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I am a Norwegian skipper and guide currently working in Norway with sailing, hiking, skiing and kayaking with guests from all around the world. I am running my own small company “Bolsand Guide and Skipper”, which offers guided trips in the mountains and at sea and specializes in combining the two. I do also take jobs for different other companies, like hiking- kayaking- and RIB-trips for Briksdal Adventure in Olden, Stryn (Western Norway) and weeklong hiking trips in the mountains for Hvitserk (Norway’s biggest guiding company). Though I spend most my time as a skipper for SeilNorge, the leading guiding company offering sailing-trips and -expeditions in Norway. I sail with them in Northern Norway, and in the Arctic (Svalbard, Jan-Mayen, Greenland, Iceland). I am a profetiuonal blue water skipper and sailing instructor, holding relevant licenses to sail boats up to 24m worldwide!
Sailing Experience
My sailing career started in Bergen, a great city for sailing, around six years ago. I was there joining a good friend, who lived in his boat (the classic Albin Vega) for daytrips, weekend trips and longer trips up and down the Norwegian west coast, and over to Denmark. After this I did some sporadic trips with other friends in Lofoten before I moved to Svalbard. After some studies and a job as a guide up there I bought my own boat back at the mainland (another Swedish speciality; the Comfort 30) together with a childhood friend. We spent a whole year onboard this ship, SV Beverly, and sailed what we in Norwegian call the milk-route, across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, and back to Norway. You can check out our trip on www.svbeverly.no and read about in the Norwegian sailing magazine, Seil Magasinet here: https://www.seilmagasinet.no/innhold/?article_id=52400. After all these nautical miles I have been living in my boat in Volda, doing trips around there and professionalized my sailing. I have been taking the needed courses for bringing passengers along, which includes the skipper licence and the needed international STCW-courses. I have sailed as a skipper for SailNorge, SailAlesund, Pukka Travels, InTheSameBoat etc. and with my own guests both on ski-and-sail trips in the winter, with video teams onboard, on summer trips along the Norwegian coast and on longer expeditions in the Arctic.
The sailing trips are mostly week long and are, in addition to the sailing, always including different land-based activities, like skiing in the winter and hiking, surfing, kayaking, wildlife-safaris or beach cleaning in the summer. The boats I am sailing are between 40 and 50 feet, and up to 70-feet. Mainly mono-hulls, but also catamarans. Since I am sailing for different companies and on different trips here in Norway, I am very well used to changing boats. Only this year I have sailed seven-eight different boats with guests. The smallest one this year being a 38 feet Benetau Oceanis, a lot on the 44- and 50-feet Bavaria Cruisers or a 50 feet Benetau, and up to Sail Norway's flaggship, Valiente, a 70 feet custom built expedition ship of 67 tonns. I am also used to a lot of different waters, from the rocky rough coasts of Norway, the heavy trafficked waters of the English Channel, to the sandy shallow seas in the Bahamas and all the way up to the unmapped areas of the Svalbard archipelago. And as I spent quite some months in the Caribbean on my voyage there, I’ll say I know those waters pretty well. On our journey across the Atlantic we landed first in Martinique and sailed north, through most islands up to the Dominican Republic from where the adventure continued through the Bahamas and up to Bermuda before we returned to Europe.
Other experience and characteristics
Other than my sailing-background I have experienced the outdoors since I was a child, and I have been guiding and arranging trips through the Norwegian Trekking Association (DNT) since high school. I went to an outdoors school in the famous Lofoten islands studying hiking, skiing and climbing full time for a whole year. I have a background from studying biology and geography at the University of Bergen and I would say I’m quite knowledgeable about nature, landscapes and all living things, which I love to share with my guests. I have also lived in Svalbard, Norway’s northernmost archipelago (reaching up to 81 degrees north), where I finished my biology-studies while also guiding guests in the arctic wilderness for the companies Hurtigruten Svalbard and Basecamp Explorer.
I am a very positive and trustworthy type. They say I could make a stone smile with my cheerful laugh, and my big smile which can motivate a guest even though it’s raining in headwind. I view myself as a very engaged person full of initiative. Guests often point out that they always feel safe around me. Even in storms up north in the Barents Sea I have shown myself that I keep my mind clear and stays calm for the guests, taking charge of the situation. Through sailing with guest that have more or less never sailed before, and hiking with people that have never hiked before etc., I have developed a pretty well-developed patience. I do also view myself an adventurous type, having been on different adventures all around the world: Hitchhiked from Norway to Africa, hiked for months through most parts of Norway, as well as spending a whole year sailing from Norway to the Caribbean and back with the two Atlantic crossings as mentioned.
Skipper abilities
As a bottom line I of course have the needed certifications and sailing experience from around the world and also the Caribbean, with boats in different size classes. A big portion of this experience is also from commercial settings, so I am very used to have paying, and sometimes demanding, impatient or mostly very nice, guests onboard. Further I am not the skipper who just sails the boat from A to B, only caring about the boat and being too old and grumpy to greet the guests with the welcoming mind we should have as skippers. I am on the other hand a young, engaged and energic skipper who are sailing for the guests. My reason for working as a guide and skipper is because I love to get to know new people and share the fantastic experiences I love, with them! I do also get a lot of good feedback from guest, that I am a very friendly and easy likable who are easy to get to know.
I do not only have a god background as a skipper, I am also a guide and have thus the necessary and very useful experience of bringing guests on trips and adventures in the outdoors. This includes of course dealing with the practicalities while underway, like safety, transparency in the guiding etc., but maybe more important I have good experience with dealing with all the logistics behind a trip, like composing interesting itineraries and make the organization run smooth. However, the quality I focus most on in my guiding is what we in Norwegian will call “formidlingsevne”, which maybe can be translated as the way you communicate the trip and everything around it to the guests. The ability to share both instructions of the activity I’m guiding, in this case sailing, in a pedagogical way, and also share interesting facts and stories about the nature and culture surrounding us where I’m bringing guests, which I would say I do have. My task as a guide or skipper is just subordinate to get people safely from A to B either it is on a boat or on foot, the main task for me as a guide/skipper is in my opinion to fill this trip in between A and B with meaningful and exciting substance, experiences and memories for the guests.
If you would like to hire me as a skipper I would bring my girlfriend, which also work as a professional guide and will be perfect as a hostess on board, which after my understanding it seems like you also always bring onboard including the skipper. (Which to me sounds like a very good form of staffing your boats). I am indeed used to function both as a skipper and a host as the only crew onboard while sailing with guests, but to have an extra crew who function as a hostess as well do I have much better experiences with! Sigrid is also a capable sailor even though she doesn’t have all the same skipper certifications as me, so she will be a very competent crew. She is also very good with people as she is also spending her time as a fulltime guide. We do also both like to cook especially when we have somebody to serve, like a group of guests!
Sigrid’s words about herself
Ever since I was a kid my parents have taken me out on Sunday hikes as is tradition in Norway. We went hiking, canoe-paddling, ice fishing or we embarked on other small adventures. In high school I chose to study health and social sciences, and after two years I started as an apprentice to become a social worker specialized on youth and children. The first year was spent at an outdoor kindergarten with kids from 4-6 years. My second year I spent three and a half months at a school in Jerez de la Frontera, Spain. This was through Leonardo da Vinci Program, the old version of the Erasmus Plus for Exchange. The rest of my second year i spent at a primary school. After this I spent a year doing military service before having to figure out what I wanted to study. It has become more and more clear to me these last couple of years, that working inside in an office every day for the rest of my career, just isn’t going to work. I always wanted to work with people, but I later realised that I want to do this outside. Bringing guests outside and showing them the beautiful great outdoors, and how nice it is, is the perfect thing for me.
I have now spent the last two years in Volda in the beautiful Sunnmøre, studying outdoor activities and nature guiding. Next to these studies I have worked part time for Loen Active as a via-ferrata guide. I have taken courses and held courses myself for beginner groups in indoor climbing. This summer season I have been working for a company called Outdoorlife Norway, located in Stavanger. Here I guide guests to two of Norway’s most famous natural sights: Preikestolen (The Pulpit rock) and Kjerag (The Kjerag Boulder).
I am a very responsible and friendly type who loves to meet new people. One of my favourite things about guiding is to see the happiness in my guests faces as they enjoy a good time in the great outdoors, knowing that I’ve been a part of creating those experiences. This is one of my biggest motivation as a guide. Colleagues tend to say I am almost too kind, but I definitely let the guests know if they do something they shouldn’t. I am not afraid to speak my mind, nor do I refrain from admonition if necessary. Safety comes first. I enjoy responsibility, which comes very naturally to me, and I will always do my best to give my guests a good experience in a safe environment.
We have both finished the Norwegian degree in Nature Guiding at Volda University College. This gives us our certificates as Norwegian Nature Guides, which is the Norwegian UIMLA- standard (Union of International Mountain Leaders Associations) for guides. We are both very serious about our profession as guides, which is what we live of full time, and would say that we have a very professional approach to guiding guest in the outdoors. This means that we treat every guest individually as best we can, but also tell if we for ex. have guest on some trips which are actually not able to join for some sort of reason. With us you get a couple of guides who are out on the activities for the sake of the guest, we are not just out on a trip for our own part and bringing some guest with us. We will not take chances on the guest behalf and the safety will be the baseline for all our work.
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