Sailing back to Stockholm city

During the weekend we went sailing for the last time this year, which was sailing back to Stockholm city for the winter. We have had her further out in the archipelago during the summer so that we didn’t have to sail the long distance from the city every time we wanted to go sailing. It is approximately 20-25 NM to sail from central Stockholm to reach the first nice archipelago islands. There are some places in between, but they are not as good as the ones you find further out.

But the summer is definitely over now and during the winter we want the boat closer so that we can finish everything we need to do before our departure.

We started on Saturday by taking the bus to Anne-Mon together with one of our new sails, a furling genoa we found second hand. We bought two furling head sails, one genoa and one jib, and a cover for the furler for 450 SEK (47 USD, 42 EUR). They are all in good shape as well, so we were really lucky to find them! 🙂

We tried the new furling genoa on the furler, and after some time we were ready to set sail. The new sail immediately proved to be way much better than our old one. Both this one and the old one are still to small for us, so we have another genoa that we plan to buy which is bigger. Then we will use the one we just bought as a reserve and probably throw away the old one.

It was pretty late when we left, and the sun sets early this time of the year. We had chosen a spot where we wanted to stay for the night, some islands just north of Vaxholm and west of Vårholma. We have been here before with the ship twice so we had a pretty okay feeling of the surroundings, therefore we decided to continue even though it got dark. It was our first time sailing with Anne-Mon in the dark, and it was pretty exiting to sail with the help from lighthouses and the dark contours of nearby islands. As we were close to the city we also saw some cruise ships on their way to Finland and Tallinn, but no one passed close to us during the evening.

We navigated in between the islands and managed to anchor towards land even though we had a really hard time seeing where we went. We ate dinner, watched a movie and went to bed.

We woke up the next day to grey weather but beautiful autumn colors.

It ate breakfast and left right after, just when it started to rain…

It was a slow sail on Sunday, barely no wind and a lot of tacking. But we sailed almost the entire way to the city, we took the sails down half an hour before sunset when we only had 1 NM to go. We were hungry and quite cold at that point after 7.5 hours of sailing, the first hours in autumn rain.

Eventually we reached our final destination. Now we will empty the boat and focus on boatwork! We have some exiting things ahead, just yesterday we bought an autopilot drive unit. Instead of buying a finished autopilot package, we buy components separately and write our own code for the control system. Perfect winter activity! We will write more about this later on, so stay tuned 🙂

If you want to read more about our previous boatwork, mostly plastic repair, rig preparations all blog post about our renovation can be found under the category Sailboat Renovation and to read about our engine overhaul, those blogposts can be found under the category Engine.