Home again, Home Again

We started sailing from Jakobstad, Finland on the morning of May 9th, and arrived in Dragsmark, Sweden on May 27th. What a trip! What a boat! For those who are following us on Facebook (also AnderssonSailing), I have been posting as we have gone along. Unfortunately, for the blog, we haven’t had a lot of access to service and I have been blogging from a computer; so there haven’t been many nights where we were able to start up the computer because the boat runs on 12V and we don’t have an inverter (yet).

As noted on the prior post, the best thing about sailing is the people you meet. We have had great meetings along the trip; from the friendly members of the Holmsund sailing club in Umeå who drove us to a bus stop and picked us up on our way back from shopping; to Rauno and Tuuli who bought Ocean Queen and met up with us in Nyköping on their way back to Estonia; to Lotta and Mikael who were our faithful companions through the locks for the 5 days of the Göta Canal. We managed to meet up with friends and family members along the way, too, and had 85-year-old Ingmar with us through the last day of the Göta Canal and over lake Vännern.

Many of our days were long, with the longest being over 15 hours sailing and 82,5 nautical miles; from Jakobstad to Umeå. Our shortest sailing trips were around 42-43 nautical miles; if you don’t count the Göta Canal. The sailing season starts later in the Gulf of Bothnia and northern Sweden, so until the 15th of May there was no official harbor service available. That meant we weren’t able to access water, electricity or showers; even if we were tied up at a harbor that had them. Even after that; several were only open on weekends so we were still out of luck; and one place where they were open the hot water heater had blown it’s fuse and we only had ice cold water (no shower that day, either).

Lulu is a dream to sail, managing well in the choppy seas that we met. With the exception of one day and the Göta Canal, we sailed in headwinds which meant both taking longer routes and also waves against us which slowed us down. But Lulu plowed through the waves like a real trooper, we felt so safe and secure even when we traveled in gale winds (Beaufort 7-8 or up to 18 m/s) the last two days. Now we will start sailing weekends around the west coast of Sweden, in beautiful Bohuslän; and our first trip will be in whichever direction the wind is blowing. The prior owner of Lulu kindly let us use his addresses for the sail home, because it’s a little tricky to change them and we didn’t want to be without a radio on the trip. (*edit – we have now changed them! MMSI 265036230 / SG3840. If you were following the Finnish MMSI, you need to look up the new MMSI / Lulu / Sweden)

Thanks to everyone who commented and followed our trip, it was extra fun knowing that you were with us! More to come – we have only just begun to sail with Lulu!