boat

A few days in Tromsø, Norway

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It’s been a long old while since I have written a travel related post, most recently would be my “digital nomad” boat experience for a year, and before that probably a very specific post on travelling from Santa Elena (Monteverde, Costa Rica) to Granada (Nicaragua) which was quite popular. I now know someone that Is about to head to Tromsø, Norway, and I was about to start writing up a private Google doc to share with what we did, how we did it, what it cost and some thoughts, but let’s turn it into a blog post instead!

Back in November 2024 my partner and I headed over to Norway to kick off 2 weeks worth of adventures, including interrailing all the way down to Berlin, and eventually back to the UK. We spent time in Tromsø, Bodø, Mosjøen, Trondheim, Oslo, Goteborg, Copenhagen and Berlin, of which the start is all Norway!

Flying there

We flew from London Luton, direct to Tromsø with Wizz Air which worked out at £83.56 per person, including a checked bag, for a 3 hour 30 min flight. Not my favourite airport to leave from, but the price made it worth it, even with the additional travel within the UK.

The plan was from here on out, to travel by train all the way down into Central Europe, however Tromsø isn’t the best connected place, and we ended up getting an additional short flight down to Bodø which cost an additional £56.90 per person before the interrailing could start.

To and from Tromsø airport to Tromsø central is about a 15-minute drive, and you can easily get a taxi straight from the stand at the airport, or apps like Uber work too. Our Uber back to the airport for our second flight was NOK220, currently around £15 at 5:15am (when we didn’t want to wait for the bus in the snow)

Tromsø itself

Tromsø itself is rather beautiful. It’s a small town, and you can easily walk around everywhere, though you might struggle of course depending on the conditions. Depending on when you go, you might only have a few hours of “real” light, or the sun might not even rise in the day (but you’ll still be able to see don’t worry). Or it might be snowing and icy under foot. We had a mixture of all of this, with the sun still rising for some time during the first half of our stay, but by the last day or two, there would no longer be any sunrises!

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2022 Year Review

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This entry is part 6 of 7 in the series Year Reviews

I’ve been doing year reviews since 2017 under the #year-review tag, and 2022 is no different. Expect I have been living aboard a sailboat traveling the world for the latter half of the year. So this year is probably going to look a little different in retrospect, including far less time coding and writing about technology, but far more nautical miles traveled.

(the GPS track below is mostly accurate, but also has some odd artifact in it…)

Blogging (and Boating)

The trip has resulted in some alternative blogging about sailboats, and much of which has been on an entirely separate blog https://sailinghannahpenn.co.uk.

In fact, here is a picture of Hannah Penn from last week after hauling out of the water in Guadeloupe for form extra painting.

There is always lots to be doing while sailing, and second to sailing comes enjoyment. I have also been working 10h per week for Wikimedia Deutschland, and altogether this leaves sparse gaps for other things on the side like blogs.

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Digital Yacht WL510 & 4G Connect review

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It’s been around 6 months since I set off on a digital nomad-style experience on a sailboat with the Digital Yacht 4GConnect and WL510, and I’m ready to give them some kind of initial review.

If you want to read some high-level details of this adventure, and other technical details of the boat, batteries, antennas and work, read the digital nomad boat experience post first.

Overall, they are 2 nice bits of kit, well-engineered and thought-through, but probably a bit expensive given the amount of use that I have managed to get out of them (less than I would have liked for a variety of reasons).

TLDR; If I were to start this trip again, I probably wouldn’t buy them again. However, for a different trip or situation, they might make more sense (cruising around the UK for example)

Installation

A collection of antennas on the Mizen (back) mast

Both of the devices were easily wall mountable, and they come with all required cables and connectors, but I do wish that they both had switches included to turn them on and off, just in case you want to.

Due to the length of the antenna cables and the desire to put the antennas up our mizzen mast the positioning of the devices was not ideal, but at least we got the antennas up with a bit of height.

The Wifi antenna cable is also pretty thick, making usage of a rubber deck cable Gromit harder than we would have liked, as the cables also already have their ends attached and these are even thicker than the cables. (Of course, we could have made our own cables…)

Usage of the 4G Connect

The UI within the 4G connect is fine, fully featured and pretty easy to use. There isn’t much you need to do here if you are using the 4G Connect alone, but you’ll probably end up regularly changing things when using in conjunction with the WL510.

It’s nice having a large and high 4G antenna (part of the 4G Connect) to increase the chances of getting a 4G connection from your sim cards.

This has mostly been most useful for me while heading away from land or toward land at 5-20 nautical miles. I always get a connection on the 4G Connect before getting one on my phone and other devices. But in the grand scheme of things, this is not when most of my internet usage happens. It was a novelty being able to make a video call while in the middle of the sea, with the land only in distant sight, but not amazingly useful.

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A digital nomad boat experience

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I have always been somewhat of a digital nomad in my working life, an opportunity that mainly exists due to my very flexible job as a software engineer at Wikimedia Germany.

Working in Isla Mujeres, Quintana Roo, Mexico 2019

Over the years I have been primarily based in the UK but have travelled with work to California, South Africa, Israel and many places in Europe, among others.

As well as these work trips, I managed an extended vacation in 2019 through Central America where I worked around 10 hours per week, as well as other hops to Portugal etc.

This is the part that I find myself attempting now again in 2022. But rather than Central America, it will be “the world” on a boat, with slightly less regular mobile data connection.

On previous trips, I didn’t really blog much, at least not about the travel. The one post I have from around 6 months in Central America was a post detailing travel between 2 places. And for work trips, if I blog I focus on the work aspects, such as this post on the Lyon Wikimedia Hackathon. I want that to change with this sailing adventure.

In fact, as I write this I am in the middle of the bay of Biscay, and I just listened to Between the Brackets episode 117 where Yaron and Brian mentioned my little adventure. (Partly the reason I decided to write this post). So here are some more details about the plan.

For more sailing details and to follow along, you might also want to check out sailinghannahpenn.co.uk where there will be more sailing content this year. There are already posts covering the first 50+ days of sailing!

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