We set sail a week ago now, and have made it to a lovely little harbor in Denmark, Øer Maritime Ferieby in Ebeltoft. Sailing has been great, from a super calm and easy sail down to Kungsö in the southern part of Gothenburg, to a trip down to Bua near Varberg where we met up with our sailing friend Tobias and spent a couple of nights. The local sailing club Bua Båtsällskap welcomed us and allowed us access to their kitchen and workshop while Magnus worked on our dinghy motor. The channels where water runs through the motor to cool it were all gummed up with salt, so it would overheat. They even supplied us with the chemicals we needed to clean the motor.
After Bua, we sailed over to Anholt, a little island between Sweden and Denmark. Since we were there just before the official start of summer holidays in Denmark, there was a lot of free space in the harbor. We spent two nights there as well, and took a day to get the boat in order. In the tumult to get everything back onboard and out of the house, we hadn’t been able to sort in all the tools and parts that we had in some sort of logical order. It took a whole day, but at the end of the day we had everything stored in a way that made it easy to live onboard and was safe for rough sailing.
Friday morning we decided to leave Anholt and see how far south we could come, because there was some rain and southerly wind forecasted for the weekend. Lulu sailed at an amazing 25-30 degree angle to the wind – very close hauled – and for most of the day we had only our cutter sail and 3 reefs in the main. The sea was choppy with only 3 seconds between the waves, but we had a great sail down to Ebeltoft. Another long day, over 50 nautical miles sailed because we had to work with the wind, and we are going to enjoy a lazy weekend in the harbor before heading down toward Kiel and the channel.
We haven’t yet decided on which route we will take to Kiel, we need a couple of days and can take a couple of different sea routes. In the meantime we slept in, baked (American) biscuits for breakfast, and are planning on small chores and maintenance while we have such a calm berth. So far we haven’t hooked up to electricity, we ran our Remoran Wave 3 hydrogenerator yesterday for the first time and it gave us a little bit of extra power. The solar panels contributed almost 3 times as much, despite mostly cloudy weather; and the little bit of motoring we did at the end of the day yesterday gave us the rest to fill our batteries to 100%. Considering we have done a couple loads of laundry and most all our cooking on induction, I think we are doing well.