Can sailing ever get better?! From Bessaker to Rörvik and Møyhamna (7-9 June 2015)

Hurtigruten old and new
The westerly air-flow continues. Perfect sailing conditions make up for the bitterly cold weather. We have been waiting in Møyhamna (65º 24’.6N 12º 07’E)  for a gale to pass and we took advantage of the lousy weather yesterday to prepare our next few passages through Helgeland. Stephan is monitoring the weather while I prepare the routes. We discovered to our amazement that within the 14.5 Kg of charts, which we brought with us, one was missing! But Stephan, who has a good grip on the electronic equipment, could work out a route on the iNavX charts by inserting waypoints taken from the small scale planning chart. So in the end our visit to the second largest glacier in Norway (just inside the arctic circle) is saved!
Lovely sailing
But enough of that and back to the sailing: On the 7th June we sailed from Bessaker to Rörvik (64º 51’.6N 11º 13’.7E), a small town where one of the tourist attractions is that every day two Hurtigrouten vessels dock in the evening for an hour or so, one going north and the other south. People gather on the dockside to compare the two. Our favorite of the two was the old timer, Lofoten, which has been recently restored to its former ‘glory’ (if you are prepared to sail with some discomfort without stabilisers…).

Another perfect sailing day awaited us on the 8th June. Sunshine, partly cloudy and winds up to 14knots. We sailed for eight hours with full sails all the way to Møyhamna, a very snug and sheltered small inlet on an island which has a mountain that looks like a hat (Torghatten). We could see it from far away, rising amongst the other low islands. Not only does Torghatten rise 300m from the sea, it also has a hole through it! According to the Trolls saga, Hestmannen, a huge Troll became infatuated with a beautiful ogress Lekamøya who was having a bath naked. She resisted his advances and when the Troll could not have her, he decided that nobody should have her and aimed to shoot her with an arrow. The King of the Mountain saved Lekamøya by deflecting the arrow with his hat...and the rest is history: the hat turned into the mountain and where the arrow pierced the hat, a hole remained.
the arduous way up
Today we had an arduous climb up Torghatten, trecking through a stream and many boulders to reach the hole and walk through it to the other side. It was a very wild and forbidding looking rocky landscape, but it was worth the effort. The views from the hole were stunning. We rewarded ourselves with a very nice light lunch in a beach restaurant at the campsite at the bottom.

View from Torghatten on a grey windswept day

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First rain; then showers. Hjartøya anchorage and Lovund (11-14th June 2015)

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Exciting sailing, rain, rain and cold. (4-6 June 2015)