Cruising the Norwegian Fjords: Why it’s hard to capture the scale – ‘the scenery just doesn’t fit in a picture’

As we head for Norway’s south coast, the spectacular west coast fjords are behind us, writes Amy Kemp, as she is halfway through her five-month adventure.

Sadly, we’re halfway through our Norwegian adventure already. As I write, we’re sailing from Haugesund to Stavanger. In a few days we’ll be as far as Kristiansand and on to Norway’s south coast; the west coast fjords are now behind us. On the upside, we hope we might see more of the sun!

Norway so far, as you might expect, has been spectacular. I feel like we’re travelling through a postcard. It is civilised, clean and feels so safe – the boys jump off the boat and go exploring in every new port and I’ve grown accustomed to not worrying about it.

A refreshing difference to life at home, where I would indeed worry. The two of them have established a thriving soft-shackle business – Barnaby is the manufacturer, and Blaise is a surprisingly confident sales strategist.

Not satisfied with our offer to pay them for boat jobs, they have found a far more interesting and lucrative source of pocket money – Blaise has even started dabbling in investing his profits via an app on James’ phone.

I’m satisfied that there is some pretty good learning going on here. There are even spreadsheets detailing costs and margins; and the two of them have a written contract that was hotly negotiated regarding their roles and responsibilities.

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Cruising the Norwegian Fjords and discovering Scandinavian scale

I had naively expected that we would meander up and down fjords, visiting places along the way. I had not appreciated how incredibly vast everything is. It’s impossible to take a photo that portrays how much we’re seeing and how minuscule we are in comparison – the scenery just doesn’t fit in a picture.

We were incredibly excited to enter our first fjords – and actually, the very first – Hjørundfjord near Ålesund – remains my favourite. We stayed in a village called Urke, beneath a snowy mountain, on a little pontoon with a sauna! It was dreamy.

But we soon came to realise that in many fjords, we could travel for hours with nowhere suitable to stop – and if we could stop, the fact this isn’t peak tourist season means everything is closed.

As I’ve said previously, we have bought two Optimists with us and had emailed sailing clubs in advance to arrange for the boys to join in with regattas and after-school clubs along our route. This has been great for the children – they’ve had a wonderful time – but it has also given us an opportunity to meet local sailing families and to pick their brains about our plans.

We’ve found ourselves entirely replanning our route as we’ve gone along, according to our new friends’ recommendations. It’s been superb!

A challenge for us is the Norwegian military’s reporting obligations for foreign flagged vessels over 15m in length. We must report daily – our ETD from our current port and our intended next port and ETA.

If the plan changes, we must report again. If we want to drop our anchor, we must apply for permission in advance; ditto if we want to use our rubber dinghy. Were we an oil tanker, with a defined schedule, and a disciplined crew, this would all be no problem. But I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve had to apologise that we’re changing our plans because someone’s tantrum has delayed us, or our children are still eating their breakfast, or someone feels sick, or the wind has died.

It’s also deterred us from anchoring, which is a great shame as it would absolutely be our preference. They request four days’ notice! This is a new system this year – we hope they will fine-tune it in future for scenarios such as ours, as it’s proving to be quite the kill-joy, and must also be a lot of administration for the military to deal with.

I mentioned Urke, which was a highlight. Other highlights have been the island of Silda, where the restaurant owner opened up especially to cook us some crab; joining an ‘Open Kindergarten’ in Ålesund, where Tamara and I spent a day playing with some Norwegian toddlers and their parents; Optimist sailing in Ålesund, Florø, and Bergen; hiking to the top of a waterfall in Hardangerfjord; and watching our children learn and flourish.

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