Below is the journal for our trip to Scotland and Norway in May and June 2016. 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 Tromsø in Norway, north of the Arctic Circle.

There's a description of the trip that you might want to read before you dig into the journal. It explains the Mahina curriculum and a bit about how the trip worked in general.

The journal is broken up into several different sections to make it more manageable.

• Pre-Sailing: Glasgow and Kirkwall
• Sailing Part 1: Kirkwall to Silda
• Sailing Part 2: Ålesund to Lovund
• Sailing Part 3: Svartisen to Tromsø
• Post-Sailing: Oslo

We've tried to make the journal entries as compact as possible while still telling you some of the interesting things that happened each day. Hopefully, we've struck the right balance.

If you'd like to look through the pictures we took while on our trip, you can check out the gallery. The gallery includes all of our pictures (split out like the journal pages above), but there's also a smaller overview section that shows highlights from the trip.

John and Amanda from Mahina Expeditions also maintain their own journal, focused more on the perspective of the sailing school itself. See the journal for Leg 1 - 2016.