Category: viking ship

When I say crew, I might be exaggerating slightly. It’s not as if we were hired and paid in plunder. We weren’t recruited by a fearsome leader for our brute strength and ruthlessness. What happened was a little more mundane.

We got to the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde (pronounced Rosh-kill and more commonly known for the music festival which I had previously thought was called RockSlide) after a circuitous route through the town. Getting to the ticket desk, the enthusiastic Danish man asked us if we wanted to go on the Viking sail boat for 95 krone. He was so enthusiastic about it that I instantly thought “Of course I do!” but I looked at Jo to see if she wanted to spend that much money on it. She looked at me to see if I would be comfortable doing it despite being unable to swim and being terrified of drowning. After a while we concluded that yes, we both definitely wanted to do it and we booked our time slot.

So we joined around 15 other tourists at the appointed time for a safety briefing with the captain of our ship. I don’t think that was her official term but I’ve forgotten her name. She told us that we’d all be wearing life jackets but they probably weren’t needed as no one had fallen in during the 25 years they’d been open which reassured me. It’s quite odd – I’ve got a fear of water that I’m able to give over after about 10 minutes on a boat. I’ve been on narrowboat holidays where I’ve been clambering around the outside of the boat, jumping assure and pushing off and jumping onto a boat, yet I still have an initial fear that I’m going to fall in and drown.

The captain also told us that we would need to do some rowing which excited me because it felt like a more authentic experience, and it excited Jo as she is a rower and it was a chance to try out rowing in a different boat.

As we were excited, we were the first ones onto the ship and we got to sit at the back of the boat which has a technical term that I forgot in my excitement. This meant that we were rowing what Jo has told me is called stroke, meaning that all the other rowers should follow our pace.

Having never rowed before, it took me a little while to get the hang of what I was supposed to be doing. During this learning phase, we went slightly off course and almost crashed into some moored boats at the side of the harbour. Reading this and knowing that the other rowers should be following my pace would suggest that it was my fault that we nearly crashed. I would like to submit my case to the jury thusly:

The woman behind me was rubbish. I had to repeatedly stop rowing as our oars would hit eat other. She was clearly not following my lead as she should have been. The only time my side of the ship were in time was when I looked back to see what she was doing and to follow her although this synchronisation was brief with her soon falling out of time again. It frustrated me a bit. She never would have made it as a Viking. She didn’t even have the beard for it.

After a while we were out at sea and go to hoist the sail. As we were in the prime position, at different times myself and Jo both got to do important rope holding tasks. I was excited by this. Even though it mostly consisted of just holding a rope for about 10 minutes, there was a period at the start of pulling on the rope and at the end of slowly letting it out. As you can tell, I am easily pleased.

I was also selected by the captain (it may have just been that I was the nearest but I like to think that I was selected) to lower the sail. I got a bit confused by this as I thought if I lowered it, that it would fall straight into the sea or onto people. I had forgotten that this probably wasn’t the first time that they had lowered a sail on a Viking ship and they probably had a tried and tested method for doing so as I marvelled as the sail lowered itself perfectly between where the crew was sat.

Whilst we were sailing, the captain was warning us that we might have to row back in. I was really hoping we would get to do so as, whilst sailing was neat, we wouldn’t get the full Viking experience if we sailed straight back into port as they were doing later in the day.

As I have mentioned, this is perhaps the coolest thing I will ever do in my life and if you ever get the chance to visit Roskilde (just half an hour from Copenhagen on train), I urge you to do so. The rest of the museum is fun too – you can care your name in runes, paint a shield or sword and many other activities that are probably aimed at children as well as see the ruins from 5 Viking boats that were recovered last century.