Sorry it’s been a while since we updated. Being in Dublin kill my creativity, the rain, the harbor, the constant butchering off decent music by all the pub musicians just make me drink Guinness or hide under a blanket. I mean what the f* is up with all this bad music, in my world all Irish people can plan at least 4 instruments, sing in key and do riverdance while sleeping. My view on the world is crumbling….

So the Irish sea then? We set out in a gale and hoisted our main with two reefs in it. That small piece of sail pushed us with an average speed of 6-7 knots all the way past Isle of Mann. We had panned maybe looking at Northern Ireland but as it just swooshed past we decided not to. Rather we forgot about it and all of a sudden we had passed the border.

Northern Ireland over there in the distance.

Coming down the coast in the early hours of the morning we came upon a massive fleet of fishing-vessels doing a small dance for us and our AIS locked crazy again. Thank god for the AIS system again, without it we would have had an tougher morning then we did. Even tough they couldn’t make up their mind on what to do and we had to make constant course alterations.

AIS fun….

Dublin has been almost fun and we’ve met a lot of nice people, people that we wouldn’t have met if we hadn’t been sailing. Ida, Pers sister, stepped off a plane and she’s now a member of our crew (we really need to sort out the crew section of the blogg soon) as we now continue away from the rain trying to outrun hurricanes, autumn storms and all the nice things that the northern part of the north atlantic has to offer from september and onwards.

Right now we have a backlog of comments but we’ll reply and sort through it when we get to spain. We’ll be heading out to see this week so we’ll just update with position and how it’s going until we reach la Coruña.
Here is a pic of the next leg.

Next leg towards spain.

By the way, no icebergs yet but I know they’re lurking somewhere close..

… Dublin. Update coming tomorrow or some day before Friday.

We’re all fine just a bit tired after a long night with rough seas. Now we’re moored up in a marina inside the harbor, but hey, it’s quite cheap.

Let’s make a post about how we’ve seen Islay.
After a 15-16 hour sail down from Oban, we rounded the green buoy and moored up nicely in Port Ellen.
In the dark, as we were steaming (yes, we started the motor when the wind stopped working in our way) I went down to check my navigation and all of a sudden I felt the smell of smoke. Not cigarette smoke but things are f-ing burning somewhere smoke. Smelling my way all over Trusty cursing and starting to make worst-case scenarios in my head checking everywhere that I could ever imagine that we could be burning. After checking the engine compartment I stuck my head outside to just check around for I don’t know, something out of the ordinary, what we always do every couple minutes when under way. The smoke was worse… a light in my head turned on. We’re downwind from Islay, they’re malting using peat to smoke and dry the malt…
All off a sudden everything was fine and I went back to checking in the flashing lights actually flashed the same way it says in the charts.

Our track towards Isay, we were doing about 4-5 through the water.

Port Ellen is a good place to get a glimpse of what island life must be like here in the Scottish archipelago, go in on google maps and watch on street-view what I mean. It’s a really dull place and we needed to go by bus to the next town, Bowmore, to get our Visa cards to work. I’m not saying it’s a bad place, the scenery is not bad, there is a beach that’s not too shabby and if it weren’t for the water temperature it sure would have had a lot of sunbathers on it. There is one downside, the maltery, they burn peat 24/7 right now and the whole place smell like well, burning peat.
The malt is manly for the seven distilleries here on Islay and that makes it bearable because the product it end up as it quite nice. Martina had her birthday here and we went out in town to celebrate it. We hadn’t booked so we got the restaurant we deserved… but hey, who puts chiliconcarne next to steak pie on a menu (in between burger, curry, mac n cheese and fish n chips)? Now we’re trying on the other restaurant in town.

Nice neighborhood isn’t it.

The marina is one of the cheapest so far and you get every fourth night free, the volunteers that collect the money have about as much change as we did when we arrived so it might take a couple of nights to get things even. (Remember the bus ride to Bowmore)
The best part of Port Ellen’s location is that you can walk to three of the better Scottish (in my view) distilleries, Laphroaig, Ardbeg and Lagavulin. We took a stroll to Laphroaig in the sun (we saw blue sky and sunlight three times in our walk, that is sunny) and did a distillery tour. When in the visitors centre you can taste a couple of different drams and if you join the Friends of Laphroaig you get a free 50ml bottle every year, as long as you collect it there.
Needless to say we stayed there for a bit and tasted some of the different blends they had in store and signed up as friends so now we own a square foot each of Islay soil, at least on the paper. We can proudly say that we own land in the same field as H.R.H Prince Charles.

Route options for the next leg.

One thing that you have to figure out when cruising (listen up dummies) is weather forecasting. When I saw the weather patterns a couple of days before leaving Oban it behaved the way I expected it to. The last part of Bertha was giving us the wind needed to have a nice sail down here, knowing that a new deep low was heading down from behind Island I figured we could stay here in Islay for the weekend letting that pass and using the later part of it to get stable wind down to Ireland. Well that didn’t work.. Writing this I should be sitting in quite strong winds looking forward ‘til Sunday and the nice winds. Right now it’s sunny and the newest weather I downloaded tell me the wind is hitting about 03:00 Sunday morning, right about when I’d be sleeping the last hours before waking up ready to sail out of the harbour.
Good thing about forecasting is that when I download the weather tomorrow it might be the same way I predicted it again.

Ps, it was almost but a mix between what I expected and what the new weather said. This weather-file at least mirror the reality..

Finally we’re tied up at a pontoon in Islay.
It was an interesting sail at least, we got to sail quite a bit before giving up to the direction finder and starting our little engine that could and huffed and puffed all the way against sea and wind saying, “I think I can, I think I can”.

We had a fun moment today when the tide came in in the northern part of the sound of Jura. Trusty was swoooshing through the water doing 5-6 knots under a reefed main and our small headsail, the swooshing continued but the speed over ground on our GPS slowly dropped.. and dropped… and well started to gain speed again, in the opposite direction.
We’ll make a proper post with some pictures of Islay and Port Helen tomorrow, if we’re not tasting whisky all day.

Now we’re tired of being rained on in Oban, let’s move south… Only thing we have planned is picking up Ida (my sister) in Dublin on the 22 of august and after that it’s sailing south. The longer we linger around up here in rainyland the shittier the weather will be and the harder it will be to get moving.

The weather situation right now.. Wind and rain…

We’re steaming out from Oban in a couple of hours and pushing to Port Ellen or maybe Dublin if we feel like it. The wind isn’t straight ahead right now so we might actually be able to sail a bit.. 🙂

We’ve been in Oban for about a week now and it’s relaxing and a bit slow. Our leaking window killed our navigation computer and now I’m waiting for the people at MaxSea to open up the licenses again.

Edinburgh. Between the church and the wheel is our hotel.

So what have we been up to then? Well we dropped of dad in Edinburgh and took a hotel-night there to just relax and see the town. Visiting the castle and admiring the beautiful city was nice in the sun. Yes, you read it, sunshine, we actually had a really sunny day in Scotland. Apparently we were in town as the same time as the fringefestival so the city was lined with performance ar,t improv-comedy and well, you get tired of hearing “Come and see the best comedy in the world, this will change your life” everywhere you went. My life is fine as it is right now and I don’t think seeing some improvised show will be giving me the money to sail indefinitely so count me out.
In the night we walked to the underbelly of the city and found Brew Dog pub witch was fun. As one enters the door you’re greeted by a sign explaining all that’s needed to know about the pub.

No live sports!
No fotball!
No shots!
No stella!
But we do have boardgames…

That kind of sums up what a brewpub should be all about. We ordered all the beer they had on tap and sat down and started tasting (it was just 1/3 pint glasses). Once we completed that I went to the bar and got us a bottle of Abstrakt and we ended the night with great beer and walked home through the streets of Edinburgh dodging small groups of comedians, living statues and French rollerbladers performing something strange and well artsy…

Bertha the hurricane (what’s left of her) blessed us with rain last night and wind today so we’ll sit here in the marina and wait the email from MaxSea as we listen to the wind howling.
At least the window is almost leakfree now. Per and half a tube of Silcaflex almost sorted that out and now its just impoving that seal, if that doesn’t work it’s gaffertapetime.

Every yacht need a pet to do pest-control and now we have one too. Meet our new crew member, who unfortunately don’t have a name yet, maybe you have a suggestion, comment or e-mail us.

Trusty’s new crew member.

We’re going to write about our trip to Edinburgh and some other things during this weekend and as soon as the wind from Bertha the hurricane drops a bit we’ll continue to Islay and Port Helen for a bit of beverage testing.

A feature that few know about is that Trusty has a big arrow on top of the mast always pointing towards the next waypoint, guiding us towards our goal (where ever that might be). Wow what a good thing you might say, how does it work? Well, I would answer, it points to where the wind is coming from. Oh, you’ll say, pondering a bit and then look up into the rigging, that’s not very convenient.

Ben Nevis, and Fort William in its natural habitat.

Steaming (I’ll say steaming because I’m get tired of writing motoring) out from Corpach (Fort William) and setting course down the almost fjord-like sound towards Oban we’re of course greeted by the wind being herded by the mountains to show us what direction we should be heading (I promise the wind turned as the bay turned).
I’m starting to realize that this will be a costly part of the sailing, soon we’ll have the wind on our hindquarters and sailing will be smooth and nice, until that we’re going to have to burn some more fossils. We had the most British lunch so far motoring in the beautiful fjord. (tea, bacon, beans, egg and branston)

Mmmmm, lunch…

We ended up in a small bay anchored a bit out from the shore with a beautiful landscape as a backdrop for our dinner (meat, potatoes, carrots fried in a pan with a tin-can of chopped tomatoes over it) as wind died. The water was almost like a mirror and the sun came out and painted the hills and mountains with yellowish green as we sat there in tranquility, if it hadn’t been for the screaming birds hovering the fish-farm 100m away. It wasn’t even raining and there we were in an oasis of calmness getting stressed out by birds constantly screeching messing up the evening. Scenery 5/5 sound pollution 10/5.

Tranquility bay.

It took us ‘round two hours “steaming” from our small cove in to Oban where we moored in Oban Marina, on a small island across the bay from town. Here we have a slip and a small restaurant where we had dinner and beers. Beer might be one of the more important liquids (except water and diesel) on Trusty; having worked in brew-pups for a while really opens up the concept of beer actually having flavour. So far, the Scottish beer we’ve tasted have been bland and watery. In Inverness a local pub served us Fosters when we ordered a pint as we dropped in for a quick one (I saw that they had better stuff, ales, stouts and porters, but those were for the locals not tourist, idiots like us). Now as we reached Oban that changed; The Waypoint, a small pub looking quite unpolished in our marina had craft beer with familiar flavour. Beer from the Isle of Mull, beer from Oban bay and well, beer that we liked. Now we’re back in business again and I think Trusty will float even lower after we’ve acquired a couple of litres of the amber liquids…

Mountain stream in the Scottish countryside.

After the first day on the canal we are now mored on the Loch Dochfour side of the Dochgarroch, close to Loch Ness. Tomorrow we’re going Nessie hunting, well we’re going to do all in our power to catch the monster. If anyone has any suggestions on bait feel free to tell us, preferably before 8:30 uk time so we can read your suggestions.

The canal is so far all we expected, lush green bushes and trees, mountains as a backdrop (probably even more on the next part as we get closer to the Scottish highlands) and a mix of proper british boats in various states of decay moored by the canal bank. So far we haven’t been traveling in any actual rivers until tomorrow when we’re going to cruise the River Ness for about 4 minutes before entering the nest loch. If any one of you readers know how to actually pronounce the names feel free to give us the phonetic versions. Here comes a few…
Clachnaharry, Tomnahurich, Dochgarroch, Kytra, Cullochy, Laggan, Loch Oich, Muirshearlich, Gairlochy, Corpach, Benavie, Dumnadrochit and Loy and Moy.

I  read in the brochure that one should not ruin ones vacation by contacting the press if one finds Nessie, but I’ll promise to update here with a picture..

Complimentary picture of the day, the fish-eye view from our go pro sitting at the back of the cockpit.

Heading to the next lock on the canal.

Our route this leg.

After packing in the last things into Trusty (forgetting a lot of the things we wanted) and casting our moorings for the las time this year in Stenungsund we pointed our bow to the west (at least after stopping by to refill our gas for our gas stove, the nice one I installed earlier) and headed out to Mollösund for diesel and meeting up with S/Y Momo and Håkan who is going to sail with us through the British isles at least. Lasse, Trustys owner jumped to the more comfortable Momo and we were off towards the North Sea.

Off into the sunset.

After a bit of sail/rigging problems that had to be solved (remember to always check everything before setting out on a long journey right?) we sailed out into the sunset and the sun was shining and the mood was great. The first night was good sailing and our Aries wind rudder did the hard work. We cooked dinner and settled in for the night (doing our 4 hour watches) witch except for a couple of fishing vessels were quite uneventful. When the dawn and sun came, the wind left, it probably had something more important to do right then. Well so then we started our Iron genua (aka. engine) and just worked our west. 265 degrees have been the compass direction of the week with a +/- 10 difference. We motored and did some chores while letting the nautical miles just pass by.
In some norwegian tv commercials Lindenes look huge but when passing it in the sunset it looked quite small and boring. Not that it wasn’t beautiful but in my mind it would be like passing cape horn or something.

The bad North Sea weather.

After a quick night stop for diesel and letting Norway squeeze out a last couple of kronor we headed out again for the open sea. Guess that course? We had a small but cute passenger that joined us for almost 20 minutes before leaving and heading back to Norway. The first part of the passage offered stunning weather and out came the sunscreen-lotion as well as our little showerbottle (more about that in a later post), I cracked a joke about not recognizing the North Sea since last time I was out here  and everything was fine.

Our little stowaway friend.

Sailing ACTION picture or something like that. At least that’s how they’re called in the brochure.

On the horizon or at least starting to show up at our zoomlevel in our digital chart was the dreaded drilling rigs for oil and gas. Big things that make your radar crazy off all the metal angles and bringing with them their guard-dogs (their tender ships) that hunt small sailors as they close in bullying them and herding them like cattle-dogs. But who could have imagined that if you do a great-circle line from Farsund to Inverness you actually go between them if you keep your course (hehe 265 something) and don’t stray off to much.

It was around this time that the first dolphins visited us, preforming a nice little show before splashing of towards the horizon. Later that night in the dark they haunted us again for over and hour and a half playing around our bow wave jumping and making noise. I say haunt because the chapter in my book was exciting and I had to put it down to look at the show..
The dolphins playing around in the dark so close turned Martina into a giggling 4 year-old, not that she cared about dolphins earlier and she was rather surprised about how they affected her. Of course as always you forget grabbing your camera but that is going to change now, our gopro will have its own “easy grab place” in our doghouse.

A night at sea.

Finally the North Sea turned back to how I remembered it, foggy, foggy, foggy and yeah you guessed it foggy. Soon we were in the middle of the oil/gas fields, seeing about 10 meter in any direction, relying completely on modern technology letting our AIS and radar work for their money. Our AIS plotting looked a bit crazy for a while, needless to say one had to keep awake and focused while trying to get one pin point away from you while not making all the others point towards you. It’s a game I rather not play without the equipment we have on board, at least not in the fog.

Land ho!!
Martina earned an extra mug of rum when spotting Scotland in the mist and fog while approaching Fraserburgh so Momo could fuel up on diesel. Steaming westish along the north coast of Aberdeenshire was beautiful as the fog lifted and it felt good being close to land again, then the wind and tide shifted. All of a sudden it was a slugging match against wind, waves and the tidal-currents as the dark fell over our little bubble of the world.
Pounding our way towards Inverness we run the engine at the normal rev. 2000-2200 and were soon down to 1,8 knots over ground. I think we did ’round 4 through the water and it felt quite depressing hunkering down in the dark with my book, at least there was no dolphins disturbing the plot this time.

Aberdeenshire and Momo in the evening sun.

After a long night the bad times lifted and in came our friend, the fog, again.. and Mr Radar had to work again..
The approach into Inverness in fog I’d never dream making without digital charts, AIS and a radar, it would have ended up with us sitting on a sandbank eating lunch while waiting for the tide to turn or the coastguard to show up, witch ever happened first.

Rounding the lighthouse at the same rev as earlier that night (remember us doing 1,8) we did at a stunning 7,5 knots while being joined by dolphins, it was like something out of a disney movie but with no singing crabs. Our first real look on the Scottish countryside confirmed our prejudice about how it would look, fluffy greenish and small houses that dot the countryside while the ling-patches threw purple streaks amongst the green and yellow fields.

Our Scottish flag as we approach Clachnaharry lock.

Under the bridge and into the lock and we had made it to the Caledonian canal only to be yelled at by a grumpy lock-keeper who told us to monitor channel 74 so we didn’t have to interrupt his lunch. Right before entering the lock Martina drew a Scottish flag to show our respect going into port.
Going up the lock was nice and we found our berth at the Seaport. After a shower and the berthing scotch we were like new people as we headed out for fish and chips and a lager or as it’s called here, beerbattered haddock, but that is a discussion we’ll take an other day.

TL;DR version:
Left Sweden, no wind, oil/gas-rigs, fog, dolphins, fog, scotland, fog, tidal-current, fog, AIS, radar, diesel, Inverness, fog, canal, Fishandships and beer.

I’ll leave you with a picture of Onionsoup with all the right sides.

Onionsoup with the right things next to it..