After our stressful night in Reine, the wind had eased off enough to let us get off the dock around 0900 the next morning. I had only gotten about 4 very fitful hours of sleep, but knew I could relax and nap once in open water. The gusts in the valleys were still touching 35 knots, but the lulls between them were longer and came more often. We removed all the extra dock lines we’d added prior, then made our escape. For a few seconds it was touch and go, as Isbjorn’s stern pulled to port and towards the fixed pier ahead of Rubicon3’s Oriole.

I’ll say I’m pretty relaxed being at sea again after the other night, which was a reminder that we are indeed in the Arctic and that shit can - and will - happen. There’s a saying that goes something like ‘the Arctic kills the unprepared,’ and last night was a freaking wake-up call for me on that front.

In the 18 hours in Bodø, we met Ola, a fan of the podcast and fellow Swede who popped by the boat to say hi. Ola used to work as a boatbuilder in Sweden for Linjett. He and his wife built their own Linjett during his tenure there, then sailed it across the Caribbean and back, including stops in Iceland and Greenland. They wound up settling in Bodø by a series of coincidences, and set up a woodworking and boatbuilding shop there over the last couple of years. Ola offered to do some work for Isbjorn if we needed anything - I wasn’t in the right frame of mind, as we were preparing to leave the dock again that afternoon, but asked about some ice poles for Svalbard, and where we might get them. “I’ll make them for you!” Ola said proudly. Nevermind we were leaving in two hours - he’d do it.

We used as much diesel on this passage as we have on any passage really, running on fumes off our big tank as we motored the last few miles into the harbor. The trade-off was the spectacularly calm ocean. The silvery light from an overcast sky made the sea one giant oil painting as far as you could see in the west, and providing the foreground for the snow-capped mountains to the east, off our starboard beam. Nobody cared that we weren’t actually sailing.

We’re at sea now two and half days, having departed Lerwick, Shetland on Sunday May 20 after a 15-hour respite from what looked like some gnarly southerly winds off the tip of Norway. In hindsight we should have continued nonstop from Fair Isle. But Mia had a bad gut feeling that morning we woke up in North Haven to get ready to go offshore, and we’ve done well to follow her gut feelings. So after a 40-mile, sun-filled downwind sail into Lerwick and a dinner ashore, we had one last night’s rest before setting out for the Arctic.