Well we’ve been two nights at the ocean now and the first one was really miserable. If you can think up a wave-direction and then 4 others I can promise you we had them all, at the same time..

Good thing is that it can only get better after that and so far I think it has. Right now we’re sailing southwestish and doing at least 4 knots so we’re not to bad. Sun is up and puffy small clouds linger around us.

We’ll keep you updated but I have reason to think our posts will be quite monotonic with lots of mentioning of waves, sun and wind.

One of the routes we might take. Let’s see how we’ll manage.

You ready?
I hope you are because we kind of don’t feel like we are. Well of course we are ready to sail out of the harbor and set sail for warmer waters but one are never really ready for it. Yesterday I sat down and tried to figure out what we had forgotten, nothing obvious came to my mind so I started to worry, what if something really important needed to be done. Well, nothing really come up so I started to go over my mental checklists.
Windwane: Everything moves smoothly, moved the lines a bit so we got new friction points.
Water: 112 L in bottles, 190 L in the tanks and a bit more.
Food: The whole boat is stacked with tincans and dry stuff. Even got our secret candystorage filled up.
Diesel: Getting filled right before we leave port.
Rigging: Checked it over in Porto Santo, sent Ida up the mast to check for any visible problems
Power: Fixed the towingline for our generator, greased up or pivot for the solarpanel. I want a pocket nuclear-reactor, can someone invent that for me please. Preferable cold fusion or something.
Kindle books: Bought a couple of new ones and stole some more of the worldwideweb so I’ve got enough words to keep me going a year or so.
Icebergs: Checked with NOAA and they’re acting normal up there in their territory.
Music: Check!
Shower: Took my last proper one for a couple of months…. When I get over the ocean I’m allowed to shave again. I’m going to be honing my straight razor like crazy during the crossing.

So I guess we are ready for this then. What will happen with the blog, you might ask. Easy, we’ll email it with our position and how everything is going. Maybe some fun facts or remarks about things that happen during the crossing. The weather looks quite fine and we’re ready to go.

Meet you on the ocean!

Yup, stranded again, well not really stranded but kind of.. We’re sitting in Puerto Mogan, a harbor, tourist attraction, flower garden and starting point of Atlantic-rowers.

Apparently after a month of not working our directions finder jumped into life again after having pointed out where we’ve been. Just look at the picture to the right, that’s the weather-forecast for our part of ocean in a couple of days time. Fun? Not really but we’ll have to stay a couple of days longer being a part of the backdrop for selfies and group-pictures taken by vacationists.

Right now I’m parked at a table in a local Irish tavern drinking Guinness and thinking about what the ocean might hold. I’m over my scare of icebergs for now, if an iceberg would be close it would melt quite quick right now and I’d probably feel the chill in the air before hitting it. It’s going to be a long haul this one but we’re ready, Trusty is ready and we food enough for the trip so we’ll be fine.

So to explain, sure we could sail tomorrow and probably just have an uncomfortable sail the coming week but what’s the point in that? Why bother if we can wait until Saturday and bypass the problem. We’ll keep you updated on our departure.

Sorry for not updating in a while, we’ve been kind of busy doing nothing.. Well not exactly nothing since we’ve been shopping, doing touristy stuff and well that is really nothing but we’re soon heading of over the pond. I know I promised a big post with lots a pictures from papagayo, our sail over from Lanzarote and such but the internet connections in the marinas where we’ve spent our time is so bad it’s ridiculous. One can’t even load the frontpage of for example facebook without having to go out for a walk while the topbanner loads.

Just to give you an idea about what we’ve been up to I can sum it up for you. Martina’s mother has been here for a week and we’ve been playing normal tourist for a couple of days. We took a ride around the mountains and the coast of Gran Canaria, took a night out in Maspalomas witch a strange place. I mean if you go to another country to have a vacation from your boring life then why go to bars that serve the same food, read a menu in your own language and meet all your friends from home. Sure the Norwegians can’t spend a week away from their beloved Grandiosa but come on, heading in to a bar called Uffes Pub eating Swedish meatballs while in spain is just wrong. Being a kind person as always I noted that every country is a sinner so I will point a finger at all of you. Paddys irish sportsbar (next to the beach, serving fried fish and chips and Guinness).. Lille trollet (now serving ribbe and fårikål)… I can make the list go on for miles.

After realising that tourism is strange we decided to shop food enough for an atlantic crossing and start planning if for real.
So in a week or something we’ll head out on the great blue. We will try and do short updates on the blog about how it’s going and our position and such. As soon as I come across a place with good wifi I’ll make a picture gallery with a lot of pictures from what we’ve been up to.

Writing this post we’re anchored in a bay outside a couple of charterhotels looking at a beach full of people turning from pale to reddish pink and just trying to get our focus back.
You sail down south and now there’s not much left that we can do but to let go of land and take our 2600 nautical miles (4815 km) little jump towards the Caribbean.

We have also made two firsts hoping that it was the lasts as well. Let me explain.
I’ve fallen off Trusty.. I fell between the dock and Trusty and banged my head a bit. That is something we don’t want to repeat as we’re heading out on bigger waters. Second first was that we goofed up and put a rope in our propeller. Having a ropecutter on the propeller shaft saved us but it was a first that we rather not do again as well.

We’re chilling in Pasito Blanco on Gran Canaria and are doing some touristy stuff and preparing for our jump across the Atlantic ocean.

We’ll give you a long post about Lanzarote and the small crossing over from Punta Papagayo to here.
Be back soon.

Until now we’ve been behind the tourist season, in Scotland we were too late, in Ireland the summer had ended and we were too late, Galicia, they had almost closed the ice-cream vendors in Porto we were “bringing the autumn” one of the marina officials joked. Yup, even in Porto Santo we were a bit late and off season..

The point slightly north of the Canary Islands where the planes decide on where to go…

But now we are just right, there are Germans, Spaniards, Englishmen, French and I actually think I heard Finnish or Danish, hard to tell when your mind is set to grasping Spanish and English so that when you hear something you should recognise it sounds like complete gibberish.
But yes we’re in charter-land!!!

Anchoring in a bay outside a beach where you’re joined by glass bottomed boats, catamarans ferrying tourists and bathing toys to the beach and lots of other boats gives you a bit of an assurance. It’s a way of proving to yourself that the choice of anchorage you’ve made is a good one. Not necessarily a safe and calm one but a nice place to bathe and get your tan on. Being between 24 and 26 C in the water helps when you want to check on your anchor or just look at the bottom of your keel. Being anchored outside a lovely beach looking at all the people tanning and playing in the surf make you feel a bit of proud, I’ve taken this yacht here it was far and I can stay here for a couple of weeks and you guys on the beach are taking the disco-catamaran back to your hotels in about an hour. Sure, you might have your air-conditioning, showers, room-service and hotel pool-bars but you’re going home next weekend and I’m continuing my trip.

Graciosa, the northernmost Canary..

Playa Francesa is a well-sheltered bay in all conditions except in south-to-south-westerly winds. Ok hard west winds can be a bit of a hassle too but most of the time the trade winds stops that from happen. Except for right now, the winds picked up and we were in a rollercoaster.

Anchorage.. you’ll be seeing more of these kind of pictures.

Well no worries, we just pop into the marina and spend one night there, stowing our dingy, up with the anchor, tuck the teapot into its hiding place and away we go. Twenty bumpy minutes later, we were heading into the safe harbour and all of a sudden there it was, the iceberg of my nightmares!

Holy S***** is that an Iceberg???

Seeing it as we entered the harbour I knew we we’re in of a bit of trouble and sure, as soon as we laid our eyes on a nice spot on the docks we heard a whistle, a guy in a uniform waved us in telling us there was no place in the marina for us. It’s full, he said and dismissed us with his clipboard. The uniform he whore stated that it was no use discussing so we headed towards our backup anchorage. But I promise you it was that effing icebergs fault. I hate icebergs, I had nightmares about them before Scotland and now they’re here to haunt me, to taunt me, to just give me a hard time..

From the mountain.. Not bad, not bad!

What the sunset looks like when I’ve misplaced my glasses.. Graciosa it’s not that shabby..

We plan on heading down to Punta Papegayo in a couple of days and hopefully we’ll bring you that story soon.

Puerto Calero now.. Stay tuned for updates… Very soon..

Now we’re anchored in the sound between Lanzarote and Graciosa. After a nice sail and a bit boring steaming we’re finally on the Canary Islands!
Waking up after sleeping an hour or two (waiting for the sun to come up) we see the bottom 12 meters under or little boat, the sun is shining on the red-orangeish mountains, the blue sea and other yachts bobbin a bit outside the smooth beach. Life is not to shabby right now!

So the crossing from Porto Santo to Isla Graciosa then?
26 in the water 30 in the air, saw a turtle or two and a couple of transport ships.. Well we’ll be back with more updates soon..

Today we’re leaving this sweet inverted oasis in the big sea. After spending a week here, sunbathing, snorkeling and riding scooters we are setting our course towards Graciosa, one of the smaller ones that we tend to forget when going on a charter trip (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graciosa,_Canary_Islands). We will be able to e-mail in updates the coming weeks but the picture heavy posts have to wait. We’ll take a lot of pictures and probably upload when we get a stable wifi again but we don’t really know when.

The plan is to stay a week or two anchored out before we head south towards Lanzarote. The weather is acting strange right now and we can just bide our time and wait for proper winds before our crossing but that’s more than a month away and it’ll be better by then. The AIS signal is a bit strange with all the mountains on there volcanic islands so marinetraffic might not be able to track us all the time.

I promise that you’ll be the first to know when we’re safely anchored up outside Playa Francesca later this week.

Step one, tie a knot one meter up from the end you want to splice and make sure the the end is taped and not burned.
Step two, measure up a length of your splicing needle from where your loop should end, mark and call it 1.
Step three, open up the line at 1 and tape up the end of the inner core where you took it out mark and call 2. Now the fun begins. Measure it up with 2/3 of a splicing needle and call it 3, measure one whole needle and call it 4.
Insert the outer casing into a splicing needle and push the needle in at 3 and take it out at 4. Drag back so that the outer rope just disappear into the core again.
Now insert the core in to the needle and go into the outer casing half a centimeter from where the outer rope goes into the core. Proceed until you come out at 1. If you can’t do it in one go just open up and drag out the core and go back in again.
When you’ve don it all you should end up with something like this.. Now tape and cut the inner core 1 cm from where it comes out of 1 and drag back the outer shell from the knot you tied in the beginning. The inner core containing the outer part of the rope will go back into the rope leaving you with a nice loop for your mooring line or what you might want to use it for.

We used it making our rig for hoisting our dingy.

Thada!! Good to go..