Category: Uncategorized

Not too long ago, flying a yellow or ‘Q’ flag signified “keep away” and quarantine! Yellow fever was also called yellow jack after the flag because strangely, this sort of flag is called a ‘jack’ by seriously boaty people!

The SXK Buoy Flag

However when we opened the post this morning and out popped a yellow flag we did not recoil in Billy Bones-esque terror as if receiving the ‘black spot’ from Long John Silver but cheered with delight! We had been allocated one of the Swedish Cruising Club Buoy Flags by the CA and so we are now not destined to roam the waters around Sweden, flying the yellow jack and quarantined from the harbours!

This flag allows us to use the 200 or so private SXK mooring buoys around the Swedish coast. The are located in some of the most beautiful and unspoilt areas of Sweden….so any isolation will be intentional! However the only slight snag is that all the information in Swedish! A cursory glance at the SXK website leads me to believe that Swedish Chef in The Muppet Show was not actually speaking Swedish so deciphering it may prove trickier than I thought!

As a matter of interest, we carry a yellow ‘Q’ flag on Grace, not because we think that we will be struck down with some contagion but because the flag now has a meaning that is completely the opposite to its original use! It now says, “come aboard, we a ready for inspection by customs and immigration”. That’s boating for you!!

So now if you see a boat flying a flag with yellow and black squares, the ‘Lima’ flag, I’d give it a wide berth! That means its in quarantine!

The Lima Flag

Well it must be spring now, the snow has gone and all things ‘boaty’ seems to have woken up. Suddenly it feels like we will be soon setting out on our travels again. Firstly, our new pilot book arrived – The Baltic Sea and Approaches, it is the definitive guide to Baltic ports and harbours with absence of just enough of the essential sailing instructions so as to cause anxiety! This is the first update since 2010 and has 438 pages of possibilies and four new opportunities for berthing chaos:
1. Lazy lines.
2. Mooring buoys.
3. Finger beams.
4. Mooring to rocks.
………..And just when we were getting the hang of box moorings!

Our new pilot book

Then Anders from the boatyard in Austenborg got in touch to find out when we want Grace back in the water so he can schedule the repairs and improvements. From mid-May, the weather should be good enough for us to sail across Denmark and up the Swedish East Coast to the Gulf of Bothnia, Helsinki and on to St Petersburg! We have booked our flights back to Sonderborg, in time to view the view the boat and sign off the maintenance and then we have planned 4 days of proving and sea trials before we set off again! We are having rust on the keel treated before antifouling – apparently it is normal for Bavaria keels. As it is a 2 tonne lump of cast iron I’m sure a few rust spots here and there are not going to be a problem!

Rust on Grace’s keel!

To help reduce damage this season, Anders has sourced a ‘bumperline’ for us – basically it is a thick rope that runs along the fat bit of Grace’s beam to allow us to squish our way into tight spaces! He is also sourcing a mooring hook – you can’t buy them in the UK but they are a big steel hook on a line with which you hope to pick up the big rings on top of mooring buoys as you breeze past!

Bumperline ready for fitting!

Mooring hooks in action!

Next there was the ‘Swedish Seminar’ at the Cruising Association in the Limehouse Basin. The basic message here was that it would be a good idea to join the Swedish Lifeboat Association so they will come and rescue you first! I can’t help feel that there is so much to see in Sweden and beyond and that is before our return trip through the Gota Kanal and Lake Vattern (the second largest lake in Europe!) to Goteborg, which is an absolute must…… I don’t see how we will get Grace back to Chichester before 2019!!

The Cruising Association at Limehouse Basin

It must have been the result of watching too much daytime TV; Antiques Roadshow, Bargain Hunt, Flog It and Cash in the Attic – I’ve seen them all! Now completely convinced that I could do better than the ‘TV experts’ and pockets stuffed with cash, I headed off to my first car boot sale…….it was never going to end well!

My fundamental error was that I bought what I liked and clearly not what anybody else liked! This included (what I still think is!) a rather nice Piquot Ware tea set. But as it is made from an uncoated aluminium alloy I would not actually want to use it, just in the same way you probably should not use uncoated aluminium cooking pans. I also bought (for no other reason than that they were very, very cheap!) two odd sized and coloured Murano glass candle sticks (or possibly vases….I never was sure)! A plant pot in what could very loosely be described as ‘Majolica style’ in the shape of a boat. My final ‘treasure’ was a small Royal Copenhagen dish commemorating the Sail Training Ship Danmark.

STS Danmark

Yet despite my most florid and lavish descriptions, lowered prices – even less than I paid for them and weeks on eBay, nothing sold with the exception of the hideous miss matched glass candle sticks! Clearly I am not destined to be an antiques expert and I will just have to find a use for these things! The plant pot should have been easy to deal with but it is just too small for a hyacinth and too big for the croci, the shiny aluminium tea set now brightens a dark corner in the kitchen and the Royal Copenhagen dish has become the front line in my crusade against plastic packaging! A soap dish for real bars of soap!

Real soap – no more plastic bottles!

The dish tells an interesting story and was made to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the STS Danmark in the 1970s. The ship was built on the island of Lolland at the Nakskovs Shipyard in 1932 by the Danish government to train officers for the merchant navy. It is still owned by the Danish government and until very recently officer cadets for all the major Danish shipping lines had to undertake a training voyage in her before they qualified. The ship is a 3 masted barque of approximately 200 feet in length, she displaces about 750 tonnes and has a crew of 80.

In 1939, at the outbreak of the second world war she was in New York at the World’s Fair to represent her country. She was ordered not to return to Denmark to avoid capture by the Germans and was then offered to the US Coastguard as a training ship and was then based in Connecticut for the duration. By the time she was returned to Denmark in 1946 over 5000 US Coastguard cadets had been trained on her. It was this last fact that convinced me that I would be able to eBay my dish for a small fortune to a nostalgic American with a happy memory of her!

Flying our N flag

Last August we sailed quite close to where she was built as we explored the Smaland Sea on our way to Nykobing F. The ‘F’ being very important here so as to distinguish it from the other Nykobing on Mors! Also, it was the bridge at Gulborg that links the islands of Lolland to Falster where we, for the first and only time, got to use our ‘N’ flag to signal that we wanted the bridge to open! Nerves of steel were required as the bridge keeper resolutely refused to open his bridge until he could almost touch our mast! By then, we were so ‘gung ho’ that there was no chance of us blinking first…..throttle open with Grace hurtling towards the bridge at 6 knots. That made him shift!

The bridge keeper blinked first!

I never learn! I’m going to my first auction next Thursday. I am bound to forget everything I learnt from the car boot sale!

Plastic packaging: When shopping in Waitrose, everything we bought was wrapped in plastic bags, sometimes double wrapped and even the loose stuff! How can that be right? Also plastic bags and bits can block your seawater engine cooling intake. Something I am a bit obsessed with! It is particularly troubling if you have a sail drive like Grace.

On a more or less ‘approved mission’, I went for a day trip to the London Boat Show. It is clearly a bit of a sad shadow of its former self! No boats on the water and now just occupying the South Hall of Excel!

The mission; other than to have a nice day out, was to find a suitable day boat that we could use to creek crawl around Chichester Harbour or to tow to the Lakes or the seaside. I’d originally thought that my Gull dinghy would have been perfect for messing about the Harbour but after an erratic wobble around Olton Mere, with both Anne and I trying not to capsize or tip each other over the side, we soon realised that ‘Gracelet’ the Gull at 12 feet long was not going to work! We are just too big!

Gracelet the Gull

So that was how I found myself at the Boat Show………!

The Boat Show

My first stop was at the boating ‘essentials’; the helicopters, followed shortly afterwards by the amphibious Dutton cars. I particularly like the  blue one. Oh and a hot tub! They would all make a very useful additions to the ‘fleet’.

Yachting essentials!

There were some great ‘pop-up’ cleats on a new Dehler Yacht, which considering everything else on the deck to stub your toes on they seemed completely unnecessary but rather fun! I can’t help feel that they will always be ‘down’ when you really need them to be ‘up’! One yacht which I liked was a new 31 foot Sun Odyssey which had full 6’6″ headroom in the saloon. Perfect for me!

Pop-up cleats!

Finally I came to the purpose of the trip….. the day boats! I found a rather nice 20 foot Bay Raider from Swallow Yachts. I really like that it does not have a ‘traditional’ wooden gaff rig but lightweight carbon fibre masts.  It also used water ballast instead of lead, so making the boat much easier to handle out of the water. This boat has got to go to the top of my list, although if it was between 17 and 18 feet it would be even better!

Bay Raider….my favourite for now!

Then there are the usual Cornish Crabbers and Shrimpers, I almost bought one some time ago and there are plenty in Chichester Harbour. Very nice and lots of used ones, these are now at the top of my list! There was a man with one on the Dutch Oostershede, as we edged our way onto a berth along side a rickety wooden pier, which had us grazing the bottom and squeezing in between two other yachts. He rocked up, chucked the anchor over the side and went to make a cup of tea! All very slick! As was his departure next morning; engine on, anchor up and off and away! Quite a contrast to our own departure from the beautifully quiet little bay where we had stayed that night. Plenty of engine revs and fenders, looked on by our anxious neighbours! I think if I had really understood ‘springing off’ it might have been less dramatic……but then again probably not!

Night time on the Oostershede

A peaceful little bay on the Oostershede !

Cornish Shrimpers…….now my favourite!

I also discover that I had not been greasing my Bruntons ‘Autoprop’ correctly and that I should be engaging ‘ahead’ when sailing and not putting it in ‘astern’ as instructed in the Volvo manual! On the stand I found myself selling the benefits of the prop better than the salesman! He obviously had never sailed a boat with one! 1.7 litres of fuel per hour, full power and little prop walk when going astern.

Autoprops!

I also discovered how Ander in Denmark will fit Grace’s Christmas present – a whisker pole to fly the genoa when sailing down wind.

Grace’s Christmas whisker pole

The next thing that caught my eye was a sandwich and pie maker for the boat’s gas ring! I was keen to find out how this worked so while chatting to the chef, we developed quite a crowd! He was so grateful as no one had spoken to him all day that he made me a very nice ham and cheese toastie by way of thanks!

Boaty toastie!

I finally found the boat we need, a Drascombe Lugger. It’s about 18 feet long and although gaff rigged, so not my favourite but at least the wooden spars fit inside the boat for towing. The Lugger is based on a Lancashire workboat that is very seaworthy and stable….and is now top of my list! The first Lugger, ‘Luka’ is in the National Maritime Museum at Falmouth.

Drascombe Lugger…..definitely my favourite!

Then, just as I was leaving for the train, I found the perfect addition to the fleet…….a folding canoe. I almost bought it there and then – except the picture on the display of the happy wanderer with the canoe in a bag on her back was clearly misleading as it weighed a tonne and needed about five different packs! So much so that it would have been a miracle if one person could carry it or indeed float!

The folding canoe!

Whatever made us think that we could turn up at Windermere in mid-winter and hire a yacht to go sailing…..we really must have been suffering from Sea Fever!

The car packed with our spare (for ‘spare’ read ‘leaky and ancient’) waterproofs we headed off to the Lake District. I was feeling a bit like something out of Swallows and Amazons, after all I had just seen the film and our hotel, Storr Hall was on a promontory into Windermere that formed the northern edge of Arthur Ransom’s Houseboat Bay. Two other and arguably more important features of the hotel is that has probably the best view for breakfast in Britain (not my words but person on the table next to us who was trying to impress his mistress….so it must be true!).

A great view at breakfast time!

The other is the Temple of Heroes that was built to commemorate four famous Admirals, Nelson, (of course), Howe, Collingwood and somebody else who was clearly not as famous as all that!

The Temple of Heroes

Exploring Bowness I discovered a brilliant ‘pilot’ book for the Lakes; The Atlas of the English Lakes by John Wilson Parker. The fact that it was in the discounted pile was another clue that mid-winter sailing on the Lake was going to be a bit of a tall order!

A great pilot book for our adventure!

A trip round the boatyard at Bowness made me realise that I really need a another boat, perhaps a nice ‘daysailer’ to add to our fleet of a Bavaria 32 and a Gull dinghy. This would be perfect for sailing in the Lakes or creek crawling around Chichester Harbour, in fact all those places where we cannot take Grace or would be too frightened to take my dinghy! A trip to the London Boat Show might be called for! Look out for my next post!

Boats and Bowness

While we waited to cross Windermere on the Nab Ferry and what looked like was going to be our only chance of a sail, a beautiful steam yacht sailed past. We could only look on with envy!

Lovely steam yacht on Windermere

The Nab Ferry

Coniston Water – looking towards Anna’s Nab

And so on to Coniston Water, while sheltering from the rain in the Bluebird Café, the site of ‘mission control’ for Donald Campbell’s fatal attempt on the world water speed record, I spotted a boat for hire! At last! It was electric, restricted to about 3 knots and had only an hour of charge left……..oh it also crabbed sideways! So no risk of breaking the water speed record then!! We were given a comprehensive safety briefing; ” Stick to the middle. Oh if you get stuck, wave the paddle and we’ll probably come and rescue you”. All very reassuring!!

Bluebird Café – Campbell Mission Control

Electric boats!

We weaved our way down the west bank of the lake, past the Sailing Club and passed the ‘iron spike’ marked on the chart and on to the Hoathwaite  Landing. Crossing the lake we sailed towards Fir Island and back up the east bank towards Cock Point. The motor started to slow as the battery discharged. We crawled up to the Coniston Steam Launch jetty at Brantwood, the home of John Ruskin. At no point was the navigation complex and the chart book was probably a bit of ‘overkill’!

Sailing sideways towards Fir Island at 3 knots!

The charts were probably a bit OTT!

Crossing the lake again we headed back towards the Bluebird Café, warmth and tea. However, even in a 15 foot electric boat, landing was the usual controlled crash! And of course we had an audience of 12 canoeists, the café, which had just received a coach party and boatman who looked on with despair and resignation. There was clearly no hope rescuing my nautical dignity! Never mind, I lost that long ago on a lock gate in Holland!

 

 

Father Christmas clearly knew I liked sailing!

Firstly, a brilliant drone to make my blog a bit more interesting, hopefully with lots of pictures of Grace sailing by – clearly people are fed up with my photography but I don’t think there is much evidence that a drone will improve it, if my ‘drone cam’ efforts so far are anything to go by!

I am trying hard to learn to fly it which so far seems to involve shredding a lot of leaves off trees and trying to avoiding landing in the water! I should have played with an X-Box when I was younger!

I am obsessed by gloves and how useless the 10 pairs that we have on Grace are at keeping your hands warm and dry!

Rubbish gloves!

We’ve both got some fantastic Gill Helmsman gloves – no not just gloves but proper gauntlets! Perfect for taking the wheel in the wind and rain! I immediately tested them by walking in -6 degrees for an hour and still had warm fingers!

Excellent gloves!

Hi-Fits are another of my many obsessions and now I finally have a pair that are actually waterproof and that fit and won’t end up round my ankles!

Not wishing to leave Grace out of the Christmas spirit; all alone in her shed in Austenborg, we have bought her an adjustable whiskerpole with all the trimmings! Hopefully that will improve her downwind performance. It will be exciting to experiment with plenty of opportunities for crash gybes! Duck!

I’ve also got more supplies of my favourite liquorice “Skipper’s Pipes” – excellent!

To bring us luck or at least to stop things getting worse, we have a bronze star for the boat. Apparently it will channel the positive energy to keep you out of trouble….that will be handy! Traditionally the stars are fixed on the end of the bowsprit – I image if we had one, there would be star imprints on every dock in Denmark! Fortunately in the absence of a bowsprit it is guaranteed to work just as well when fixed on the bulkhead!

To remind me of Copenhagen and especially of my disappointment in just how small the Little Mermaid really is I’ve a nice Royal Copenhagen pin dish with what could be ‘Grace’ sailing past in the background!

The truly Little Mermaid!

After around 16 weeks living in less than 120 square feet of space, coming back home and ashore was a bit of a shock! Firstly, what to do with all that space and secondly, what to do with all that stuff……our home is full (now ‘was’ due to the wonders of eBay) of gadgetry; from room humidifiers to a room dehumidifiers!! We just had too much stuff. After all, 4 mugs and a kettle did us just fine on Grace! It all has to go!

Grace; 120 square feet of space…….who could possibly need anymore!

eBay still amazes me, in the past few weeks I’ve been astounded by what people are prepared to buy! I’ve sent items all over the UK but also America. Items that I would normally have put into the car and taken to the tip……yet people have bought them! It is the ‘end to end’ slickness of eBay, from payment to postage that is so impressive! I’m sort of a convert…..although I don’t think I would be comfortable about buying stuff from eBay as really I like my stuff to be new!

So, what have I learnt? Well, eBay is a doddle………even for someone who claims to be experienced in sales and marketing! Although as always I did try to over complicate it!

1. Photography. Don’t worry about the quality of the photography – but use all 12 of the allowed photos to capture labels, serial numbers and so on. If the pictures look too good and professional it makes people uneasy about your pricing as they think you are a “proper“ shop.

2. Descriptions. Now these really are important, people seem to love long and florid descriptions – packed with plenty of features and benefits statements; it has X, which means Y. These always work even for the most inane feature and tenuous benefit! However all descriptions must start with “This is a….”. It may seem formulaic and completely obvious but then again it just works and I don’t understand why!

3. Timing. Not surprisingly ski coats sold well before skiing holidays and winter coats sold when the weather turned bad!

4. Free postage. Despite what eBay tell you, it’s a waste of effort and margin! Never do it, always make the customer pay! People seem to ignore the cost of postage and are prepared to pay, within reason, what ever you ask. Of course as postage is not included in the final price, eBay do not charge commission on it!

5. Pricing. Now this is also interesting, items priced as whole numbers or simple multiples seem to invite sweeping offers and deep discounts. £20 always becomes £15 automatically whereas £22.17 will become £20! If the price asked for seems calculated and considered then people seem to be less willing to ask for discounts. It is as if people assume that the price has been carefully researched! Definitely not applicable to my pricing!

6. Be serious about selling it. eBay is great at getting you the true value of what your stuff is really worth – what someone else is prepared to pay for it! However distressing it may appear particularly when I think back to what I paid for it all in the shops. But ultimately it needs to be priced ‘to sell’!

7. Gadgets sell! All those miracle coffee machines, pie makers and electric Fondue sets sold for me like the proverbial hotcakes! People seem happy to buy those gadgets which are used once and then sit in the back of the garage for 10 years! Did I really need seven different ways of making coffee? No!….Four ways are more than enough! You don’t believe me? See for yourself! Filter machine, Cafetiere, Tassimo, Nepresso, Aeropress, Percolator and Espresso machine!

8. Product knowledge. I have learn lots of facts about the items I’ve sold – did you know for example that the M prefix on a Singer sewing machine serial number means it was made between January and June 1900!

9. Everybody’s doing it! I’ve sent stuff to taxi drivers and judges! I continue to be surprised by the people who have bought my old junk!

10. Not everything sells! Despite being ‘cheaper than chips’ somethings just won’t sell, this offended me at first because I must have liked them when I bought them in the first place! However, I realise that the only solution for them was the destination where they would have gone in the first place if I had not discovered eBay….the tip! Now, what new stuff to buy……a Whisker Pole for starters!

1. Trust in Grace!

Bavaria build sea worthy yachts and Volvo makes reliable engines! We know, We have put them to the test! Even after bumping through every lock in Holland….and across the Segats of the Friesian Islands and through the washing machine they call the German Bight! Grace never missed a beat and looked after us! And we all we sustained was about €500 of Anders ‘the shipwright’ time in the process to repair the damage!

Not too much damage from a close encounter with a lock!

2. Slow it down!

Lots of engine revs does not solve everything! Especially when leaving alongside the dock. We have lost a fender in every country so far! Grace does not have bow thrusters and is quite ‘sticky’ when alongside and all lots of revs does is rip the fenders off! So we have learnt a lot about spring lines and springing off!

Slowing it right down!

3. Hi-Fit and Sailing Wellies

When you are stood at the helm for an hour or so, the wind cuts right through you! It really does not matter if there’s barely a breath, Hi-Fits are the only thing that keeps you warm and dry.

Sailing wellies are a no brainer, just step straight into them and your on deck and on the way to the facilities first thing in the morning!

Wellies!

4. Charts

We love our charts…..and especially NV Chart Books. They are like road atlases and are really easy to handle. And also have a brilliant large plastic wallet to keep it dry on deck……lmray learn from this!

The brilliant NV Chart wallet!

5. Talk to the Harbour Master

With the exception of the dragon at Cuxhafen, all the harbour masters have been fantastically helpful; we had ones that hid us from the ‘red diesel police’ in Belgium, glamorous ones in Holland, ones with megaphones and plenty of advice, and ones that looked after our post with our new Baltic Sea Nav Card in Kiel.

Harbour Masters……always ready to offer plenty of advice!

6. Night sailing is horrible!

I still break out in a cold sweat when I think of our night sail down the Elbe and into Cuxhafen.

The light is beginning to go and we still have 20 nm to go!

7. Gloves

You just can’t have enough pairs of gloves – at the wheel your hand just get cold and wet. We found that all the gloves we had were unsuitable and we always had cold hands! Buy better ones for Christmas!

And every pair is cold and wet!

8. Sailing downwind

Fitting the gybe preventer, even on a broad reach is a comfort! It is well worth the effort of scrabbling round the foredeck with 25m of uncooperative wet rope!

Grace can carry much more sail on a run than we can fly at the moment. I was desperate to buy a parasail after being swept past by yachts with spinnakers but we realised that our genoa is almost as big as most spinnakers and that we just need a whisker pole. A much cheaper option and Anders will fit one in the spring before he re-rigs the boat. It will enable us to goosewing the sails and effectively more than double the sail area we can carry downwind! It should also improve our speed on a very a broad reach too – a great solution all round!

Overtaken again!

9. Box moorings

They are really quite good and have got some benefits over finger pontoons. And we always seemed to provide plenty of entertainment for people on shore to watch as we squished our way in or out of them! It took some practice and our fenders were put to hard use and Gracie’s gel coat suffered a bit too in the process!

However if you are prepared, then they are quite simple with the just the odd opportunity for disaster such as…..

⁃ Our stern lines were too short and our bows ended up 2 metre from the pontoon! Stuck!

⁃ Getting the bows blown off course and ending up side on to the posts and stuck again!

⁃ Rather embarrassingly picking a berth that is too narrow for Grace’s beam and getting stuck yet again!

Plus many more small humiliations, after all berthing is just a controlled crash!

We did learn that…….

⁃ You need your longest lines at the stern with loops in the ends.

⁃ No fenders at the beam, they just get stuck against the posts.

⁃ A nice thick rope running along the sides is all the rendering you need.

⁃ Take it slow but with enough momentum to keep the bows under control.

⁃ The person at the bow must be ready to jump for it and it is always easier with three!

Sometimes, you just have to jump for it!

10. A Pressure cooker!

What a fantastic invention, quick hot food in minutes! Chuck in virtually anything unidentifiable that you can buy in the nearest Danish supermarket, pop it on the gas ring and 10 minutes later out comes wonderfully hot and delicious food that is just what you need after you have completed the mooring ordeal!

Hot food…..wonderful!

Today, Grace has been in our ownership for exactly one year. In that time she has left her home berth of 7 years in Chichester Marina for possibly the first time, sailed about 1000 nm east to spend this winter in Augustenborg in Denmark……and she is still only a third of the way through her cruise! Looking back, it is difficult to believe what a profound change 32 feet of GRP has made on our lives!! Everything is different; our jobs, where we live and what we do in the future. But for the Grace we not have had 12 months of adventures, with the promise of plenty more to come!

Grace of Chichester

I still have a sharp intake of breath in surprise when I think of the speed of what we have done, from the first phone call I made to the yacht broker in Chichester that fateful Sunday morning in late October in 2016, to seeing Grace, the very same afternoon, tucked snugly in her berth and then making an offer for her a few days later! Still more, the surprise of having our offer accepted.

We have learnt so much, especially new ways of spending money! We have discovered Chichester, the Solent and tidal navigation and of course my number one obsession, getting over Chichester Bar. We have made our first channel crossing, sailed in some of the busiest waters in the world. We’ve traversed Holland from end to end, explored the ‘Riddle of the Sands’ country and fought our way through the German Bight! We and our little 6 tonne Gracie have shared the Kiel Canal with massive 30000 tonne container ships that towered above us as we bobbed about in their Tsunami sized wakes. We have seen the causes of the first and second world wars at Sonderborg, been underwhelmed by the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen and awestruck by 1500 years of Viking history at Roskilde.

Getting used to boat ownership!

Getting used to tidal navigation!

Crossing the Bar at Chichester

Crossing the Channel for the first time!

The canals of Holland

Riddle of the Sands country!

German Bight

The Kiel Canal!

Real Danish Pastries!

Dybbol Mill, 1864 and the possibly the origins of WW1 and WW2

They are right to call her the Little Mermaid!

1500 years of Viking heritage at Roskilde

With Grace now overwintering in Denmark, it feels strange not to be able to go to sail her and of course to check she is not lonely!! But I am sure she is happy, warm and dry in a nice shed in Augustenborg. But can I wait until May before I can see Grace again and start our odyssey again……only time will tell!

Grace safely in the dry and warm at Austenborg!

Mmmm, not quite like Grace!

Well, if Tom Cunliffe is happy to leave his boat at Augustenborg with Anders then we must have done the right thing! Watch his vlog and see where Grace is! We must have missed each other by a few days but we might meet when we are refitting Grace in May for our trip to Sweden and beyond!

Check out the link to his YouTube video………….

Augustenborg Jacht Havn

Grace getting ready to come out of the water!