Horta to Norway

Our voyage from Horta was good but with variable weather.

Grete's new baked bread tasted wonderfull!

Refilling the diesel tank underway.

Geir had daily contact with radio friends on HAM radio and on the radio networks on marine bands.

Weather forecasts was sent to us by LA3ZH Leif in Kristiansand every day and we also downloaded forecasts from Predictwind.com. Another feature was position reports via Predictwind.

This gave us the oportunity to report our own position and to see other boats position while underway.

This is a "Happy meal" while underway

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The last week we had a LOW with high winds and choppy seas.
2 days prior this LOW we turned due East and sailed towards the Spanish NW coast to get further away from the high winds.
On friday noon wind picked up from the SW to 20-25 knots and seas were building. The wind slowly increased to 30-35 knots and the sea to 5-6 meters. It stayed like that untill Saturday evening. Sunday morning it slowly decreased and by noon wind was down to 15-20 knots.

The boat sailed very well through this gale - and living aboard was fine. We even cooked our dinner and relaxed quite comfortbaly.

However, we decided to drop sailing up to Ireland, as this ment sailing with the beam to the high seas created by the gale force winds.
We therefore set our course for Yarmouth Harbour on the Isle of Wight.
Our friend Thom D'Arcy on S/Y Fathom - put in a good word for us - as Yarmouth is his home port.

We were therefore given a fine berth when we arrived on June 25th.

Just tied up at the Yellow Pontoon in Yarmouth Harbour

We celebrated our 20th year anniversity.

A few pictures from Yarmouth:

Boat needed to be "pimped up" with some brass.

We spent a few days relaxing and went for fresh supplies at the local grocery shop.

Finally we tanked up with water and diesel and started our voyage to our home port Farsund in south Norway. We departed with the current flowing from west to east - and managed to do great distance before the direction turned.

The first day we did 150nm. The wind was blowing from the SW at 15-20 knots and we were "flying" along out of the English Channel and into the North Sea.
We kept out of the Traffic Separation Sone sailing along the English coast and the Dutch coast.
There were a few fishing trawlers, windfarms og offshore oil/gas platforms - but we sailed through without any problems.

Approaching Dogger Bank we exspected yet another gale. The forecast was intitially for gusts up to 35-40 knots, but later downgraded to 25-30. When it arrived it slowly built up from the SW from 15 up to 25, then varied slowly up to 25 to 30 knots from the SW. The water depth of Doggerbank is ony 12-25 meters and seas builds fast and creates quite choppy seas. But again Ocean Viking showed us what a great sea going boat we have. And I have good praise to our Hydrovane and our Simrad AP25/AC20 autopilot. They steered the boat better than I can do manually.

The wind started to ease off early morning on Saturday 4.7. In the afternoon/evening we were getting close to the Norwegian trench. We were approached by a Danish fishing boat. We called them on the radio and had a great chat with the captain, who was from the Faroes - but living in Denmark. He also had a 31 foot sailboat at home.

He came up pretty close to us and took pictures that he later emailed us. Here is a couple of them.

We arrived in the early morning at Farsund and was moored at 3AM and even if it was kinda late,

a toast or two... was very appropriate.

The good stuff - Gin from Peters Cafe Sport in Horta

Why has that nose turned so RED ?

It's been a great year - but it could had been so much better. The COVID-19 pandemic unfortunatly set a total stop to our trip.

We feel we still have lots to see. Who knows - we may cast off again on new adventures in the future.