When the colour scale in the "Windy" weather app changes to dark purple, it gets nasty. If it turns white, it's extraordinary. That's what happened last weekend: With hurricane "Sarai", a severe storm approached Iceland and hit the island with full force on Monday night.
Gusts of more than 120 knots were reported "Iceland Monitor" were measured in the Hvalfjörður fjord in the west of Iceland. Never before documented wave heights of more than 30 metres in the south of the island are reported by the Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration.
Some sailors have moored in Iceland this winter - how did they fare? The "Freydis", owned by storm-tested circumnavigators Heide and Erich Wilts, is spending the winter in Ísafjörður in north-east Iceland. The Wilts themselves are currently at home in Heidelberg.
"The Freydis is directly under the harbour master's window. He would have contacted us if something had happened," says Erich Wilts when asked. He is not worried. Yet it was just four months ago that two hurricanes in close succession shook the ships in Ísafjörður to the core. Back then, the wind hit the mountains surrounding the harbour. "The downdraughts are then quickly twice as strong as the actual wind. A lot of things got broken," reports Erich Wilts: torn railing supports, a smashed wind generator and damage to the rigging were the sad result of the storm on the "Freydis".
Also in the north is the yacht of sailing blogger Juho Karho, who is spending the winter on board with his girlfriend. "It didn't really hit us hard here in Siglufjördur," he wrote in a post on Facebook on Tuesday. "But the crazy thing is the waves on the south-west coast of Iceland. The average wave height will be at least twelve metres tomorrow, pretty much right on the coast."
There, in Reykjavik, the "Dagmar Aaen" of polar explorer and sailor Arved Fuchs has moored. "The storm was much stronger there than in the north. Winds of over 70 knots were measured in the harbour, up to 90 knots off the coast and gusts of up to 120 knots in the Denmark Strait," reports Fuchs.
The professional adventurer continues: "The ship and crew have survived everything well so far: A crew member on site deployed additional lines in good time. A bollard was torn off and a few fenders burst - otherwise everything was fine. But it was exceptionally violent, even by Icelandic standards."
