When you arrive in a new country in a sailboat, you have to raise the “Q” flag, which is a yellow flag, on the starboard (right) side of the boat. This shows your intention to clear in to the country, and you are allowed a little time between when you arrive and when you go …
It’s been almost a month since our last blog post, we have been sailing the Windward Islands of the Caribbean. That is Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada & Carriacou, and Martinique. January started off wonderfully, we had a gorgeous lobster dinner on the beach in the Tobago Cays with our buddy boat …
We landed in Saint Lucia on 11 December 2023, and are in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) for New Year’s Eve. Having watched a lot of sailing videos and talking to people about the Caribbean, I had a lot of preconceived notions about what it would be like in the Caribbean. It has been …
On Monday 11 December 2023 at 16:15 local time, Lulu crossed the finish line of the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers (ARC) after 22 days and 7 hours of sailing. It was our first ever race, so all the official start countdowns and finish line confirmations were new for us, and made it extra special. The …
The big day is finally here, we have been actively working towards our departure date for a year and we are excited and happy to be this close to the start. Today we just did small jobs on the boat, we have been provisioning food and stockpiling spare parts for the boat and the boat …
We have been in the Canary Islands for over a month now, and really enjoyed being here. In a post on our Facebook account, I noted that it felt like holiday. That’s because the trip down from Sweden was fairly hectic, we pushed hard to move and there was a lot of stress along the …
We have now been on our trip for 100 days, some days it doesn’t seem like we can have been gone that long, but when we look back at different places we have visited, some of them seem like a very long time ago. If you want to follow our trip, we have activated our …
On 15 September 2023 we completed our longest passage to date, a 4-day sail from Nazaré on the Portuguese west coast to Porto Santo in the Madeira archipelago. Life on passage is a mixture of inactivity and constant activity. The boat is in continuous motion, it rolls from side to side or up and down …
Life onboard means of course eating onboard, and the more we can cook onboard, the more economical our trip will be. Generally we always eat breakfast onboard, although we have taken advantage of harbors like Zeebrugge where they delivered fresh baked bread and pastries every morning; or shopped in A Coruna where we could pick …
After leaving Luarca, we have been sailing west along the northern coast of Spain, landing in A Coruna on the 15th of August. The first night there we spent at anchor in front of a lovely beach, then the next morning we moved over to the harbor, ultimately spending four nights there. The harbor was …
Sailing across the Bay of Biscay has been a milestone for us. Partly because it has a bad reputation for having rough seas, and partly because it would be our longest single stretch so far. We are making our way down to Las Palmas, and looking for a weather window. It looked good early in …
When we packed for our trip, we thought sun, summer and warm days. So far we have had about 4, the rest have been at or below 20 degrees C or about 68 F. This morning it was 14 degrees at the harbor, in the low 50’s F. Therefore if you are looking at our …
We think we know why there are no popular YouTube channels cruising the North Atlantic coasts. It’s not been easy cruising! We have seen amazing views, had a lot of dramatic weather, and moved from point A to point B. But not so much good sailing or summer-type weather. However, we have spent over 40 …
We set sail on 25 June from Gothenburg, and it has been a fantastic trip so far. Some days it’s hard, but we knew it would be hard and after some sleep or chocolate it is usually better! We are keeping a trip log in the beautiful log book that Magnus father hand-made for us, …
When looking for a weather window, most sailors try to find one with the best sailing conditions. Unfortunately, we haven’t had much to choose from, so we took the one with the least headwind. Given the recent high winds, that translated to an average of 10 m/s or about 20 knots, which is a decent …
Before I knew anything about sailing, I thought that a lot of wind was good for sailors. Actually, what you really want is a “lagom” or just right amount of wind, preferably from the direction opposite of where you are headed. For our trip so far, we have had mostly headwinds and lots of them. …
One thing that I keep learning as I travel, is how you can have preconceived notions about people or cultures that you have to re-evaluate. When we were in Germany, we were met by really friendly and open people. The harbormasters and staff have all been very helpful, we had four different employees of a …
The past week has been spent sailing down from Denmark to Germany and through the Kiel Channel over to Cuxhaven on the mouth of the Elbe river. We are staying an extra night in Cuxhaven, as there are strong warnings against going out against westerly winds, and there will be southerly winds tomorrow, which will …
Sometimes you get a little more wind than you are expecting. We checked and checked the wind yesterday, and also the wave height and periodicity, and decided that even though it was predicted to be around 13 m/s average winds, we have sailed several longer trips in those conditions and know how Lulu handles (very …
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 …