IN THE WAKE OF VIKINGS

CAN YOU TACKLE A NORTHERLY ATLANTIC CROSSING – THE LEGENDARY ‘VIKING’ ROUTE – IN A STANDARD BLUEWATER CRUISER? SAM FORTESCUE MEETS AN OWNER WHO DID JUST THAT

Think of crossing the Atlantic from west to east, and most people will picture a pleasant high-pressure route via Bermuda or the Azores. But there is another way of doing it. One that cocks a snook at the rhumbline and flies in the face of the usual assumptions about what constitutes ideal weather. Promisingly, it is known as the Viking Route, so named after the Norse explorers who voyaged as far as Nova Scotia a thousand years ago.

Put simply, to follow the Viking route takes you from the east coast of the US, across the top of the planet via Newfoundland, Greenland and Iceland, back down to Europe via the Faroe Islands.

Besides the wild and little-visited isles along the route, its chief attraction is how this option breaks the transatlantic ocean passage down into smaller, bite-sized chunks. When Alberto Duhau looked into the route to take his Hylas 63 Shaima from Florida to the Mediterranean, he quickly realised that there’d be no more than six days at sea between landfalls.

HIGH LATITUDE PREPARATIONS

After consulting weather experts, ice pilots, and Hylas themselves, Duhau also saw that his boat would need relatively little in the way of modification to tackle these higher latitudes. After all, if the Vikings could do it in longships built of green oak with iron rivets and square sails made of wool, a modern high-spec glassfibre cruiser should have no problems. This is the story of how Alberto Duhau followed in the wake of the Vikings.

Shaima’s voyage began in Florida, but Duhau and his ever-changing crew of friends and family took the whole US east coast in a single hop, making their first stops along the coast of Nova Scotia. There are plenty of well-protected anchorages here, and Duhau recalls it as an early highlight of the trip.