After part one, you should now know where Svalbard is and how challenging life over there can be. Sailing can be dangerous but in most places, there is reasonable hope for help if something goes really bad. In Svalbard, you are on your own. The governor of Svalbard makes it really clear that help can take a long time to reach you and you should be prepared to help yourself.
I’m not confident enough in my sailing skills so I chartered a boat with a crew. The boat is not a big one, it’s an Alubat Ovni 445, 45ft aluminum hull sailboat, made in France (in the Sables d’Olonnes).
The boat was really confortable and spacious. We were 4 passengers and 2 crew members.
Inside our sailboat.
Inside our sailboat.
The constant presence of sunlight really confused our internal clock. After a while we had lunch at 6pm local time, diner was 2am and breakfast was 10/11am. You loose complete notion of time since it’s always daylight. There is nothing to mark your day. If like me, you don’t have a watch or don’t carry your phone, you would loose track of time and days. For that reason and the fact we did and saw a lot of things in a short period of time, the 7-day sailing trip still felt like a 3-week vacation. It’s a wonderful feeling.
Waffle time on deck
While the sailboat was very confortable, some of us really wanted to try to swim, I had to document this feat and could not join them, right !
Testing the emergency procedure.
The sailboat was always near us, so I took a fair amount of images with our sailboat on it, here are about 20 of them:
Sailing in the Svalbard is a multi-post story:
- Part 1: Sailing in Svalbard: the Northernmost Inhabited Place in the World
- Part 2: this one
- Part 3: coming soon