Cruising with Amy

I was expecting to have to motor most of the way to the Greifswalder Bodden and the hopefully catch some wind towards evening to cross towards the Dänische Wiek. But contrary to the forecast, we were able to sail the whole distance. We had left Saßnitz at noon and dropped the anchor in front of the entrance to the river at 8:30pm. All this felt very surreal. I could very vividly remember the day that I had taken off more that 13months and 14000nm ago and now we were returning the same way.

There was a lot of traffic and I didn’t get much sleep and the wind turned against us around 6am. Up until then it had been a perfect sail. We arrived in Saßnitz around 1pm after having to tack to windward for the last few miles. That way we had our own personal sightseeing tour of the white cliffs. There were so few ships in the harbour that we thought it would be closed. But it was open as always and we were happy to be able to chose were to go. We then went out for fish rolls and enjoyed the day. In the evening we had a barbecue and ate dinner with wine on the pier where they had installed some benches.

We did take off early (at 3:30am) and made it to Rødvig with a lot of tacking against ever increasing winds. We had initially wanted to sail to Klintholm but after listening to never-ending gale warnings on the vhf and our tacking angle now being at 160 degrees because of the steep waves, we decided to turn into Rødvig instead. This turned out to be a good choice. 
Backing Amy into the box required a lot of lines that had to be attached here and there and slowly pulling ourselves towards the jetty. There was a gentleman (Georg as it turned out) waiting patiently for me to hand him a rope. I was trying to explain how it isn’t possible to go astern with Amy (like always) but he didn’t need explanations and could apparently appreciate our working with the lines. This made him instantly likeable. 

I got up early and weighed anchor at 4:00am. Zissi was still asleep. We had a 45nm sail to Anholt. The weather was going to turn bad the day after the next and for that we wanted to be out of the Kattegat and as far south as possible. That meant having to leave Anholt on the following day and since we wanted to explore at least a little bit of the island we wanted to arrive as early as possible. We had a perfect sailing day and arrived at 2:30, had some ice cream and took a nice walk and picked a ton of berries.

I had picked Zissi up from the train station and we celebrated our reunion after half a year with dinner that I had prepared on board and a few medium cold beers. We spent a beautiful day exploring Lemvig together and left the next day when the weather really turned to shit. The forecast was for very unstable weather for a longer time so we decided that we might as well take off. There are no big waves in the Limfjord so that wasn’t a problem but we were fighting with 45knot gusts and the Windex wind indicator broke right off the masttop. 

We left Brightlingsea on Friday morning. The sail out of the Thames Estuary turned out to be easy. We were met by one cold front on the second day that left us tacking on the spot for a few hours but passed fairly quickly. After that we had one great sail across the North Sea all the way to Thyborøn where we entered the channel and continued to Lemvig. Here we will wait until Zissi arrives on Sunday and then continue together. I made a short film about the crossing.