Norway Post 18

Day 15

After Mr. Barnes helped repair my skeg I was off feeling good despite another rainy day. I think part of my problem, aside from the shortage of showers and associated chafing was that Norwegians seem to be more withdrawn than Meditteranians. It was really nice to enjoy sailor's hospitality.

I paddled off my chart and won't be on the next one till tomorrow. When I was getting ready to call it a day I waved down a motorboat to ask for directions. I was in the wilderness. There was nothing for miles in either direction. The last settlement I had seen was 40 minutes earlier and the next, the motor boat man told me, would be in 14 nautical miles, almost five hours of paddling.  There was nothing until then he assured me. I didn't want to paddle forward another five hours and I certainly didn't want to paddle back for 40 minutes.

I wanted a boathouse. It was raining. I didn't want to make camp in the rain. When I was ready to give up on my lengthy inquiries with the motorboat man, who was traveling at 28 knots from Trondhiem to his summer cottage, suggested that I try the village just around the corner.

In twenty minutes I found the village that google maps told me might or might not be a village. There was a dock and above it a boathouse with a substantial awning that could keep me dry in all but the worst storm. I had everything I needed.

That night the storm's worst came. Horizontal rain drenched my sleeping bag and my things at 2:00 am when I scurried to get out of my bivi sack and close my dry bags. At 3:00 am I looked up at the line above my head where I hung my dry top in the evening. It was gone. I climbed down the sea wall to pull it out of a heaving bed of surf and seaweed, washed it off in a local stream as the heavens crumbled around me and went back to sleep. At some point in the night I heard the wind blow my knife off the table.

In the morning I found it on the rocks beneath the deck's floorboards. It had fallen between the cracks. Aside from serving as my spoon since I lost my regular spoon in Geiranger, I also need my knife for safety issues like getting caught on a fishing line. It had a special way of attaching to my life jacket and I liked it.

I asked the men on the ferry boat if they had a wire hanger. They did not.

Rain poured all morning. My Gore-Tex shell has lots of holes in it; it's come quite a long way with me and is no longer the least bit waterproof. My rain pants are still pretty good though.

I knocked on the door to a house and the grandfather that opened it brought along some thin flexible aluminum rods. Just as I was getting it out, the ferry man showed up with a magnet, and together we finished the job.

It was noon. The temperature was 46 Fahrenheit. The fjord was not calm and the rain kept on coming. I decided to take the rest of the day off.