Someone has blocked the streets down to Stavanger harbour. The old town is a pocket of Scandi-cool: crafts and coffee in former fishermen’s houses, weatherboard painted in jaunty colours. What’s missing is the sea. A white wall honeycombed with windows fills the end of side streets where the water should be — the cruise ship Costa Diadema has docked.
I keep walking. Ahead the flags of Cornwall and Scotland flutter from the mast of the sailing boat Bessie Ellen.
A total of 229 cruise ships sailed from Stavanger last year, making this southwestern port one of Norway’s top three cruise destinations.
It serves as a gateway to the fjords for 600,000 passengers a year. They probably have a blast even if their experience of fjordland is often via outings on speedboats.
Enter Bessie Ellen. The 35m (115ft) wooden boat is one of the last West Country sailing ketches from a fleet that numbered 700 in the early 1900s.
Did you see the splendid little ship in the Captain Cook episode of the Channel 5 series James May’s Great Explorers? That was Bessie Ellen.
In July the boat’s owner-captain Nikki Alford sailed east of the Highlands for the first time to spend August in the fjords around Stavanger. It’s a move that brought its own issues. The mariners’ guide to the region sucked its teeth about limited anchorages (not true for a larger vessel). More problematic was an edict by the Norwegian military, spooked by Russian shipping, that every boat over 15m report its position every six hours. “The paperwork has gone mental,” Nikki says.
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An unusual way to see the Fjords
For the passengers, however, Bessie Ellen offers a Norway cruise but not as we know it.
“Gaskets off the mainsail!” Nikki roars. “Come on!” It’s 8am and Stavanger is a smudge of terracotta and spires astern. Guided by the young crew, we hoist the mainsail and mizzen, then the staysail and three jibs off the bowsprit with muscle alone. Traditional sail is a great leveller. Teamwork is all to counter forces measured in tonnes. Belay pins of identical brown ropes turn salt-seasoned yachties into rank amateurs.
James Stewart steering the way
It’s only when the engine goes off that you notice what’s beyond the ship. In light airs Bessie ghosts through pine-fuzzed islands over a sea like indigo silk. Rising from the water ahead are hazy mountains — peak behind peak, stacked like stage flats.
Compared with a standard fjord cruise, our week will be laughable. Accommodation is in cubbyhole bunks in the refurbished former cargo hold, and you’ll wait a long time for waiter service for the excellent meals prepared in the galley. Daily distances rarely top 25 miles. Nikki’s plan is “to just enjoy the boat. She was built without an engine. She wants to sail. Everything else is just messing around.”
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Bessie’s loyal fans
That suits the dozen passengers. From their fifties to their seventies, travelling unencumbered by partners or children (this may be the best solos holiday going), all are returnees to Bessie. One is on her 12th cruise; another has a tattoo of the ship on his arm. What explains such devotion?
Guests help sail the ship
On the first afternoon out of Stavanger, high-speed Ribs race past taking cruise passengers to Lysefjord. We arrive the next day, semi-drifting into what appears to be a lost set from The Lord of the Rings. Mountains rise in slabs from 200m-deep seas. Waterfalls plume in clefts. Somewhere up the fjord we pass Pulpit Rock, a monster tabletop bluff that’s one of Norway’s great hiking destinations. We don’t see it today, though — low cloud blankets the summit. It barely matters. Lysefjord translates as “light fjord”. As the clouds scud overhead, the sea takes star billing, shifting from pewter to silver to steel in mercurial light.
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From Lysefjord we tack southwest in a friendly breeze. Time is measured by turns in our course zigzagging from the bay. When not hauling ropes, we natter and watch a slowly unfolding diorama of salmon farms and rust-red houses dwarfed beneath blue-grey ridges. When it’s my turn at the wheel I discover Bessie doesn’t really need me — with the sails balanced, it sails a truer course without help. But there are few more enjoyable experiences than to feel 87 tonnes of sailing boat lean a shoulder into a brisk wind. It feels robustly alive. Our wake streams behind like a steadily unfastening zip.
Lysefjord translates as “light fjord”
ALAMY
Learning how to steer by feel
The days settle into a rhythm. We wake at 7am. While most of us blink on deck with a coffee in hand, some drop overboard for a brisk swim. During the day we sail in winds that build steadily, then drop anchor off a still village for the night. Not one is mentioned in the onboard guidebook.
The hero of the voyage is Bessie Ellen itself. Beautifully raked from bowsprit to stern, it becomes a self-contained world. We’re in each other’s company 24 hours a day for seven days. It never feels awkward because the boat becomes a shared home where the only rule is live and let live. We discover how to steer by feel — watch the sails, feel the helm load up. We learn to sweat up halyards, ease sheets and coil ropes so they don’t tangle.
Meals are prepared in the galley
At the edge of the chart, Kvitsoy is where Norway shatters into skerries, as if Thor had gone mad with his hammer. Ninth-century Viking sagas place the final battle of Harald Harfagre (Fairhair) in these seas. Spurned in marriage, Harald vowed not to cut his locks until he became the first king of Norway. It took a decade of blood and vengeance. The chronicles are silent on the length of his tresses when he claimed the throne.
We approach into a low swell rolling from the open sea and nose through a maze of skerries to anchor in an inner pool. Scattered loosely across islets is a village like a Nordic Venice, its channels lined with immaculate weatherboard houses.
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Mooring at Kvitsoy
Retired from fishing, Kvitsoy has gentrified into a backwater for coastal walks and tranquillity that feels further than its 35 minutes by ferry from Stavanger. Though a nailed-on certainty for tourism, there are no bars and just one couple sit on the terrace of the sole restaurant, Groningen, when I visit. There are few tourists because Kvitsoy’s 500 islanders offer precious little accommodation. The easiest way to stay overnight is on a boat.
Kvitsoy is ideal for coastal walks and tranquility
MOXEY
And that’s the thing about a cruise like this. If you see fewer celebrated sights compared with a standard cruise, you experience more. I’ve mentioned few destinations because they’re largely irrelevant. The boat is the thing. The sailing, the sense of cutting off from life’s hurly-burly, of time unspooling, is an experience more beautiful, more life-enhancing than words can easily tell.
As we return towards Stavanger the next day I lie on a hatch, watching the sails billow, listening to ropes creak and the sea slosh and hiss. Bessie Ellen is a reminder that ships can be more than vehicles. They are for falling in love with. People once gave them characters — doughty, skittish, elegant — and sailed on them because they’d lost their hearts to them.
Some people still do.
James Stewart was a guest of VentureSail. There are no further Norway sailings currently planned, but six nights’ all-inclusive on board the Bessie Ellen exploring Skye and the Small Isles is from £1,485pp (venturesailholidays.com)