Hi All
I am leaving for an around the world trip where i will live on the
boat for the next 3-5 years
I just returned in port after the completion of the maiden voyage, i'm not sure if this is the correct place to post this, but here is the summary from the maiden voyage
The Maiden Voyage
Les Sables-d’olonne to Copenhagen,
Length 1040 Nautical Miles (1926 km)
Duration 7 days
With Henrik Pedersen, Thomas Cilius and Ulrik Scheibye
The Maiden Voyages has for many years been a trip to test the
boat to see if a boat could float and if it was leaking
water. The
new boat was well afloat all the time but leaking water… well more about that later….
Les Sables is a coa...stal city facing the great
Atlantic ocean 1.5 hours south of Nantes and 3 hours north of Bordeaux, it’s a famous tourist
destination for the French. I arrived one week before the estimated departure date in order to begin preparation for the trip. The feeling to prepare for the trip is the same feeling as moving into an empty apartment, everything is required from
toilet paper and towels, to pots and pans, plus the needed
safety equipment of course. Later in the week Thomas and Ulrik arrived from Paris and we began filling up the ship with
food for the trip. Looking back we might have bought a little too much
food, so now i have food for many weeks to come
Once Henrik arrived and the
registration of the boat was in place we sat sail on Wednesday at 16:00 in the afternoon.
The
Atlantic ocean didn’t give us a very gently welcome, it was blowing a high gale with
wind up to 18 m/s and with long big waves, but this is the Atlantic so this is what we had to
work with. We put up the
sails and trimmed them to a course of 330 degrees, which we followed for the next two days.
I have never in my life been seasick but after the first 10 hours the ocean won and I gave in. I was sick for the next 2 days and was completely exhausted and without energy. Every time I ate something I threw it out to the
fish a little bit later. During these 2 days I was starting to questioning myself, “why have I taken this decision”, “feeling sick is not fun, this was supposed to be a fun trip”, “was this the right choice of boat” etc. but when the seasickness wearied off I concluded that it was the right choice that I had taken, and learned always to have
sea sickness stickers so you don’t get seasick
It was impossible to cook during the first days due to the hard
weather and the angle of the ship. We learned that next time we need to have sandwiches or premade food which can be heated in the microwave so as little time as possible is needed below
deck. It was also during the first couple of days where we soon realized that there was several small leakages from the scepters on both side of the ship. It wasn’t much
water, but enough to make the madras wet and leave a lot of
salt stripes on the inside of the
interior. During the night the Lantern gave us problems when they stopped working. We realized the next day it was just a bad connection causing the problem, we fixed it with some duct tape and the lantern was working again.
One morning we made a bad turn which made the Genua (the front sail) break our
radar and
deck light in the
mast. Ulrik who have been hauled up into a
mast before volunteered to be sent up to fix the problem, and again duct tape was the solution. Lesson learned, never leave port without 2-3 rolls of duct tape.
On the third morning we entered into the
English channel and the
weather and sea was much better. We had speeds (over the ground) up to 13 knots when we were sailing in the Atlantic but we still maintained a good speed of between 8-10
knot in the southern part of the channel. Later on the
wind turned west and we were unable to maintain our good speed. We turned on the
engine and ran with this on and off depending how our course was compared to the wind.
On day 5 the wind decreased to only a few m/s and we packed away the sail and started the 140 HP
engine. We sailed to Dan Helder in
Holland where we had a 1 hour stop to refuel. We continued nonstop with the engine still running to the entrance of the Kieler
Canal. Sailing through the
canal was wonderful. It was like driving through
parts of the Danish country side, but instead of driving we were wailing a boat. There was small township alongside the canal with ferries taking people and cars across, only interrupted by the huge tankers cruising through the scenery.
We came out of the canal, turned east and once we passed Gedser we turned north with a course straight home. We arrived in harbor in Copenhagen at 12:00 on Wednesday 7 days after we set sail from Les Sables. We opened a cold
beer and cheered to the maiden voyage we had just accomplished.
It was a wonderful Voyage even with many unexpected problems underway. These problems will now be taken care of before the departure on the long trip. There are also many other feature which will be prepared on the ship such as
installation of a
water maker to make fresh water out of
salt water,
installation of a
wind generator and installation of a new genakker (big front sail)
The time is now focused on the upcoming
VHF exam, preparing the last details on the boat and finding the remaining crew. The departure date is still set to be the 1st of October, but may be postponed depending if the boat is ready or not
I want to thank my crew on this first voyage for an excellent trip with very good food and company onboard, I hope that I will see you again on the long trip
Christian (Drilith)