After a couple of days motorsailing, motoring a bit of sailing we are now moored in the first marina in the Caledonian canal. Most things work as we want it to but some we might have to look into.

I’ll post a big post with pictures and everything that happened a bit later tonight or tomorrow morning.  A small picture describing how it was this morning right before we approached the channel into Inverness…

By the way, rain in Scottland? How is that possible..

After a night stop in Norway to fill up our diesel we’re off again. Now its Scottland and Inverness again. The watch system works fine but it’s a lot of motoring. Catch you all when we’re there or get the emailblog function to work properly..

Leg one!

Here we go, hopefully we’ll be there before the weekend. The weather look good and now it’s just filling her up with diesel and water before sailing of into the first sunset.
How often we can update we’ll see but we’ll try as often as possible. The first days will be a big game of Tetris and I’ll download the theme music to play when we try to find a spot for everything

Look us up at marinetraffic (link in our locate us page ) and feel free to e-mail us. We’ll grab our e-mails once a day at least (might as well when we grab our grib-mails) just to make sure everything works now in the beginning. As sunny as it is right now I don’t have to worry about the icebergs that have haunted my dreams the last two weeks 🙂 but hey, they show up on radar don’t they?????

Tomorrow it’s cast of day! Today is shopping day and the last day to buy swedish stuff for a year.. 🙁

Yesterday we packed most of our stuff into Trusty and now it’s just the computers and food left, I packed my razor so I guess I’ll shave in Inverness next time. Weather is looking good for the crossing from Sweden but we might have to motor a bit (i guess motor alot) but as long as we don’t get any bad weather nothing is that much of a problem as long as we’ve started our journey. Later today we’ll make a more detailed post about the crossing and what routes we might be taking. I think we’ll have AIS coverage at marinetraffic the whole way so we can be followed as we make our way over to haggis-land.

Now it’s off to Torp, ooh the picture… From last night when we motored a bit to shake down everything we’ve packed so far so we can cram in some more stuff..

Testing if we can move Trusty with all our things inside.

Well soon we’re ready to cast of our moorings and sail out into the sunset… at least on Monday, if nothing new comes up..

Well how to summarize this week? Easy, solve one problem – find a couple of new ones, test one thing – find it not working 20 minutes later. It’s easy to only look at the negative and just grasp all the problems and things that need to be fixed instead of looking at what is finished. I can easy list a couple things that need to be sorted out before Monday but I’ll give you the completion list instead (not in importance or chronological order).

New stove, doubled the battery capacity, new battery-charger on the generator, new water tank, new windows on our doghouse, reinforced our doghouse, ais installation, moved our radar, sat-phone installation, masted and rigged, reinforced our wind-generator and solar-panel installation, new cables for the wind-gen and solar-panels, new lantern in the masthead, new wooden step on our bowpulpit, closet door, lighting in the head and in the closet.. and a couple of other things.. 🙂

TL:DR version, leaving on Monday, got shit done, need to get shit done, need to pack our shit, need to buy more shit, it has been warm and now Trusty is looking like a bout again.. And.. I need to sort out more on our blog, kind of what I’m doing right now among other things.
Mandatory pictures..

It’s not supposed to be like this…

Quite nice scenery…

She’s almost sailable.. (I guarantee that sailable is a word..)

Damn we need to look into our wiring…

… we were sailing or rather motoring a bit. After getting our doghouse bolted back, with new windows and a bit sturdier then before, we did a bit of work on our mast before taking Trusty out for a 5 minute stroll outside our marina. It felt great having her move like a boat after spending a couple of days just working with plexi-glass and wood in a garage.

As soon as one thing gets checked of our list two other things appear but the list is actually getting shorter. Right now I’m just waiting for out satphone to arrive so we can give the number to relatives and friends. Yesterday evening I configured the program we’re going to use for email and stuff and now i want to try it over the satphone. 🙂

Today’s rigging day and hopefully later you’ll see pictures of that process if the sun don’t burn us too much and typing is too painfull.

I’ll leave you with a picture of my moring view as I drink my tea and write this entry.

Swedish summer…

Now we have been working for a couple of days on Trusty and we’re getting stuff done. In my ordinary life I’m spending a lot of time right by the stove as a Chef, now I spent most of the day working on our stove.. Bought a new one and installed it while removing the old one. The sun was shining all day and now we’re quite burned all of us.

We almost finished the support for our windgenerator and solarpower mount and now we just need a few more pieces and we’re set. It’s great to see that things are getting done and how all that work seems to just become easier.
If I can muster enough energy tonight I might start installing MaxSea (the chartsuite we’re going to use) and looking into all the computer stuff that needs sorting out.

But for now I leave you with a display on before and after…

Before

After