, it was then that I suddenly spotted a small brown animal running across the rocks and it had one brief foray into the water, at first we thought it was an otter but in hindsight I wonder whether it was a mink as it did not spend much time in the water and then disappeared into the rocks going up hill. We also had a visit from a heron looking for his supper but the midges were too bad to stay on deck long – it was the first time that we have really been bothered by them, on the other hand the weather has been so poor that we have not often wanted to sit out late! The anchorage had the occasional visit from dinghies having a look and briefly two people appeared with dogs from one of the other anchorages nearby, otherwise we had the place to ourselves. This whole area provides a number of anchoring, stern anchoring with bows tied to a tree (step off on to rock) or miscellaneous pontoons / jetty possibilities.
Now we are further south I am able to get BBC radio 4 again, so after two months of very little news I now feel I am re-joining the human race again, is that a good thing I ask myself? Being in Norway at the time of the atrocity in and near Oslo, it is useful to get some news of what has happen even if only to be able to commiserate with the Norges.
Distance motored: 18 nm
Monday 25th July 2011 – Top Ten Anchorage?
At least the morning was not wet, grey yes and the water temperature at 16 degrees still does not attract me to go swimming, I always say 18 degrees is about the minimum I want to swim in, certainly for my normal 40 minutes! So James said that we might as well continue with our exploration south. However, when he went to get the anchor up, the electric anchor windlass would not work – the second time on this trip so we lifted up our fore cabin berth to get at the mechanism, the last time all James had to do was fiddle with the wires and hey presto it worked again but not today, so it was back to hauling the anchor and chain up manually (luckily this time only 20 metres of chain was out rather than the 50 metres last time), as you might imagine the air was blue and the boat ready to be sold to the first bidder!
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| Storhaugen: stern anchor, bow to pontoon |
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| View of the pontoon, once we were back at anchor |
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| Storhaugen view out of the last bay. |
As I have mentioned in a previous blog entry, James has been collecting articles of sailing in Norway for over 20 years and one of these by Kevin Seymour (who was a director at Northshore when we had the Southerly 115) mentioned an anchorage that came into his top 10 of anchorages anywhere, so of course we really had to go and have a look Storhaugen on the southern end of the Island of Borgundo. This is also a series of 3 bays, the out one had a free pontoon with boats already on it, the middle one had a pontoon on either side by houses / boat house, one of which said ‘private’ and a final almost enclosed bay with a 1.3 m rock right in the entrance which had to be negotiated carefully had a small pontoon towards the end – it looked too shallow towards the land, but we were able to put a stern anchor out and bow onto the seaward end of the pontoon, it was an absolutely still day so we did not have to worry about the stern anchor not being very well embedded! Of course the rain came down all afternoon and the water is very black – peaty we think, not the normal clear water we are use to in Norway.
Would this anchorage make our top ten? We are not sure that it would, it would certainly be very secure in all weathers, we had it to ourselves which is always nice and it was quite pretty, perhaps if the sun had shone we would have felt differently. However, having been in some truly spectacular anchorages in the Swedish and Finish Archipelagos has perhaps spoilt us.
In the early evening when the rain had stopped I went ashore and picked wild raspberries and a few blueberries, all the time watching where I walked as there were cow pats and hoof marks all around in the very boggy ground. However, I got a large bag of the small raspberries which did us both for two suppers. After that we went and anchored in the middle [James having now got the anchor windlass to work again, this after a telephone call to Steve Larkman at our boat yard gave him another avenue to try which worked!]
Distance motored: 44 nm
Tuesday 26th July 2011 – First Christian Church in Norway
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| Church on the site of the 1st Church in Norway |
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| Open air theatre |
On leaving Storhaugen we motored the 12 miles to Mosterhamn on Moster Island, which is where the first Christian King of Norway (brought up in England) set up his stronghold; and the first church in Norway was built on the site of the present church. We found a wooden wall to moor to next to the café (not open!) and walked to the church which I had read was open in the season, it was definitely closed – perhaps the season is over or has not yet begun! We carried on round the village and found the shop for necessities and then had a look at the village theatre built in an old mine – open air – seating for up to a thousand with a rock back drop, around the outside a café and other facilities have been built. It seems as though most summers they put on a musical and this year to celebrate 10 years they are doing a ‘concert’ of songs and scenes from all the ones they have done. We were able to see a little of the rehearsal, before returning to the boat and continuing on south.
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| Mosterhamn, tied up by the cafe. |
We spent the night at Skudeneshavn at the south end of Karmoy Island. The inner harbour was heaving with boats and whilst it was very scenic the houses are mainly white wood which is quite unusual here. We opted to tie alongside a wall further out of the town centre and by the time we walked back there were even more boats – 5 deep in places!
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| Skudeneshavn |
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| Skudeneshavn |
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| Skudeneshavn - our free berth for the night! |
Distance motored: 55 nm
Wednesday 27th July 2011 - Tananger
We left Skudeneshavn at 7am with the plan to sail south to Egersund or further south before the crossing to Denmark. However, we had only been going a short time when James was seeing and hearing ‘Tall Ships’ on the VHF, so he suddenly said “I wonder if the Tall Ships are meeting in Stavanger?” a quick look at the Internet confirmed that they were racing from Shetland to Stavanger and the celebrations in Stavanger were from 28th – 31st July. Having seen them in Amsterdam last year and Turku (Finland) in 2009 we decide to make for Tananger which by road is quite close to Stavanger, as we know berthing space in Stavanger will be very limited, so as it was still very early James rolled out the jib as the we had a NW 3 and we slowly sailed towards Tananger until the wind was so light that we were hardly making any way. Once in Tananger we took the opportunity to top the fuel tank up from beside the hotel and then found a finger berth on the pontoon.
I walked into town for fresh food and a look around during the afternoon, whilst James cleaned the boat! The plan tomorrow will be to either cycle or take the bus to Stavanger to see the ‘Tall Ships’, there are certainly some names we recognise from previous gatherings.
[Info: Berthing by the hotel is NOK 150 and on the pontoon NOK 100 includes electricity and free showers. Fuel was reasonably priced at NOK 9.60 p.l.]
Distance motored / sailed: 21 nm
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