It was pretty good to get the well travelled 3 piece Rockpool Alaw Bach in the water again. It's been a while, as I was trying to preserve it for this trip to northern Norway. It nearly all went very wrong as Norwegian customs toyed with the idea of charging me £680 pounds to allow the boat into the country. They relented, but the delays meant that we thought we'd missed out on collecting the kayak before we left Tromso. With just 10 minutes to spare before we boarded a ferry to the Island of Senja, the hotel in Tromso rang to alert us to the kayak's arrival. We didn't mind the 3 hour back track, and simply caught a later ferry. 10 minutes later and the kayak would have been effectively out of reach as we continued our journey down the "Whale Route".It was in Hamn that I took to the water. This small harbour on the west coast of the Island of Senja is the gateway to an archipelago of over 100 smaller islands. The photos above do not do justice to the setting and in the warm summer sunshine the archipelago seemed more reminiscent of the Caribbean than this special place above the Arctic Circle. Clearly others felt so as a steady trickle of paddlers launched into the turquoise water from Hamn. They take paddling pretty seriously up here and there is a Midnight Sun Paddling Festival on Senja from the 2nd to the 5th of July if you are in the area.
www.KAYAK.im
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