August 2010:

Trouble in the night

“We were on our way up to Sognefjorden, our first real voyage.  Versto was at the helm, Van Geest sound asleep. We were drinking port, proudly contemplating our new seaborne existence, a slight breeze in the air. It was pitch dark. We were not far from Herdla, just north of Askøy where we planned to dock for the night.

I was inside stuffing my pipe when Versto called out that something was not quite right. We were slowing down. I studied the landscape through the darkness and confirmed. We were, in fact, not moving at all. Versto tried to speed up, but nothing happened. We were apparantly fighting a current to strong for Kalypsos engine. I went out back to check on the propeller. Thought we might have lost it. But it was there, jammed. Didnt move. And the boat was drifting landwards.  I got up into the cockpit, had a look at the panel. I soon found out that we had been going in neutral. For how long? None of us could tell. ” 

Skjerjehamn

In early August, newspaper Strilen reported that a strange vessel had been observed outside of Skjerjehamn and showed a picture of the Kalypso.

“Yeah...So much happened that day. Our cooking equipment bounced off deck due to waves from one of those fucking cabincruisers. Then we found a musical festival in the middle of nowhere, and decided to sneak in to buy some food. As we approached the harbour, Versto mistook an oar for the railing and fell over board with the grapnel in one hand, oar in the other. And he actually managed to resurface with that grapnel. Hilarious. Two hours later, van Geest was thrown out of the festival by some guards who noticed that he didnt wear the ribbon. When he got to the boat, he pulled off the same trick, fell in the water with the oar in his hand. Later that evening, I found Versto and van Geest struggling to move the boat. It had drifted too close to another one. When I found them, they had managed to get the rope to the grapnel stuck in the propeller. Fucking retards. Some other guys were there, trying to help them out. Versto was pretending to be a foreigner in order to reduce his embarassment.  They got the rope out of the propeller, but had to cut it. Then Versto spliced the rope and threw out the grapnel. As we were pulling out the boat, the rope suddenly lost hold, and the grapnel was gone forever. The knot wasn’t right. Unbelievable. We were so embarassed we just left the place in the middle of the night.”