Ready, steady, go!

After 7 months out of the water, it is great to see Grace back on the water with her mast up, fuelled, provisioned and ready to go! (…..Well almost! We did need Anders to climb up the mast dangled on a bit of string!). However the unintentional replacement of the topping lift (stops the boom from falling down when the main sail is furled) due to a slight language problem did solve the problem that for the last 18 months I have been hitting my head on the boom every time I step on deck! Simply pulling on the topping lift raises the boom out of my head height…….well worth the investment of 275 Kr!

Grace back in the water after 7 months!

Anders fine tuning the rig!

We arrived on Tuesday from Heathrow via Copenhagen to Sonderborg. Everything was in good order except for the loss of two bags, containing what I felt to be a catastrophic gap in our essential supplies, 7 months supply of teabags and Chichester’s entire stock of mozzie coils! (You may think I am over reacting, but when you are forced to drink Lipton’s Yellow Label tea, or have been bitten to within an inch of your life on a summer’s evening on an unpronounceable desolate Swedish archipelago by mosquitos, who think your sole purpose is to be an insect smorgasbord, then you might change your mind!). The only other missing items were all of Anne’s clothes……..mine came through without mishap!

It is lucky for us that the Ministry of Fish or something similar has relocated to Augustenborg as it means that there are 4 flights a day back to Copenhagen so all these marooned civil servants are able scurry back to civilisation and Starbucks at every opportunity!

Fortunately after 4 days and with lots of help from Susanne in the boatyard; who was able to work her way through the various SAS lost property departments, teabags, mozzies coils, oh and Anne’s clothes were all reunited with us and we were able to get underway!

Bags reunited

Tom Cunliffe, the sailing guru was also preparing his yacht for the summer in Augustenborg. I have most of his books and had to be restrained from stalking him up the pontoons to ask him to autograph them for me! However we took his advice after he watched us fill our diesel tank at the marina to go to Flensburg in Germany, it is only just 10 miles away, as the duty of fuel (too late!) and booze is about half that of Denmark! So on Saturday we joined the queues of Danes doing exactly that in the nearest supermarket!

Flensburg

A lucky diversion in our search for new charts was that we came across a fascinating exhibition about the very famous Abeking and Rasmussen yachts at the rather swanky Robbe & Berking boatyard on the harbour in Flensburg. Founded in 1907 A&R built some of the most beautiful wooden sailing yachts of their day. Today I think they provide big toys to oligarchs.

Robbe and Berking visitor centre

They were busy setting up the displays so we sneaked in for an exclusive preview! It felt rather good to sit at Georg Abeking’s desk amongst his plans and drawing implements – I always wanted to be a naval architect!