Celebrations and Preparations

In Norway, May 17 is Grunnlovsdag (National Day). It is a highly anticipated and widely enjoyed holiday event, a day to wave the flag and celebrate Norway’s national heritage.

Across Norway, it’s a day of parades and music. In the Tromsø official parade, it seemed like every school in town participated in the march as well as various bands and other town groups.

Banner of one of the school groups in the parade.

Lots of colour and flags on display.

There aren’t any ‘floats’ as such, but, the highlight is that almost all of the marchers are wearing Norwegian traditional dress. Actually, just about everybody, whether in a parade or not, had it on. It’s the one day when all age groups, men, women and children dress up in their traditional finery. The outfits are beautifully made, consisting of long skirts for the women with some combination of an apron, petticoat, cape and/or bonnet. The men are in fitted waistcoats, jodhpurs, leggings and hats. Both men and women wear plain black shoes with large, square, silver buckles. I’m not sure of the origin or meaning of the designs, but, they seemed to hint at eighteenth century origin although I could be wrong. The fabrics range from very fine wool to silk. The women’s clothes are beautifully embroidered, often with a matching purse. The colour range is limited with blue, green and brown/black being the most common.

A couple in Norwegian traditional dress.

Girls in Norwegian traditional dress.

It really was a lovely sight and it seems to mean a lot to the Norwegians. The traditional dress is sometimes also worn to church and often at weddings as well.

Sami (aboriginal people) traditional dress.

Unofficial parades continued throughout the day and everybody gathered in the pedestrian mall downtown to chat and listen to the music from the outdoor stage. It was a very cold day with a brisk wind, but, that didn’t seem to impede the crowd’s enjoyment of the events.

One of the guest parade groups in town was the Russian Navy band and we saw them, in their sailor suits and brass button finery, around town for a few days before the event. They were a very pasty-looking bunch, with bad skin, as if they’d been confined to a submarine for a few months, maybe they had been!

Another parade participant was a large group of teenagers all wearing red bib overalls. The overall’s bib was a Norwegian flag, strategically draped down over their lap. Down the side of one leg, in large white letters, was the label ‘Russ 2011’. They were running through the parade, holding hands, blowing whistles and just generally acting like teenagers. We’d actually been seeing these overalls around town for a few weeks prior to the event and wondered at their significance. It turned out that the teens wearing them are this year’s graduating ‘high school’ class. Instead of signing yearbooks for each other, they write messages on the pants and I guess they are then kept as a souvenir, kind of a nice tradition.

A pair of ‘high school’ graduation overalls.

Contributing to everyone’s high spirits in May has been the arrival of the ‘midnight sun’. It is now daylight all the time! To be honest, we haven’t really noticed it that much as we are both good sleepers and haven’t needed to black out our portholes or anything to get to sleep. It is interesting though, to wake at 2-3 a.m. and see a blue sky. Conversely, it seems weird to be going to bed with the sun shining. It will be like this now for two months. We are really looking forward to not having any night sailing for our upcoming voyages. Speaking of which, if all goes according to plan, this will probably be our last post from Tromsø. Our preparations are well under way and we hope to leave here the week of June 6 for a local cruise and then, if the ice permits, we will leave for Svalbard hopefully the week of June 13, or, 20th.

We’ve been getting first-hand Svalbard ice reports from G’s Belgian photographer friend, Rudy, who’s there on a polar research vessel right now. A number of the fjords are still completely blocked with pack ice and they were unable to get to shore at one of the weather stations due to the ice. So, it’s still way too early for us to consider heading north. Svalbard is about six hundred miles north from where we are now and the temperatures are also lagging behind. It’s averaging between 3-12 degrees C here and we did have snow showers yesterday (27th). In Svalbard, it’s still hovering around zero and just below, with snow showers quite often. We’ve been thinking ahead to our reward of warmer temperatures in the Mediterranean where we hope to be at the end of this year. We were planning for Barcelona, but, there’s been a bit of a glitch with the marina we were hoping to get into, so, now we are thinking about maybe just staying in the south of France instead. More on this later, but, right now, we’re still heading for the Med in that general area.

Boat preparations have been going reasonably well. At the beginning of May, A made a quick trip to Miami to pick up our new mainsail, Strong Track track system and a set of lazyjacks. You might be wondering why I would go in person rather than just ship it when there are such good international courier services. Well, there are a lot of reasons, but, the biggest is that we didn’t want the shipment to get stuck in Oslo customs for weeks while we stressed about our departure date. It felt better to be in control of the situation and hand-carry the goods. ‘Hand-carry’ is a bit of a misnomer though, as the sail weighed 60 lbs. and came in a very long, very big box. The sail track and full battens for the sail were coiled up inside another very large, octagonal-shaped box. I also had a small backpack with my personal luggage. It was lots of ‘fun’ getting from rental car, rental car shuttle bus, to a Miami departure gate, deplane at Heathrow (with the boxes), take a bus (and the boxes) to Gatwick, check-in the boxes for Oslo, then, get the boxes off at Oslo, check them in again for the plane to Tromsø and then by taxi to the boat. Actually, it wasn’t as bad as it sounded although it was a relief to get back. It was in the 90’s in Miami which was great for about ten minutes, then, I was wishing for cooler temperatures again. The overweight/oversize fees charged by Delta were exorbitant. I really hate flying now, sailing is a much better way to go!

The good news is that everything fitted and the track and sail went on without a hitch. The lazyjacks (a system of ropes used to catch the mainsail when lowering it) are a different story. We’re now on day three of fiddling with them to get the right layout and have made Swiss cheese of our mast and boom in the process. G has to go up the mast again tomorrow to hopefully do the final fitting for them.

G up the mast fixing our roller furling and installing ‘lazyjacks’.

One of the tasks on our list was to do a capacity test on our batteries. We had problems with them last year as they didn’t seem to be holding a charge very well and we found that even running a few instruments while sailing was a problem. We installed our new Xantrex LinkLite battery monitor first, to replace its dead predecessor, and then ran some tests. Unfortunately, our worst fears were realized and we definitely need new batteries. The boat budget has already been well and truly blown for this year, so, we are going to try and mollycoddle them along although it will probably mean we will have to charge at least twice a day while sailing. As long as our generator continues to work, this won’t be too bad as it is very miserly on diesel usage. Also, due to the twenty-four daylight, we won’t need to have any running lights showing at night which will help. However, a close eye will constantly need to be kept on them to prevent unwanted problems.

It hasn’t been all boat work and no play though. This month, we had our very first boat guest, Selka the dog, for four days and we enjoyed her company very much.

Selka, our first boat guest.

Selka’s owners wanted to go to Oslo to visit family for the long holiday weekend. Celia, my friend, is the usual dogsitter but couldn’t take her as she was going to Amsterdam. We were happy to step in. She is a very placid dog and took to the boat unbelievably well. By the third day she was going up and down the companionway by herself with just a little support. Think of a dog climbing a ladder as that is essentially what she was doing. She also got on/off the boat by herself as well. An added bonus is that she came with a car. The weather cooperated and we took her off with us on two short road trips. One, to Kvaløya (Whale Island). The island has an incredibly varied terrain, from the beautiful little harbour of Sommarøy, where the clear blue water and white sand reminded us a bit of Bermuda, to mountains on the interior where we saw lots of Norwegians out ‘top-touring’, in the brilliant sunshine, on the remaining snow on the peaks. We were also thrilled to see our first wild reindeer.

Reindeer on Kvaløya.

The next day we headed out to the Lyngenfjord area. This area is often called the ‘Lyngen Alps’ as the jagged peaks are reminiscent of the Swiss Alps. It was also a lovely day out with lots of views of mountains and cascading spring waterfalls. It was a real treat to have the use of the car.

For next month’s entry, I hope to be posting from Svalbard. I’m not sure if we’ll be able to access the internet from there and depending on our departure date, I may not be able to post on the first of the month as usual, although I’ll try to do it as close to that date as I possibly can.