The Good Life... a weblog about life, technology, and the Opera Web browser

Håkon was kind enough to welcome Rebekah and me onto his boat, the 404 Not Found[1], for a trip around the Oslo fjord yesterday. I had been out with Håkon once before in August 2003 for the Scandinavian Grand Prix in Offshore Racing which took place in the Oslo Fjord. This was Rebekah's first sailing trip.

We agreed to meet Håkon at a pier in Aker Brygge a little after 1pm. Aker Brygge is a wharf downtown where many of the ferries that travel across the fjord moor. There're also a bunch of restaurants and shops there. This weekend, there was a small carnival spread out across the open area with a sound stage near the water. Rebekah and I joined the crowd to watch a sound check on the stage as we waited for Håkon to arrive. Within a couple of minutes, Håkon pulled his ~25ft. sailboat alongside the pier, we hopped on, promptly turned around, and headed out to the fjord.

As we pulled away from the pier, Håkon introduced us to the rest of the crew: his daughter, Anniken, and two of her friends and his brother, Harald, and his two children. We passed several wooden sailboats and a group of single-person sailboats drifted in front of us as we motored out into the fjord. A wooden sailboat with trees was moored just outside the harbor.

When we got into the open fjord, Harald and Anniken helped Håkon raise the sails. Rebekah informed Håkon that this was her first time sailing. He assured her that it was perfectly safe and that the only person that'd fallen off his boat was a Microsoft employee. Håkon tied a rope to the back of the boat and the girls braved the water amid cries of "It's cold!" for a chance to get pulled along. Not wanting to put the swim suit I was wearing to waste, I decided to take a dip. The overcast sky provided little warmth and I scurried back onto the boat and cuddled on the deck under my towel. The girls and their chattering teeth soon did the same and we continued along the Bygdøy peninsula at 5km per hour.

Harald spotted a manor house on the shore in the distance and suggested we head in that direction. The manor house was part of a public park called Vækerøparken, recently opened by Norsk Hydro, that he'd been meaning to visit. We scoured the area in front of the manor for a dock and saw a short stone pier protruding from the rocky shore where a young lady sat reading. The young lady leered at the boat as it approached, but Håkon said something in Norwegian and managed to get a laugh out of her. Harald and I peered through the clear water to the fjord's rocky floor and doubted whether the sailboat would be safe there, though its draft was only a meter and a half. The pier had been stripped of ties, so it was a fruitless effort. Our hopes dashed, we turned back and found a pier at the other end of the park.

The crew disembarked and left the boat behind. Harald's daughter took a nap; Harald watched the boat; Harald's son, Anniken, and her friends rummaged through the shells along the shore; and Håkon, Rebekah, and I headed toward the manor. The path from the boat snaked along the shore below the main lawn where a grave for one Otto Joachim stood among the trees. A sign along the path informed us that the park and manor had been created to mimic a 16th-century English manor, complete with a trickling fountain by the shore. A larger fountain sat behind the manor house, which looked like the perfect place for an exclusive party.

Rebekah left Håkon and me behind the house to chat about work. We found her a bit later around the side of the house. We followed her to the front of the house, where she pointed out a gravel area surrounded by a dozen large, white stable doors. We continued along the other side of the house, Rebekah peeking in every window on the way. Small, infrequent drops of rain pushed us back toward the boat, though Rebekah took time to let the waves lap at her feet. Back at the boat, Håkon went off to find his daughter and company while I skipped rocks into the fjord.

Anniken, her friends, Harald's son, and Håkon appeared through the bushes and we converged on the boat. The girls took one last opportunity to take a dip and Anniken showed her climbing abilities by crawling up the wooden piles between the pier and the boat. We soon set sail with three wet and shivering girls. Håkon took us on a short jaunt through a nearby harbor before we headed back toward downtown Oslo.

The gloomy sky finally started showing some signs of clearing as we motored back past Bygdøy. I helped Håkon pack the main sail along the way. We pulled down the sail, then folded a bit on each side of the boom, forming a continual "S" shape drooping over each side. Anniken and I folded the jib (small front sail) on the ship's bow, though I ended up sitting underneath part of it, fumbling around, and laughing as I tried to smooth a 10ft wide sail on a 4ft wide deck. We dodged some cruise ships and pulled along the same pier we'd left that afternoon, rappers booming from the stage at Aker Brygge.

We hopped off, said our "Ha det!"s (goodbyes), and walked into the mass of concert-goers. The boat motored back into the fjord, on its way to moor on Bygdøy and Rebekah and I walked to the tram stop to wait for the next tram home.

More pictures from our trip are available in our gallery.

[1] Just to make sure I don't leave geekiness out of this post, I need to explain the name of this boat. Most people have run into Web pages before with the text "404 Not Found" instead of the page they were trying to reach. When a Web page is unavailable because the URL doesn't exist, the correct response code from the server is "404 Not Found". So, Håkon, being an Interneter, cleverly named his boat after that HTTP error code. Thus ends this post's geekiness.