Region 'Baltic Sea'

This map shows the accumulation of the passages made by the Hallberg-Rassy 54 sailing yacht, Feelin’ Good, from the time she was launched in July 2011 to her arrival in southern Spain in September 2011. Her travels have taken her from Sweden through the Kiel Canal in Germany, along the coast of Holland and Belgium and through the English Channel to the Bay of Biscay.

We attempted to find fuel this morning and spent until 11:00 before we gave up and headed over to queue up to enter the Lock. With about 25 other yachts and big freighters we waited about an hour before we were let in to the lock. Interesting to raft up with all sorts of boats making the transit. My expectation was the water level difference would be huge but it’s only about 30 cm or so.

Waking up at a beautiful anchorage on a nice day is one of the great pleasures in life! Too bad we have to hustle off to get staged for the Kiel Canal transit. Another long day ahead of us but we need to get in front of some weather that’s coming into the North Sea and do the Canal tomorrow.

After the gale, we left Saeby, Denmark and headed south toward the Kiel Canal. We spent the night at a nice anchorage off the north shore of beautiful Samso Island before continuing on the next day toward the Kiel. A very peaceful and serene location to spend the night contrasted with the chaos in the marina in Saeby.

We finally begin our journey south to the Mediteranean. Our first passage is from Ellos, at the Hallberg-Rassy shipyard in Sweden, over to Saeby, Denmark where had to hold up a few days to wait out a gale. At this time of the year the sun stays up until midnight then goes dusky for a while and rises at 03:00 or so in the morning. A little hard to get your system ready to sleep when it’s still daylight out but we adapted after a while.

After delivery of the yacht we spent the weekend sailing around the beautiful coastline of northern Sweden with friends. The first night we anchored out in a nice cove and put some steaks on the BBQ. It was a wonderful way to start our cruising lifestyle. Getting to know the yacht a bit better, but still an enormous amount of information to soak up.