The Viking Voyage – With Gaia to Vinland –

“A thousand years after Leif Eiriksson became the first European to land in north America, a seventy-six foot replica Viking ship sailed in his wake from Norway to ‘Vinland’. The voyage was timed as a reminder that the Vikings reached America five hundred years before Columbus. …

Gaia followed the Viking route from Norway via Orkney, Shetland, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland to ‘Vinland’- the name given in the Sagas to north America. Her crew of nine men and one woman experienced the north Atlantic in all its moods – including storms, freezing fog and pack ice – and were greeted as heroes at the isolated communities founded by the original Norse settlers against some of the world’s harshest and most spectacular landscape.

Writer Judy Lomax, the only woman on board, shared to the full the variety and drama of the six month voyage, the tensions among the crew, and the rigours of the environment to which they were exposed. …”