Back to the beginning

Due to lack of internet we haven't been able to write anything for a while.

We went thru the german rivers Mosel and Rhein and the canals from Duisburg to Lübeck. In Travemünde we had the masts raised at Trave werft. From Lübeck we sailed across to Gislövs Läge, Sweden. It took about 20 hours and there was a lot of traffic in all directions.
We sailed slowly up the swedish baltic coast arrived back in Stenhamra on monday the 13th of October. It was a grey and rainy day it a temperature of 5 degrees centigrade.

Now we start to update and repair a lot of things. Next summer we plan to take up the boat on shore to sandblast and paint the bottom, change bearings to the rudder and many other things.
We will continue to report the progress.

Schengen

It is good to be able to travel  freely in Europe. We left France and the next village on our left side was Schengen in Luxembourg, on the right side was Germany. No one cared, we just had to change flags.

Fete de mirabelle

After more than 100 locks we reached the beautiful city of Metz. We stayed in the nice port de plaicence in the middle of the old town.
It was a festival of mirabelle. Mirabelle is like a small plum.
We took part in the juru of the best desert with mirabelle. We got four very good ones and as I was offered an extra one from the lady next to me I was absolutely full. They were very good-
In the evening we went to an outdoor consert with nice music.  After the first part there was going to be a flamenco performace and they rerigged the stage. Just when it all should beginn it started to rain and it was pouring down. Unfortunately it had to be cancelled.

The Gollywobler - the quen among sails

What is a code zero, spinnaker or genua - nothing compared to the gollywobler.
A gollywobler is hoisted on the fore mast of a scooner and sheeted to the top of the main mast and to the deck.

We saw this boat in Bonifacio strait.

Some locks are small and some are the biggest in the world

When going on the Rhone all the locks are big. They are all about 180 m by 12 m and the height varies from 10 to 23 m.which is 49.680.000 litre of water. The Bollene lock was the biggest in the world when it was built.

Up the river Rhone

We heared rumours about the strong current in the river. People usually dramatise and tell how bad things are. We started out and the first part up past Arles to Beaucaire took us a day and we averaged about 3 knots which is ok. The next day it was worse. Now the current was up to five knots and in certain stretches we were down to .7 knots. The old ladies with wheel chairs overtook us. Not a very funny day. We were working our ways for about 12 hours each day. But we reached Lyon and had done the worst part.

Everything breaks down!

As we had a leaking propeller shaft when arriving to Monastir we put the boat on the hard and changed the sealings and was happy that we solved the problem. But we hadn't! when crossing to Sardinia it started to leak even worse, then the electric bilge pump failed, the Navionics charts stopped working and the forestay to the main mast  broke.. We pumped manually and navigated with 15 years old charts but finally we reached Olbia where we bought a new bilgepump and a lot of grease for the propeller shaft. We contiued up along the east coast of Sardinia and Corse and crossed to Ile de Porquerolles and reached Port St Louis where we once againg put the boat on the hard. The men driving the travel lift remembered us from 2010!! - they dropped us accidately.
Now we bought a new stuffing box and took down the masts. The Navionics charts started to work after a new release of the app.
Everything was back in good order again.