The vagabond gene
Bodø beyond the Arctic Circle, the nineteenth and final day of the expedition. In a moment I come off the board of the Oceanograf as one of the last, the ship is empty and quiet, there is no queue for the express machine, no slamming of the lab door, board games are packed. The ship […]
The cook must stay
We live in a postcard from the north. A sea so smooth that the water looks like liquid metal in the sun, it’s warm and crisp at the same time, with toothy Norwegian islands on the horizon and snow-capped mountain peaks behind them. A small whale with funny white fins, identified as a common minke […]
Colors of fire
Saturday, the thirteenth day of the cruise. We left Bergen last night to enter one of the most beautiful phenomena I’ve ever seen in my life. You know that moment when the sun sets over the sea, the sky burns intensely with the colors of fire for a moment, then the colors fade, night falls […]
Bucket and a drop
The tenth day of the expedition, we sailed from Kiel five days ago and have only enjoyed calm weather for brief moments since. We haven’t encountered a really stormy one either, but the winds are blowing evenly all the time, and now we’ve also had to duck behind a rocky island below Stavanger – an […]
AGW WP
Want to make the ocean laugh, tell it your plans. On the morning of the eighth day of the expedition, we should be sampling off the coast of Norway, and we are standing huddled with twenty other ships behind the tip of Jutland waiting for good weather. Just above our car park in the Skagerrak […]
The longest night
Friday morning, the fifth day of the expedition. Behind the stern disappears the huge war memorial in Kiel, ahead are six days of sailing along the coasts of Sweden and Norway to Bergen, a city tucked away in the land of fjords. A short lecture on the physics of sailing. Toward the ship the wind […]
Steel-eyed adventurers
It’s Tuesday afternoon on the second day of the cruise. After sailing almost two hundred miles, we pass Bornholm, which allows us to catch Danish coverage for a while and call our families, still 24 hours to Kiel – where the real expedition begins. There is not much wind, the sea is almost flat, a […]