Day 6
28 February 2024
Leg 1 Vindön-Bergen | Day 3
Inshore sailing is all about enjoying the moment. The plans you lay out in the morning will almost always change once the sails are up. We left Tananger after a slow morning talking to the locals, fixing things, and exploring. The downwind sail north took us through beautiful Kvitsøy. We were supposed to sail in the outskirts, but we ended up sailing through the very narrow channels in downtown Kvitsøy. Google Kvitsøy and you will want to make the same trip as us. We should have stopped, but we continued up Karmsundet. The next plan broken was an anchorage just south of Haugesund. A forecast promising gusts of 46 knots didn't sound like a good night's sleep. So here we are in Haugesund, getting ready for a restaurant dinner. All is well on board the good ship Isbjorn—Jon, JoJo, and fantastic crew. PS: We had sun almost all the way.
JonAmtrup
View more passage logs
Birds and glows
The sun brought new wind and we were soon putting up the Yankee (jib) and turning off the motor. During the evening tradition of sharing “glums and glows” that follows the crew dinner, our Mate Ryan proclaimed it a “champagne sailing” kind of day. As Alex noted this evening, life goes by so fast that one of the very best things about his line of work is enjoying the passage of time in the slow lane of an ocean passage. But by tomorrow, the green blobs in the weather sailing app indicate we’re going to pick up some significant northwesterly winds and we’ll take them ever further south to the Channel Islands latitude. We’re all super excited for the knots to climb and to see Falken really run.
Golden Day
The Pacific is giving us “the shimmer” - with a still flat sea seven hours out of San Francisco Bay, we’re motoring south along the shipping channel, with an hour to go to what teases now as a stunning sunset against wispy clouds. Throughout this first day of Falken 11 the sails have unfurled and been furled again as skipper Alex tries to fill them a meager breeze indeed. We’ve seen a few whales traveling along the route, and an otter that was sadly just a buoy. It’s the first open ocean sail for many of us and it’s a thrill to anticipate all the new experiences we’ll have.
Seasickness
But maybe, I thought, with some drugs I could stay ahead of it. The first 48 hours I felt horrible. But luckily with 3 health care professionals on board and in a very encouraging environment, my body found its way. Anyway, someone offered me a patch (unavailable in Canada) and someone else gave me some pills for nausea and now I feel much, much better.