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Year Four: A Review

Eagle Seven Sailing

Sailing in Northern Europe

Gliding along atop a sun-sparkled North Sea off the coast of Scotland.

The Fourth year of our voyage is complete!

The white dots are places where we stopped for the night or several nights.

Headlines:

Stockholm
Waiting for our turn in the next lock along the Göta Canal.
A quiet anchorage on Sweden’s rocky west coast just south of Oslo, Norway.
Amsterdam. (Yea, not technically “Scandinavia” but it felt Scandinavian to us and we have bestowed The Netherlands with honorary membership in the Scandi region.)

Read about our time sailing in Scandinavia in a previous E7S blogpost here: Sailing Thru a Scandinavian Summer

Saint-Malo, Brittany, Fance.
A lot of miles were logged on foot on the Southwest Coastal Path along the coast of Cornwall and Devon.
Non-European birds
Tied up along side Scotland’s Caledonian Canal
Available wherever books are sold.

A few statistics from the past 12 months:

Year Four Breakdowns:

For a 35-year-old boat Sundance continues to hold up exceptionally well, we had no significant failures to report.

Sadly, we do have a series of losses to report. Multiple dinghies have gone astray in recent months. For the first two years of our voyage, we had the best dinghy in the world, a wooden rowboat named Heidi, built by Chris’s father to a Bruce Redmond design called Tetra. She’s 27 years old and has over 40,000 miles rowed and towed under her keel. A truly great boat. (We write about this boat at length in the ‘about the boat’ section of this website.) Prior to crossing the Atlantic, we decided to retire Heidi into storage in Massachusetts. Her one weakness is that she dosen’t fit well on our foredeck. We decided it wouldn’t be prudent to try and cross an ocean with her up there. In hindsight, our crossing was mild, and she would have been just fine up there. We miss her terribly and wish that we had taken the risk to bring her along. We’ve tried three different replacement dinghies since arriving into European waters. All of them rubber, ungainly, and pathetic. One of them flipped over on her towline in a puff of wind, dove, broke free due to a failure of her D-ring, and was quickly dashed to bits on a rocky lee shore in Denmark. It was a bit breezy and we shouldn’t have been towing her that day, so that one’s on us. But not such a seaworthy craft. Another one was so sorry, we intentionally abandoned her after only two months of ownership at a marina in England under a sign that read “Free.” Now we have this ultralight weight thing made from kite board sailcloth. It stuffs into a tiny pouch that we can easily tuck into our cockpit locker which we like because then we don’t have to look at it. When in use, the thing flutters around like a helium balloon. The oars are like a stick with a white flag on the end–total defeat. We’re not sure how long she’ll last. We miss our old dinghy Heidi and her beautiful Shaw and Tenney spruce wide-blade spoons with mahogany inlaid tips. The good news is that the Heidi boat and her oars (and her spare pair of oars) are still waiting for us back in America and one day we will reunite. In the meantime, we’re looking for a nesting sailing/rowing dinghy that we can stow on the foredeck.

Scour the Eagle Seven website and you won’t find any photos of the sad series of condom-craft boats we’ve been suffering with of late. Instead we prefer to celebrate favorite memories of our dear old Heidi boat.

Ahhh, the good old days. Miss that boat. Miss that dog.

Year Four Boat Projects:

New boom preventer set-up

Takeaways:

Chris’s ancestry is English, German, and French. We visited all three countries this past year. Alex comes from Scottish and Irish people. We’re visiting both of those countries this year. There was nothing intentional about this. Other factors aside from ancestry dictated our course. We simply followed a path that appealed to us. It’s funny how the ancestors paired up perfectly. Perhaps not such a coincidence after all.

For people who consider themselves to be voyaging full-time we sure have spent a lot of nights off the boat in recent years. Northern Europe is pretty far north and the sailing season is short. Once we decided to spend time sailing up around these parts we had three options: 1. We could winter-over living aboard in a marina somewhere up here. 2: We could sail south to say the Med or the Caribbean and then back north for more Northern European sailing. 3: We could park the boat and travel elsewhere by airplane. (We sold our house, so returning home was not an option.)

There are pros and cons to each option. Ultimately, we were pleased enough with our choice after our Scandinavian summer to travel off the boat for a second winter to enable a Scottish/Irish summer. Now Norway calls. On the other hand, so does the Med and the Caribbean. Will we stay up here in Northern Europe for a third year? We’ll see…

Reflections:

Chris:

Sailing is the best way to travel. Arriving by boat is such a proud accomplishment everywhere we arrive into. Then, once we’re there, living in our little floating home can’t be topped. Instead of getting old and dull, this trip keeps getting more incredible. What we see is incredible, turning our destinations into arrivals is incredible, and our mode of transport is incredible. I shake my head in disbelief on the regular.

On the flip side, there are challenges, discomforts, and spells of yearning for more time with loved ones who are far away and seldom seen. The way I see it, the sailing life delivers more hardship and more reward than dirt-dwelling does. It’s the intensity of the experience that keeps me charged up.

Worst Day: Leaving the boat in England. It’s always hard to leave the boat but this time was especially tuff. The highly reputable boatyard there in Lymington had our home propped up with these highly unreliable-looking sticks and wedges in the soft boatyard mud. A proper jack-stand was no where to be found. I was sure she was going to topple over as soon as a gust of wind came up. Fortunately it turns out the boatyard guys knew what they were doing. Generations of boats have endured English winters on those feeble looking sticks and ours did too.

On the hard in Lymington

Best Day: Arriving into Stockholm. Many years ago, my father had opportunity to sail with friends in the Stockholm Archipelago and on The Zuiderzee in The Netherlands too. He raved about both experiences. To finally follow in his wake in these magical places was a thrill. To do so in my own boat was icing on the cake.

What a happy thing it was to arrive into Stockholm just in time for the June 21 Swedish Midsommer holiday. Alex’s brother, Justin, was about to arrive for a visit, we were tied up under the ABBA museum, and under the Swedish National Drinking Museum, and near an awesome pastry shop full of Kardemummabullar. (Sticky cardamon Buns.) Life was good that day.

Alex:

Once again, we wintered off the boat, which afforded some lovely opportunities to be with family and see familiar places, along with some new ones. But truth be told, I’d rather be on the boat. It’s not that this life doesn’t have its drawbacks – mostly around the subject of physical comfort – but I’m always ready to get back. This year, the fates and gods of wind and weather permitting, we will have more nights on the boat than away from her.

Worst Day: Technically I’m not allowed to talk about this because it happened off the boat, but it was the day in Buenos Aires when the doctor confirmed that I had shingles. My own damn fault, not getting that vaccine. But a month and a half of misery followed and it cast a pall on my time in one of the world’s most beautiful cities. Alas.

Best Day: Somewhere around the third or fourth day back on the water, heading north from The Solent, counter-clockwise around England, bound for Scotland. I can’t tell you the exact day, because the truth of the matter is I mostly don’t know what day it is in this sailing life. What I can tell you is that something clicks into place when we’re out on the water, heading for someplace new. It’s an almost unbearable sense of joy and freedom, and it’s unlike anything else I experience in my life. Even – maybe especially -the night watches. Two hours on and two off isn’t objectively the best recipe for a good night’s sleep – but boy that long sleep on the other end is blissful. And there’s something about it that makes my borders more porous….this business of taking in the vastness of an ocean, talking to a bird who arrives for a visit, the great rejoicing when a pod of dolphins arrives to play, the way a sentence in the novel I’m reading suddenly illuminates some profound truth. I don’t know, I’m just open to it all in my heart. Maybe it’s the fact that we’re constantly in the path of beauty, or that 99.9% of our encounters with strangers are positive and remind me that people can be so kind, generous and welcoming. Whatever it is, it seems, for me anyway, like the perfect antidote to the hard and angry world that shows up on my phone.

What’s next?

Scotland & Ireland. Then south?

At anchor in the Helford River, Cornwall

Onwards.

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