Better Late than Never -Post 1 of 2

Better Late than Never. Here is my last posting about my European trip. With so many distractions and ways to waste my time at home it has taken me quite a while to get this posting written. Since there are quite a few photos I have divided it into two separate posts.

The second portion of my voyage was a race from Maloy, Norway to Den Helder, The Neatherland. Overal there were about 75 ships participating in the race with about 20 that we were competing against in Class A.

Tuesday morning right after breakfast we left port early in the morning so we would have plenty of time to get to the start line and be ready for a 7pm start. I thought this was perfect timing. My watch was on duty from 6pm to 8pm, so we would be right there for the excitement of the start. Unfortunately the winds died, so the race organizers had to postpone the start to 9pm since it is rather hazardous to have so many boats floating around trying to cross the startline with minimal forward movement. However, this provided a great opportunity for taking photos since all the ships were now circling around for 2 hours.

The first few days of the race passed quickly with no major occurrences. My watch gets out of bed for our noon to 4pm watch on Thursday to discover that the wind has died and most of the sails have been taken down since they were flapping back and forth too much. With no sails up, there is minimal work to be done during watch. Everyone on board has plenty of energy and the warmth of the sun can actually be felt due to the lack of wind. The atmosphere on board has completely changed. Too keep us from getting too bored while on board and floating aimlessly around the North Sea a tug-of-war between the various watches is organized on-deck for after dinner.

My watch was mainly women and our few guys were fairly small, so we didn’t feel that it was a fair competition. We decided to use our brain instead of our muscles and wrapped the end of the rope around one of the winches on deck. This was a very successful tactic for the first minute or so, but organizer started to wonder why the rope wasn’t moving at all and came to investigate.

Thankfully the wind picked up again during the night and we started making progress towards the finish line again.

Below is the sunrise as observed from the bridge during a 4am-8am watch one morning.

We finished the race early Monday morning around 4am, 7 days after initially setting out. We placed 7th in our class once each ship’s handicap was considered. The sails were lowered and the engine turned on and we headed for the town of Harlinger. After spending 7 full days at sea it was nice to have solid ground below my feet.

Please see my next post below for the rest of the story of my time sailing featuring a big wind storm.