Time: 23:03 CET
Pos: Bergen Harbor, Norway
It is way past bedtime, but the sun is still setting here at 60 degrees North. It is a beautiful night: completely still and remarkably warm. ISBJØRN is at the dock in Bergen; crew just came aboard this afternoon and we are getting ready to sail the Shetland Race across the North Sea in a few days. It has been a very long time since I did this race and I can’t wait to get going. The event celebrates the heroic maritime traffic between the West coast of Norway and Shetland during WWII, when local sailors and fishermen smuggled agents and weapons across the North Sea to conduct secret Allied operations inside of Nazi-occupied Norway. Shetland and Norway have a very close relationship, and the race is organized by a combined committee from both Bergen and Lerwick.
It’s been a bit of a handful getting ISBJØRN ready to race under Norwegian flag for the first time. She needed a new Norwegian sail number, and sadly had to give up the boat’s original number — USA 14571. Pretty cool how that number has shown up throughout the boat’s history. ISBJØRN took part in a pretty intense spinnaker flying scene in the second Jaws movie, and even though the boat is hard to identify, that sail number on the spinnaker has a lot of screen time (scroll to :46 in this clip).
ISBJØRN’s brand new sail number is NOR 15046, and it will hopefully be found on a trophy very soon! We have a couple of days of training together before the start gun, and will try our best to become a racing team in record speed.
When the start of a passage is this close, the skipper’s mind is constantly on the weather. With the regular passage making that we usually do, the big question is when to go. Studying the weather models and trying to find the perfect time to set off — when the wind, tide and visibility will be most favorable. But with offshore racing, all of that has already been decided for us. And all we get to decide is what to do with the weather that has been given to us. It looks like a very light, upwind race. I’m tempted to go quite far North in search of more winds. But I’ll never forget the time-honored adage: “the shortest distance between two points is a rhumb line”.
— August
