About this ebook
Volume 1 – Swedish Border to Bergen
The essential sailing guide and pilot book for cruising the Norwegian coast.
Volume 1 of the Norwegian Cruising Guide covers Norway from the Swedish border to Bergen, providing detailed harbour information, anchorages, charts and practical navigation guidance for recreational sailors and yacht cruisers.
This comprehensive cruising guide is part of a four-volume series covering the entire Norwegian coastline, Svalbard and Jan Mayen.
The series contains:
• Detailed descriptions of harbours and anchorages along the southern and western Norwegian coast
• Local navigation advice for fjords, skerries, tidal waters and exposed passages
• Over 1 500 maps, sketch charts and photographs across the series
• More than 1 000 harbours and anchorages described in detail
• Waypoint files for use with chart plotters and marine navigation software
• Continuously updated content maintained since 1978
• Written by experienced Norwegian sailors with over 50 years of coastal cruising knowledge
This is a practical pilot guide for sailors — not a coffee-table photo book. It is designed to support real-world passage planning, harbour selection, and safe coastal navigation in Norway’s challenging and beautiful waters.
Ideal for:
• Sailing yachts cruising Norway
• Bluewater sailors planning a North Sea or Scandinavian voyage
• Skippers preparing for extended coastal cruising
• Sailors continuing north toward Lofoten, Tromsø or Svalbard
Free general cruising information is available at:
www.norwegiancruisingguide.com
The Norwegian Cruising Guide remains the most complete and authoritative sailing guide to Norway.
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About the author
Hans Jakob Valderhaug and Eli Husum, the Guide’s Norwegian authors, live in Oslo. Both are passionate and highly accomplished skiers and hikers—something that quickly becomes evident from their photographs and from the places they choose to explore.
For more than forty years, Hans Jakob has cruised the Norwegian coast, from the Swedish border north to Svalbard. Since 2002, he and Eli have shared their accumulated local knowledge through the Norwegian Cruising Guide, contributing not only detailed cruising information but also insight into Norway’s culture, landscape and history.
Each season, they visit, document and photograph a remarkable number of harbours and anchorages. Their early cruising was done aboard their Hallberg-Rassy 31 Anna, and since 2013 they have continued this work aboard their Koopmans 39, also named Anna, extending both the range and depth of their coverage.
Daniel and Kathrin Gerber are full-time cruising sailors with more than twenty-five years of experience under sail.
Much of our sailing life has been spent in northern waters, both offshore and along the exposed coasts of England, Scotland, Ireland and the Faroe Islands. From there, we crossed the North Sea and discovered the long, intricate coastline of Norway—along with the generosity and quiet competence of the people who live and work there.
In 2025, after two seasons sailing in northern Norway, including Svalbard, and a winter spent living aboard our Bavaria Cruiser 46, Polaris Helvetica in arctic Norway, based in Finnsnes close to the island of Senja, an unexpected opportunity arose. When the chance came to take over the publication of the Norwegian Cruising Guide from Phyllis Nickel and John Harries, it felt like a natural continuation of our own journey.
Since moving aboard permanently in 2021, we have also documented our sailing life through a YouTube channel, sharing the realities of high-latitude cruising, life afloat, and the lessons learned along the way.
