After sailing north for the past four months, it’s now time to head south again. Our plan was to spend a few days around Senja, a supposedly beautiful island north of the Lofoten Islands, but the weather had other plans. We had no chance of sailing there without having to fight against the wind and big waves, and that just wasn’t worth it for us.

On our way through the Lofoten Islands, we had a surprisingly nice sail with the gennaker before we found a little anchorage where we caught a few big fish. Reto was so lucky that he even caught one while I was pulling up the anchor the next morning!

After buying some much-needed groceries in Lødingen, we discovered a new anchorage that wasn’t marked on the charts yet. It was a very narrow entrance, but a great, protected basin on the other side. Since the water there was so clear, I decided to take on a long-overdue project: cleaning the hull.

For the first time since we hauled out last August, I took a close look at the underwater parts of the boat. I put on my thermal underwear, my neoprene top and my 5mm-thick wetsuit and started scrubbing. To my surprise, the hull itself was not dirty at all. The only issue was that the previous owner hadn’t painted the waterline high enough, so we had some seagrass growth there and on the rudder, where we don’t have Coppercoat. Luckily, I was able to scrape it off pretty easily.

After a little over an hour in the water, I was done and the hull looked presentable again.

One day later, the bad weather front had passed and we took the opportunity to make a long leg and get as far south as possible. It happened to be Reto’s birthday, so we had birthday cake for breakfast before setting off. We decided that we would keep sailing for as long as we were making good progress and the weather was on our side.

For Reto, it hit pretty hard celebrating his birthday out on the ocean and thinking about what he had done on his birthday in the past couple of years - mostly “celebrating” it at work, bringing a cake and getting birthday wishes - and what he was doing this year: sailing from the Lofoten Islands all the way to the middle of Norway being the Captain of his own boat! It’s pretty crazy if you think about it like this!

The first part of the sail went pretty well. The wind and weather were with us, and we made good progress south. It had already started to get darker again during the nights, but we had a clear sky and I didn’t have any issues with the darkness. I also didn’t really get seasick, which made the whole crossing much more enjoyable.

We made it as far as Lovund at a good speed and in good conditions, but after that, things started to get a bit uncomfortable. The wind died down, but the waves stayed the same, so we had to seek shelter behind the islands while trying to keep moving south. Eventually, it became too uncomfortable to continue at a good pace, so when we reached Brønnøysund, we decided to stop there and take a break.

We had randomly chosen Brønnøysund as our destination, but when we stopped there, we found out that it was almost exactly in the middle of Norway when looking from north to south. This was very impressive to us! The weather forecast for the next two days was pretty bad anyway, so we were happy to have found a good, sheltered harbour where we could wait it out.

During those 36 hours at sea, we also had plenty of time to think about our plans. As I told you in the last blog, we can’t sail to Scotland like we originally planned, so we have to come up with a new route.

This wouldn’t be such a big problem if we hadn’t already made plans with Reto’s father and his wife to visit us in Scotland and sail through the Caledonian Canal together. Of course, they had already bought their plane tickets, booked a hotel and made plans with his wife’s daughter…

For now, the plan is that we will sail back to the Netherlands and then follow the coast of Belgium and France, before continuing south towards Spain and Portugal. Now we just have to tell Reto’s father when we will be in the Netherlands at the exact day that he wants to visit us so they can rearrange their flights and hotels — sounds easy, right?

Staying in Brønnøysund for a day gave us some time to work on some boat projects again. During the long crossing, we had some water in the bilge, which triggered the bilge alarm, and we had to pump it out with the vacuum cleaner whilst heeling and sailing with 6 knots. We quickly found out that the stuffing box of the rudder was leaking, but luckily this was pretty easy to fix. We only had to tighten it again, and it was watertight.

Of course, we didn’t stop there, though. Reto decided to give the whole steering system some love, as he was taking it apart to tighten the stuffing box anyway.

For dinner, we expanded our cooking skills and decided to make ramen with our fresh fish. We had never cooked it before, and it wasn’t easy to find all the ingredients, but even with a bit of improvising, it turned out very yummy.

On our next blog, we will walk through a hole in a mountain and make one of our longest legs ever, so don’t forget to come back!

Day 114: Tromsø NO - Sommarøy NO