Next Years Plans - thoughts and volunteers required

As the year draws to a close it's time for us to start planning next year's adventures.

The good ship B is currently 1200 miles north and 200 miles above the Arctic circle. To put this in context, if we sailed the same distance south we would be in the Canary Islands! Whilst this does cause a degree of challenge it also gives us plenty of options for the forthcoming season ..

Much of the fun is in the conversations and the planning and we have been bouncing lots of ideas around for some time with a number of exciting options being considered that I'd appreciate your thoughts on:

1. Sail further north up to Svalbard and then back to where we are for the end of the season
2. Sail south along the west coast of Norway and then back home
3. Continue north round north cape of Norway and into Russia

They are all great trips but length of holiday is a really limiting factor.

The trip up and over Finland and Russia will require 3 months off and with my current job I can't take this length of time off. The trip up to Svalbard is also very tempting - we could stop off at Tromso and pick up the necessary high caliber rifle and other bitsnbobs and off we go. But again, to do this trip justice I would still need more leave in a single go than I can organise so once again we're scuppered.

So, the proposed plan is to sail south along the west coast of Norway and then at a suitable moment head west over to the UK. Depending on how far south we get and prevailing weather at the time we can then either hop over to the Shetlands/Orkney Islands and then south from there. We can then decide whether to go straight down the east coast of the UK or if time allows go through the Caledonian Canal. If we went west-side we would then sail south along the west coast of Scotland and England with a possible diversion to top up with Guinness on the way.

I'm not to worried where we end up at the end of the season but if we are heading south I would prefer it to be UK mainland.

So that's the plan for discussion. In terms of dates I am proposing to take off two blocks for sailing as follows:

2 weeks in June, probably 13 to 28th June  (pick up boat in Tjelsund and head south along west coast of Norway with aspiration to get to Bergen)
3 weeks  in July/August 18th July to 8th August (Bergen to Shetland islands and then south as weather permits)

I will probably head out at least once before then to check Brim is ok.

So it's now over to you all to let me know what you think and if you want to sign up to any of the legs. My expectation is that the June one would be in two blocks of a week and the July one would be the first 2 weeks of pushing the boat across the North Sea and then the last week with Selma and the kids.

Let me know I'm open to any suggestions at this stage so just shout. I'm doing comms on the Blog this year as a bit of an experiment rather than emails which get a bit confused with lots of people involved. That said, you all have my email address so ping me a note if you'd rather.