Here we are in Oslo, Norway, at 60 degrees north, our northernmost port of call. We're as far north as Greenland and Siberia. It's the Land of the Midnight Sun except we're here almost exactly at the autumnal equinox, so the days and nights are each twelve hours long, just like anywhere else. In three months this place will get about four hours of daylight. They've got a special place in Morocco to send Norwegians when they get depressed. But right now it's very pretty with the smell of woodsmoke in the air. It's still pretty comfortable in the daytime but at night it is, in the words of our engineer, "Cold as a witch's tit in a brass bra." So we've fired up the diesel stove.

Jan calls this stove Charlie Chernobyl, which is a complex pun combining the sailorly name for the stove's chimney, the charlie noble, with the famous nuclear explosion site. Sailors are great ones for naming things. The official name is the Beaufort Dickenson, from Coquitlam, British Columbia. But what fun is that?

Charile Chernobyl is a big chunk of iron with a complicated carburator that John the Engineer hates. But when it's all settled in and running smoothly, it heats the whole midships cabin. And since we never turn it off, I keep two teakettles of boiling water on top and I always have a preheated oven for baking. I had a terrible time getting things to brown over last week, until I remembered to turn the damper down. Now it's great. It runs from a day tank that the crew fills out of the main fuel tank, so I never have to conserve fuel as I do with our nameless warm weather gas stove. And there's no foolishness about adjusting the temperature.

It's got a little oven thermometer set in the door, which reads three hundred and fifty degrees whether the stove is on or off. Sometimes people ask me how I can cook without knowing how hot my oven is. There are tricks I learned in Maine on the woodstoves, where you hold a piece of paper in the oven, or just stick your hand in, and count how long till it singes. But I find it simpler to put the food in my stove and look at it every fifteen minutes or so, and take it out when it's cooked. Works everytime. Usually.

Since it's always going, I do a lot more braising and stewing than I do on the other stove. Gas heat is hotter, but it heats from the bottom, so the bottom of my bread will burn before the top browns. It's better for pies and pizza though.