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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.
I had wanted a weather window like the one when I had sailed to Scotland with winds from the east, a blocking high reaching across Ireland and pretty much nothing to worry about weatherwise.
It was not to be. The best I could come up with included leaving Tuesday afternoon after the storm had just abated but nasty waves were still to be expected. Then being hit by a cold front on Wednesday to Thursday night and getting into harbour on Saturday as early as possible because of another low creeping up the channel and making for nasty weather.
At 4 in the morning I took things apart. Cleaned the heat exchanger stack and put it together again. Turned on the engine…. No change.
Very frustrated I left, knowing that I would be able to sail most of the way today and only use the engine a little bit. The wind had picked up again and was now gusting to more tan 30 knots. We were flying along with only a deep reefed Genoa at 7 knots and more.
This was a day of motoring. With three bridges where the opening times would need to be met and mostly narrow channels where sailing (with the wind on the nose) was no option (at least not for me, because I was in a hurry). I know this “in-a-hurry” thing is not a good idea at all and totally not part of my plan but there have been weeks of no weather windows for crossing the north sea and there may just be one next week and if I’m not in Lemvig or near Thyboroen before the storm hits I will probably miss it.
I had taken the early train from Berlin and done some last grocery shopping in Greifswald to keep me from starving for at least five days.
Below decks it was still chaos and I put all the things wherever I could find some room (I’ll probably never find them again).
I was in a bit of a hurry because I wanted to catch the last bridge opening in Wieck at 2000 because the wind was looking good for the next few days and I needed to be safely in a harbour (preferably in Lemvig) before a nasty low pressure system would come through towards the end of the week.
