Wednesday 22/11/2017

At Sea 71.16.95 N.  25.78.32 E. -6C

Sunrise 11.02am. Sunset. 11.23am. (Yes, its correct)

“Rounding the Nordcap” does not have quite the same ring as “rounding the Horn” but it has always had the same degree of difficulty to the world’s sailors.

It is officially the northern most point of the European land mass.

It was 10am this morning and barely light when Ilze and I sailed around in a degree of luxury and comfort that would have been unthinkable to my late father and the thousands of sailors  who went before him.

Bernard John Yeates AB. R.N. rounded it 9 times, mostly on the open rear deck of a Royal Navy escort destroyer guarding supply convoys en route to Murmansk in Russia during W.W. II.  The infamous Arctic Convoys. The conditions were always unspeakable. Safer, during the winter hours of darkness but suffering terribly from the awful cold. Warmer in the summer months but the longer daylight hours made them sitting ducks for U-boats and aircraft.

I stood on Nordcap, and looked out to sea.  Russia just off to the east, the inhospitable Scandinavian hinterland behind and nothing until the polar ice cap to the north. What a bleak and spectacular place.

Worth fighting and dying for?  Clearly not. Yet thousands did and died, lost and alone on this freezing and terrible shore with no hope of rescue. Dad asked me to raise a glass to them if I came this way and I surely will.

Nothing illustrated more clearly Ilze’s long held belief in the stupidity of war.

Ilze and I spent thousands of dollars to come this way.

What would all those lost young men have paid NOT to have come?

Anything.

Pete.