Karlsøyfjorden
Sailing in Northern Norway and beyond
Sailing in Northern Norway is the number one activity for us, Marena and Roger Leivseth. We love our Argo, which is a German built Bavaria 31 Cruiser, 2008. Sailing is giving us rest, peace and energy. In these beautiful surroundings it is always a pleasure to take our beloved sailboat out for a cruise. We live up north in Norway, in Fauske, just north of the Arctic circle close to the Lofoten Islands. We experience the midnight sun during summers and polar nights during the winters.
The sailing season
Our sailing season usually starts in the end of March due to the polar nights and temperatures way below freezing during winter. We normally end the sailing season in October for the same reasons. We are very fortunate to live in these surroundings with the love for sailing. The nearby areas are lovely places to visit, both fjords, archipelagos and islands in open sea. Hopefully you want to follow along our journey so that you can experience the northern parts of Norway through our videos 🙂
The Plan
Our plan is to make a longer sailing journey, starting in mars 2021 How long it will take, we don’t know yet. But we want to visit: Scotland, Irland, Northern Irland, England, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. And of course we want to cruise the french waterways. The French network of waterways includes 100 canals and rivers, totaling over 8,000 kilometers. There are dozens of possible cruises, along a single canal or into other inter-connected waterways. Boats (within size limits) can pass through from the English Channel to the Med. So hopefully you will follow our journey. Check us out on youtube and Facebook.
Update
Picking up diesel in Kirkwall, Orkney Islands
We started the process of moving to Argo in 2019. Bodø was our first winter port. Our journey began in March 2021, when both the apartment and car were sold and personal belongings put in storage (which wasn’t particularly much:) We ended up that year in Florø, after a “detour” via Shetland, Fair Isle, Orkney Islands, Inverness and Loch Ness.
Cromarty firth northeast of Invergordon
When the spring of 2022 came to Florø, we said goodbye to a great group in Florø harbor and headed south again. We didn’t get further than Bergen that year. When we sailed into Strusshamn on Askøy for the first time in the early summer, we fell completely in love and decided to look at the possibilities of using this as a winter harbor for the coming winter 2022/23. After a chat with a nice port manager, we got the contract we had hoped for.The summer of 2022 was spent in the area from Bergen to Stavanger, and in the autumn we were crew on a sailboat that was to be moved from Mallorca to the west coast of Greece – a fantastic three-week trip.
The summer of 2023 has so far agreed to a couple of Shetland trips, a trip with Argo as well as a trip from the Faroe Islands via Shetland and back to Norway as crew on another boat. A magical trip, and for those of you who love wild nature and want a slightly different destination; go to the Faroe Islands, rent a car and see all the wonderful things that these islands far out in the Atlantic have to offer…to be continued…
Link to our youtube channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRAS2FLydKqiLDYtluePwBw
Link to our videos:
https://www.sailingargo.no/videos/