Arctic sojourn

THANKS to Slartibartfast from the ‘Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy’, for creating coastlines and specialising in fjords. He excelled himself with his award winning Norwegian design.

For many months in the northern summer of 2018 we: Simon Pahor, our charter guests and I, poked our way into 27 of Norway’s countless coastal destinations and sailed around its “lovely crinkly edges” drinking up its picturesque exquisiteness. Like Slartibartfast I am inspired to rhapsodise about this experience and have departed Norway wanting to continue exploring its 13,500 nautical miles of coastline.

It is a long and narrow country that plunges into the Norwegian Sea. It’s deeply notched with fjords and fringed with more than 50,000 islands, meandering inside passages, rocks and skerries. It stretches from 57° to 81° north if you count its Svalbard archipelago near the North Pole.

Suffice to say, everything you read about Norway abounds in superlatives so take all these stereotypical picturesque clichés as befitting of this superb and varied cruising ground for not only yachts, but off-the-beach boats, open boats, kayaks