Looking for weather windows to the Netherlands
COAST HOPPING SOUTH
The journey south from Bergen now descended into a series of even shorter hops along the coast. Ideally, we had wanted to do the crossing south over the North Sea in one hit and from as far north as possible, Florø or Bergen. However, gales kept rolling in with just a day or two in between them. From Bergen south, we needed a four day window to be on the safe side, preferably five. Instead of waiting in vain for a four day window in Bergen, we kept doing day hops south when the weather was suitable. In theory, each hop would shorten the time needed for the crossing and so increase the chances that we’d get a sufficiently long window.
Leaving Bergen, with enormous oil supply ships in the background.
This stretch of the coast also gets more and more exposed to the wind and currents, with little to no opportunity to shelter. So each harbour had to be pretty secure given the increasing strength of gales and storms already coming through.
Yuma secure in Skudneshavn.
And each weather window needed to be long enough to safely complete the next day-hop. And so on we went, Bergen to Leirvik, Leirvik to Skudneshavn, Skudneshavn to Stavanger, Stavanger to Egersund, Egersund to Farsund.
The next storm coming in, this time in Skudneshavn.
At each of these places we waited a day or more, doing walks through quiet towns, walks and runs through forests and reserves, or simply sheltering from wind and rain onboard Yuma or, if one existed, in cafes and restaurants. Mostly these were quaint but tedious towns with empty marinas, closed up after the tourist season and silent in the rain and wind.
FASCINATING OIL MUSEUM
The exception to this was Stavanger where there was lots going on, including a session at a local Irish pub where I enjoyed (and Frederieke endured) some Celtic music. Fun. The Oil Museum, which was right next to our mooring was an absolute cracker. I have to admit that my knowledge of the oil industry was almost non-existent prior to visiting this museum and this museum was a fantastic antidote to that. Frederieke also learnt that the gas discovery in her province of Groningen in 1959 was the first, and led to the opening of the oil and gas industry in North-West Europe. So informative! We left heavily impressed by the engineering, the politics and the impact of the industry. Wow! The Norwegians did oil well.
