Photo taken of us in Fur sound , morning of 16 June.  No wind,  but we had good winds from Glenure to Thyboron, and went in to the North Sea at Thyboron 1900 hrs! Skipper

It´s such a big boat to clean, polish, and apply antifoul to! I spent the whole day applying antifoul to half of the wetted surface, and hoe too finish the other half tomorrow. But she is looking great! EVEN IF I say it myself! We very much hope she will go back in the water on Friday. Then we can get on with the other preps before leaving on 15 or 16 June for Bergen.

After some hard work by the skipper, guided by Søren, the hull was cleaned with bathroom cleaner yesterday, using a long brush. It worked pretty well, but there are still some fender marks to deal with using some other technique.

Next step is to wax and polish the hull, and I hope to manage this before going to Scotland on Friday for my sister Pat´s 80th birthday party on Raasay.

Today, my favourite boatyard, Værftet Skive, lifted Svalen our of the water with the large crane in the main commercial harbour. Most of those concerned had been ion the Around Funen Race this weekend. Not much of a race it seems, due to lack of wind and water! She was quite dirty below the water line, as you can see from the first photo, but after three hours of pressure washing by your truly she cleaned up real good as the song goes. More hull cleaning tomorrow in store.

Here she is on the crane.

And here she is again in her trailer, and on the hard, after power washing with water.

yes she is actually blue!

Incidentally, Svalen is bout 25 Tonnes deadweight, so quite a lift for the crane, and always a nervous moment for those involved, especially when she is also full of “stuff” for the long voyage!

We all knew this would be a long day – about 85 sea miles. Fortunately, having avoided the Sirens calling from the rocks, and various sea monsters conjured up from old stories and imagination, the elements favoured us with a nice Easterly breeze.  This lasted until lunchtime, after which it died somewhat for a while and inconveniently went Northerly. However, as we made a rather swift crossing to Anholt island, a true mid point on the route between the Limfjord and Öresund, we decided to press on to Hals, even though it may be dark when we get there.

In the morning we made between 6 and 7 knots under three sails, but mid afternoon saw us add some engine power in order not to be arriving in the middle of the night.

Why press on? Why not stop in the lovely island of Anholt, said to have the best water in Denmark (or, by real afficionados, the best water anywhere!). Well the forecast for wind tomorrow is bad – all the wrong directions for us, and generally light or non existent when it does blow. Better the devil we know!

Anyhow, we finally arrived in Hals in the dusk, under a half moon, and tied up in a convenient space, retiring below for coffee, some of Birthe´s home made cookies, and a wee dram (yes, the best, Macallan!). We have done 650 sea miles from Oxelsund in Sweden, and about another 70 from Stockholm, so around 720 sea miles in all. We took 9.5 days, but we stopped every night in some delightful place, either on the anchor or tied up in a harbor.

Now we have a short sail up to Aalborg, where Öla and Lasse will help with the SSB radio issues, and Birthe will change the zips on the cockpit tent and shelter. After that we proceed to Skive for the lift-out, cleaning, checking of sea-cocks and other small items before heading west to Thyboron and the North Sea for the sail to Bergen in Norway, and then across to the Shetland islands.  Note, Thyboron is as far as I know one of very few places in Denmark where one can find smoked haddock, our favourite Scottish Haddies! Maybe we will stop there a while!

Meanwhile, here are a couple of today’s photos. We had some great sailing, helped by the great crew!

1. 9,2 knots today – pretty much a record for sailing in Svalen!
2. Birthe repairing the parasailor, which she now hates!
3. SE Bornholm beach – the finest sand in Denmark
4. Sunset approaching Falsterbro
5. The Bridge!
6. Village on the Swedish island of VEN in the øresund
7. Hamlet*s Helsingør castle

Svalens Blog,

We were up in good time, and Skipper went to the local baker (he was here before!!) and bought Rundstukker (morning rolls) and kransekakker (apple cake) for him  and crew. Must keep morale high! After frokost (breakfast) skip did the usual engine checks, and as a rarity checked the gearbox oil level, which was found to be a bit low. It took a while to locate the manual, and the right oil, but eventually it was all fixed, and we set off in a good wind, in the right direction. No engine support needed today! Off at 6-7kts and quickly under the famous bridge  that joins Sweden and Denmark in the Öresund. Famous largely because of the Danish-Swedish TV crime series, Broen 1, 2 and 3, with Saga as the gorgeously eccentric Swedish female detective, and martin as her tolerant Danish equivalent and sometimes partner.

After passing under the bridge  and heading up the Sund, the wind soon died somewhat leaving us sailing at 4-5 kts. – a bit of a come-down. But great for getting Lasse bored, because that´s when he turns his practical eye to things that need to be fixed on board. Today it was the caballing for the satellite signal receiver that will give us the ability to send and receive texts and emails, no matter where we are in the world. Fantastic to have thatb more or less solved, while gently covering the miles.

Eventually we pass the charming island of Ven in the Sund – a Swedish island used as an observatory in medieval times. No time to stop, though, as we are in a hurry to get to Jutland before the wind returns to its customary west of north west, when it will be in our face,. Same with Copenhagen – normally I love to stop there in the harbours in the centre of the old town, and see our friends who live there, but today we had to miss that too. Slowly up the Sund to Helsigngør, Hamlet´s famous castle, and the narrows between Denmark and Sweden with four ferries running non-stop between. Finally, we tied up in the harbor in Gilleleije, right on the North of Zeeland, poinsed to take a long day sail tomorrow to Hals, at the western entrance to the Limfjord, after which it will be easy to get to Aalborg and Skive where the boat will be lifted out for cleaning and related work.  We seem to have one more day of favourable winds, so we hope they will be strong enough to give us a fast sail, as it is about 85 sea miles to Hals from here.

That’s it for now. Photos later!

Skipper

Sunday, 20^thMay

We came back to Sweden from Denmark. To be precise, from the small harbor at  Allinge in the NE of  Bornholm, to Falsterbro, the small canal which is a shortcut through from the Baltic proper to øresund, where “The Bridge” is between Copenhagen and Molmo. That we will pass under tomorrow on our way north and west again to Jutland.

There was little wind especially in the morning, so we used too much engine. However, we crossed the busy Baltic shipping lanes without major incident, and did have three, later two, sail up to help.  The sea was rather calm, so both Lasse and I tackled small tasks that needed doing, such as getting the navigation lights working, and fixing the handrails properly. Lasse has also cracked our complex electrical system, which is both 24 volt and 12 volt, depending on what it is used for,  We can step up the 24 volts to 240 Volts using an inverter, and he has fixed an inverter with two normal sockets so that we can change things that need that. We can also make 240 volts with the generator, but we want to do that as little as possible.

A  small but important milestone has been managing to download weather forecasts, charts, and routing data using the iridium Go box, and also working out how to send and receive emails via the box. This has taken a few days, but now I think we’ve got it!

A boat is like a small city. One has to be as self sufficient as possible. We can generate electricity from solar power, and if that is not enough, from diesel. We need that to desalinate the sea water to make drinking water, and so we also have a desalinator. Essentially this is a micro-filter membrane that can filter out the salt in the water under high pressure.  We have tanks to hold sewage until we can discharge it either into pumping stations in harbours (where these exist, and work), or into the open sea where nature can handle it. We try to minimize non-biodegradable waste, especially plastic, but if we cannot avoid it, we compress it, and store it until we can get rid of it. We carry a lot of dried and preserved or tinned food, and packets of flour, rice and other dry goods. I have a tin of whole spices, and a tin of ground spices, for cooking. A luxury is to have herbs growing in the cockpit, out small garden.  But we cannot really grow our food. It all has to be taken with us in one way or another, and we do like to cook.

Of course when sailing along coastlines and between ports, we meet a lot of interesting people, and sometimes we go to places in order to meet people we know who happen to be there when we are- This is important because they connect us to local places and other people on the way.  And we also connect them to a different world.

Last night is a good example. We came to Bornholm partly to meet up with Birthe and Lasse´s son Christian. In fact we not only met him, but his wife and one-year old son, Karl Herman, as well as her parents, their other daughter, Camilla, her husband Mark, and their two kids, Anna and Magnus.  This is because we were invited to a BBQ at the summer house they were renting for a week.  Mark works for Tata Consulting, the great Indian company. Karen, Lisbeth, Morten and I had visited one of their tea plantations at Munnar in Kerala in 2010—11, and I was quite familiar with the Tata empire for all sorts of other reasons, so we had a lot to chat about.  After the BBQ we had a great walk to, and along, the lovely beach, which has the finest sand in Denmark.  Later, Christian drove us back to the boat, through the lovely Bornholm countryside.

Today Lasse, Birthe and I sailed a creditable 122km (66nm) , with the help of the parasailor and a fair following wind. It took a while to sort out all the lines, sheets, and guys in the parasailor because it had been put away badly in the autumn, last time we used it, and also shifted around a few times in the “tidying up”.  We also had a long day, leaving just after 7am and arriving just before sunset at 2050. Once again, the sun shone the whole day.

Unfortunately the parasailor caught on a securing wire on a shackle that had not yet been taped up, and in a fraction of a second, a tear appeared more than 1 meter long. Our resident sailmaker, Birthe, quickly got her needle and thread, and put in enough temporary stitching to stop the tear from running further. We carried on, the wind being too good to miss. Tomorrow we will get some sail repair tape in the excellent chandlery in Kalmar.

We all like Kalmar. It is a beautiful old city. Famous for it castle, among other things. In this castle, the treaty forming the Kalmar Union between Sweden (then including much of Finland), Norway and Denmark, was signed in 1397. This was a Union promoted by Margaret of Denmark to resist the spread of the German influence in the Baltic. it ended in 1523. At the signing of the Treaty, the Norwegian ecclesiastical authorities were represented by a Scot, who happened to be Bishop of Trondheim at the time. Trondheim discuss covered the Northern Isles at this time, and formerly also covered the Western Isles. It also has good shops, and as always, we need some stuff to keep us going to Bornholm, the danish island that is our next major stop!

The darkness falls in this anchorage, about 9nm north of Kalmar, and the birds here are chirping as if there was no tomorrow. Other than those sounds, there is a wonderful calm silence.