daystrom

Mahina 2016: Description

This trip was focused on a sailing/crusing class offered by Mahina Expeditions. Along with 2 instructors and 4 other students, we sailed on Mahina Tiare III, a Halberg-Rassy 46, from Kirkwall in the Scottish Orkneys to Tromsų in Norway, north of the Arctic Circle.

We were out of the country from May 13 to June 10, and sailed with Mahina from May 17 to June 7. Prior to the sailing class, we visited friends and relatives in Glasgow and spent some time touring around the area of Kirkwall, to see things we missed when we were last there in 2014. Afterwards, we spent a few days in Oslo before flying home.

Mahina Expeditions is a sail training school run by John and Amanda Neal. A Mahina expedition is not a vacation — it is an in-depth 10-to-21 day crash-course designed to help students (who already know how to sail) learn how to do extended voyaging on their own boat. To get a slot on this particular expedition, we each submitted a 10-page application form and non-refundable deposit over 18 months in advance, in October of 2014.

The Mahina course fee includes a 100-page printed Expedition Companion, which is used to provide instruction on topics including safety, medicine, marine weather, anchoring and docking, knots and splicing, navigation, storm tactics, provisioning, sail repair, diesel engines, and winch and rigging maintenance. There are also other practical topics such as what to expect and plan for when checking in and out of foreign ports, etc.

Onboard, John and Amanda do all of the provisioning and all of the cooking. John usually cooked breakfast and Amanda cooked lunch and dinner. Amanda is a wizard with soups.

Mahina Tiare is a center-cockpit boat with sleeping accomodations for 9. The aft cabin is a private apartment for John & Amanda. Students sleep in the front of the boat. Two of us (Ken and Julie) were in the vee berth at the bow, two were in the bunk room behind the vee berth (Michael and Martin) and two of us were on the settees in the saloon (Lisa and Rick). John and Amanda have their own head (bathroom) in their apartment. The forward head is used by students and has the shower. The forward head has electric pumps and an electric macerator.

Mahina students act as crew on the boat, with a specific watch schedule and duties. We each rotated through one of the following duty roles every day:

For watches, we had a 1-hour rotation when coastal crusing, and a 2-hour rotation when passagemaking. (Passagemaking is long-distance travel when the boat is moving 24 hours per day.) Each watch included two students. For instance, the offshore watches looked like this:

So, from 4:00am-6:00am, Ken and Michael would be on watch. They would rotate each half hour, one person steering and one person as lookout. The watch schedule was not entirely even — for instance, you can see that Martin comes off watch at 10:00pm and comes back on watch at midnight.

Our itinerary was somewhat flexible — the only hard requirements were that it must start in Kirkwall on May 17 and end in Tromsų on June 7. For example, we had originally planned to go to the Shetlands, but the weather forecast precluded that, and we started our passage across the North Sea from Fair Isle instead. In other cases, we started early, delayed our start, or even skipped destinations to fit a weather window.

If you look at the track we traveled for the North Sea crossing, you'll also see another example of weather affecting our plans. We had to travel further south than we originally hoped to. This was because we expected the wind to switch during the passage. We needed a course that would not be too far upwind when we approached the coast of Norway, so we wouldn't miss our entrance from the ocean into the protected inland waters. The wind was forecast to turn on us as we approached the coast, so we ended up beating upwind and a bit off course (south-ish) so we'd be in the right place when the wind shifted.

We moved to a different port basically every night. Most of the time, we tied up in a marina or to a guest pontoon in a harbor. In a few cases, we anchored. Some of the time, a shower or laundry was available. Showers were also sometimes available on the boat, if there was enough fresh water in the tanks and we were motoring (since the engine acts as a water heater). Getting access to a laundry machine was a much bigger pain than getting access to a shower.

Once in Norway, we traveled mostly in protected waters, not in the ocean. We did visit some fjords, but not too many of the famous ones. Fjords are often really long — tens of miles — and there's nowhere to anchor because they're so deep. So, it's not that easy to sail up them. Instead, we focused on destinations that were easier to get to. For instance, John and Amanda wanted to see Lovund (the Puffin Island) and the Lofoten islands.

Our biggest problem on the trip was temperature. It was somewhat colder than normal in Norway, and we were not entirely prepared. We didn't have enough clothes, and ended up buying a fleece and some warmer gloves in Norway. We also did not have warm enough sleeping bags, so Amanda loaned a bag to Julie and Ken doubled up with our lightweight bags. Even so, we were often cold. Toward the end of the trip, the only time Ken's fingers and toes were not cold was when he got out of bed in the morning — if he was lucky.