23rd June Feast of St Hans -

harbour at Sorlenangen



friendly arctic tern - our gatekeeper

group meeting by Larry's stern

sharing the gossip

Midsummer's eve - looking north - 11.30 pm

midnight

Thursday 23^rd June Lyngen peninsula

Woke to a grey day – little wind but low grey cloud; however to our delight we found we could access the internet via a free WiFi connection, so we spent most of the morning doing the two previous days’ blogs, sending various emails and generally tidying up. 

We left about 1 pm and headed south – needless to say we had a southerly wind on our nose! - we have yet to take the sail covers off the sails this year! As soon as we got going we realised that the chart-plotter was not picking up information from the GPS . This was very, very irritating as Christopher has been struggling to get the system working since before we arrived out here and the current situation is now worse than last year. However we could still see the charts and GPS was working. Furthermore today’s planned journey was a very straightforward run down to Sorlenangen (69⁰48.7N 19⁰59.5E) so we were able to navigate here without problem and this evening Christopher is endeavouring to return the system to the way we had it last year which was perfectly good, except that we have to spend time inputting waypoints to GPS  manually when it should be possible to upload waypoints automatically from the chart-plotter .

Low clouds meant the Lyngen alps are only partly visible and all other mountains were the same as yesterday, so no new mountain photos today. 

As we approached Sorlenangen we encountered a raft of 60 to 70 adult and young male eider ducks. Interesting as up to now we have seen several groups of female eider with lots of ducklings operating a crèche system, but there has been no sign of any males – clearly they are off at a men’s club!

Sorlenangen is a large inlet with a small mole harbour, half way up the west side of the Lyngen peninsula. It is a typical little fishing harbour with several fishing boats coming and going. We found space at the end of a small pontoon for leisure craft. As we came in it was clear we were disturbing a flock of about 14 Arctic terns – they went to sit on a nearby disused gangway for a bit, but once we were settled they returned to sit on a short fing er pontoon immediately behind our stern and have only just left after at least 2 hours chatting!

We have a beautiful view of the Alps but our original plan to go walking in the mountains is not possible as we are too far away and on the wrong side of the fjord so we will probably return to Tromso tomorrow. The forecast looks reasonable but promises to be very wet on Saturday so we hope to catch up with our Norwegian friend Ragner in Tromso.

 Cully, I have tried to make this larger print, perhaps you could let me know if it has not been successful. Many thanks for printing these out I will make a donation for your printer ink when we return!