Northern Europe

The Stockholm archipelago has roughly 30,000 islands. Most of them have nobody on them, and most of those that do have a single house. The Swedish coast is the easier half of a Northern European charter, with protected water, short crossings, and a calendar built around midsummer, when there is daylight from around 3 in the morning to 11 at night. Stockholm is the natural pickup port, and a week is enough to take in the Sandhamn, Vaxholm and Möja islands, plus the open-water passage out to Gotland, the limestone island in the middle of the Baltic.

Norway is the dramatic half. The West Norwegian Fjords were UNESCO-listed in 2005, with Geirangerfjord and Nærøyfjord the two headline ones; Geirangerfjord has been ranked by the National Geographic Society as the best natural-heritage site in the world. The fjords are 1,400-metre crystalline rock walls dropping straight into water 500 metres deep, with waterfalls running down them all summer. The route to do them properly starts in Bergen, the historic Hanseatic harbour city on the west coast, and runs north for a week or two depending on the weather window.

The Northern European charter season is short and intense, June to early September, with the daylight long and the temperatures comfortable for shore excursions. The fleet is smaller and more specialised than in the Mediterranean, mostly explorer yachts and ice-class motor yachts that can also handle the colder cruising grounds further north (Svalbard, Greenland). A Northern European charter is the alternative for clients who have done the Mediterranean repeatedly and want a wilder, quieter version of summer at sea.