Day 6
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.
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”For some things, we will never be ready.” - Moana 2
After 852 miles of open ocean sailing, the crew of Falken dropped anchor in Moorea's Cook's Bay—not with a quiet glide in, but surfing down waves in a squall, breaking speed records and cheering each other on through the rain. What started as a plan to "just dip a toe" into offshore sailing turned into something harder to explain: the worse the conditions got, the more alive everyone felt. Turns out the question was never whether the crew was ready—it was whether they even needed to be.
Kauehi conundrum
Kauehi atoll was always on the itinerary—until the forecast made it a gamble not worth taking. Squalls, bommies, a tidal pass, and no clean escape route: sometimes the hardest call in sailing is the one that keeps you out of a place, not in it. The Tuamotus will have to wait.
Hove-to!
Falken is too fast—a problem most sailors would kill for, yet here we are, tacking back and forth across the Pacific just to kill time. A rogue low pressure system south of Tahiti has stolen the trades and scrambled our timing for the tidal window into Kauehi's pass, leaving us hove-to 45 miles short of our target in the Tuamotus. Salt licorice, dream sandwich debates, and a philosophical question about mermaid reproduction are helping pass the night.