My first week and two passages

I guess I should start with a short introduction to who I am before getting into my reflections of the first week.

My name is Jonathan and I’m 30 years old, born and raised in Stockholm. Before joining this venture I used to work with logistics and supply chain for an e-commerce company that sells spare parts for cars.

Ludvig and I met through Lacrosse when he joined the team I was playing for in Stockholm around 9 years ago. As some of you may know he went on a sailing trip back in 2012 and he asked me back then if I was interested, but I had already committed to move to Vancouver to play some Lacrosse for mutual friends club team.

So when Ludvig asked me again back in April, it didn’t take much of reconsideration before I said yes.

So here I am a week later after I stepped foot on Colon, without any previous sailing experience and really no idea what I have said yes to.

My flight left Arlanda airport at 6 am and I arrived in Paris around 8:30 am, enjoyed a croissant and a coffee and walked around trying to find the train station. My train was scheduled to leave around 12:50 pm, finally found it and set up a camp with all my baggage and read for a while before I had lunch. I had to take three different trains before I finally arrived in Cherbourg. Ludvig met me at the station and then finally after 13 hour of traveling I finally stepped on my new home for an unseen future.

We spent one night in Cherbourg before we left for a small channel island called Guernsey. No sailing unfortunately and it took us about 6 hours before we entered the marina.

Once we docked and were done re-fueling we strolled around for a bit, before we found the oldest pub and got to speak to some locals who thought us some history about the island. After a few beers we met up with Ludvig’s friends on a sailing boat named Marzemino, captained by German guy named Nils and his crew mate Andrea.

We spent two nights before we started up the engine once again and this time we had about 16 hours of engine humming a head of us. The goal was to get to Roscoff in France before midnight and I think we managed with 5 minutes.

Yey, we made it but it was not without bruises. About midway I was at the steering while Ludvig took a power nap, all of a sudden I hear “Jonte do you think the solar panel arch looks weird?!” I replied “I don’t know”.

Luckily Ludvig jumped back to the arch were the welding of onethe polesin the arch had cracked. While I had to disengage the autopilot and manually steer us into a circle so that the waves wasn’t going to roll us that much. At the same time of this throwing Ludvig ropes and zip ties so that he could in his best way stabilize the arch. During this time of stress our friends on Marzimino kept calling us on the VHF radio asking if we were in trouble. I asked Ludvig if should reply but he said let it be, make sure we’re stable into the waves. After the third call from Marzimino I got to use the VHF for the first time in my life. What a day!

We have now spent a couple of days in Roscoff and have fixed the broken arch with help from another friend of Ludvig, a Swedish sailing boat named Joyride captained by Jonathan.

Roscoff:

Tomorrow Tuesday we’re leaving Roscoff and head out towards the great bay of biscay. If all goes to plan we should be in Spain around Friday noon and finally some constant sunshine and maybe even get see some dolphins on our way!

To be continued!

Cheers!

// Jonte