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Norway’s sailor king doesn’t look or act like one might imagine a monarch would. On his green-hulled boat with the wooden deck, with his crew sitting in a nearby boat enjoying a post-race beer at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club on the Toronto Islands, the king cut the figure of a kindly grandfather (he has six grandchildren).

He was dressed casually: sneakers, white socks, shorts and a matching T-shirt. He crunched happily on his apple, consuming every morsel, including the core, before politely removing his sunglasses to reveal light blue eyes that crinkled at the corners when he smiled.

Part of the appeal of sailing with the same group of guys forever is that the formalities get tossed overboard. On the Sira, the king goes by Harald. When ashore, the crew addresses him as the King or His Majesty. But, as a skipper, he is one of the boys, like any other, searching for ways to win a race. And, as happened about a decade ago during a race, some of those ways are less direct — and more bloody — than others. Indeed. His Majesty was knocked unconscious in one notorious sailing mishap, an incident his crew refers to as the time the King of Norway nearly abdicated.

“I split my eye on the wheel,” the king says, chuckling, pointing to a scar above his right eye. “It was lights out for about five seconds. There was lots of blood.”

The King’s visit to Toronto is unofficial. He has no dignitaries to meet. He is here to race and, at night, he sleeps aboard the Royal Yacht, the Norge, a hard-to-miss 264-foot boat that has been moored on the Toronto waterfront for two weeks.