Circumnavigating Spitsbergen: Getting there and going round

So how did I end up going round Spitsbergen?

Well to a degree it was down to a chance meeting at the Southampton Boat Show. I'd gone to hear a talk by Skip Novak about sailing at high latitudes which was jolly interesting. Afterwards I got chatting to Emil and Henry who'd also come to hear the talk and then we walked around the boat show.

They were planning a trip to northern islands and after my trips to the Arctic Circle and Greenland I was interesting in joining them. The idea was to sail from Svalbard via Jan Mayen to Greenland, then Iceland, in a Challenge 72, but alas that fell through (insurance issues). But we kept in touch, for example saying hi at various events, including the London Boat Show and London OnWater.

Since then Emil set up Sail Norway (sailing trips in high latitudes, Norway, Svalbard, Jan Mayen, Greenland, Iceland etc.) and Henry Kraken Travel (web site with lots of really interesting sailing adventures on it. Updated: as mentioned in this month's Yachting World) and both were on my browser favourite list.

So when on Henry's web site I saw a trip via Emil's sailing company to circumnavigate the wild and wonderful Spitsbergen (just the name is fantastic) it rose quickly to the point where bank transfers were made and kit piled high on my bedroom floor.

But to get there was a long journey, taking many days, stopping over at Oslo and Tromso (which deserve blog posts on their own as both were great) before flying into Longyearbyen, the main town of the Svalbard archipelago.

Here I joined the Valiente, a 70 foot steel hulled lifting keel yacht to do the circumnavigation in the Google Earth map above.

BTW, the KML of this route was based on the log with a bit of tweaking as:
1)  Mostly the log just kept the degrees and minutes at each hour, and this wasn't really enough to avoid the dreaded path-on-land problem. It really needs at least one decimal minute to get sufficient accuracy (which a few did, those initialled "JP")
2) Even with accurate logs it is likely that tracks will go across land if logged once an hour as you can go round a cape in half an hour and it will look like you've gone through it.

It took 10 days to get round including several stops at anchor for half days, about 800 NM.

And in every single day between leaving Oslo and returning two weeks later there was 24 hours of sunshine, endless midnight sun.

Must admit I really missed the sunsets and nighttime and found the first sunset rather exciting: