It was all Murray Carmichael’s fault!
Murray is one of my friends at the Port Edgar Yacht club and it was he who suggested, originally as a joke, that I celebrate my retirement by sailing to Spitsbergen and just above 80 degrees north. The plan was to take in the ice-free west coast of Spitsbergen, beginning with the North Sea Race from Banff to Stavanger. But this changed dramatically in Longyearbyen to a much more dangerous one – the circumnavigation of Spitsbergen through the unchartered, normally fully icebound waters of the east coast.