Bergen, Norway to a Coruña, Spain 2024

We enjoyed an extraordinary time in Bergen and were fortunate enough to have a berth alongside the main quay in the downtown area. The choices for restaurants included everything you could wish for and the markets for provisioning were superb, especially the fish markets. A visit to the big Helly Hansen store allowed us to update our foul weather clothes with the best the sailing market offers. We spent four nights in Bergen it is remembered as one of our most special stop-overs along the way to the Med.

Once we had a good weather window predicted for crossing the North Sea to the Shetland Islands we headed out and experienced a very nice 24 hour passage in good conditions arriving at Lerwick to check into the UK. I had secured a clearance from the UK Border Force for our arrival and everything went smoothly.

Our time in the Shetlands was highlighted by a visit to a Puffin Colony at the south end of the islands which we visited via the local bus. I have been talking about seeing Puffins for over 20 years and now finally I got to see the little guys in person! We lucked out with a spectacular sunny and clear sky day for our visit and got amazing video and photos of hundreds of these birds living and flying on the tops of the cliffs. What a great memory!

After a few more days waiting for better weather we finally departed but still had to deal with big rolling seas and wind on our way south. While I had planned for us to go on the west side of the UK and visit the spectacular West Coast of Scotland, the weather forecast was for three weeks of continuous heavy storms so we elected to go to the north end of Scotland by Fraserburgh which turned out to be a terrible place to be with a nice sailing yacht as it was a commercial fishing port. Tired as we were, we moved on about 15 nm further west where we found a nice bay near Gardenstown to anchor in, beautiful hills to look at and a nice little village to do some provisioning.

Our friend Bruno had been looking for an opportunity to come sail with us and this turned out to be a perfect place for him to come find us as he had a business meeting in Edinburgh. He hopped on a train, a bus and finally a taxi to get to us (an adventure in itself!). We left the next morning for a 600 nm passage over three days along the East coast of the UK all the way to the Southampton area where Nautor Swan Global Service had a facility in Hamble at the Universal Marina.

The entire east coast of the UK had literally no marina we could get into or bay deep enough to anchor in. Along with cross currents, big tides, fog and one of the world's busiest Traffic Separation Scheme it was an interesting passage to say the least. We were all tired and glad to get to the Universal Marina in Hamble.

We spent a number of lovely days in Hamble exploring the Southampton area having the Nautor Swan service team taking care of some of our priority warranty items taken care of (great job guys!) but finally we had to move on.

We had been following the weather for a number of days and spotted a good opportunity where we could not only cross the English Channel but could continue all the way across the Bay of Biscay to A Coruña, Spain. The Bay of 'Dismay' has a reputation of being a very difficult place to cross as it has storms every week and the wind and sea state can be very treacherous.

However both Andrea and I were very good on weather issues and in all our years sailing together we always waited until had a good window of opportunity to avoid the worst of the weather. This time we also called it correctly and had a wonderful passage with nice winds, manageable sea states and most sunny skies.

Tracy and I hadn't been back to A Coruña since we sailed our Hallberg-Rasse 54 from Sweden in 2012 but we remembered it as one of the nicest places, bet marinas and most fantastic seafood we ever had. We remembered correctly and after 3-4 nights there, we had to tear ourselves away and continue our passage south.