Setting Sail

Setting Sail  AKA  It was an awesome party but…

Thursday I am set to swabbing the decks. It’s a pretty mindless job and takes a couple hours but I quite enjoy it. I feel a bit like an applied student - teach me a new skill, convince me it is useful, and then let me practice it endlessly. Olve comes behind with a pressure washer and by the time he is finished the decks look great. We tidy away a lot of stuff and move the boat from where it had been to a canal in downtown Copenhagen. For the first time I believe that we will in fact leave on Saturday.

Friday evening there is a goodbye party. It starts about 5 pm and only gets better as more and more people arrive. I turn in at midnight but get up again at 2 am as the music is blaring louder than ever. I had worried that perhaps this boat might not fit 12, a full crew compliment, but see that my fears were unjustified as there are currently at least 4 times that many people on board and they are all happy. A crowd is dancing in the salon and groups are scattered all over the cockpits and deck. About 4 am most people leave and Olve changes out of his best suit and heads off to bed.

Saturday morning at 7 am we are all up picking up empty beer cans and washing wine glasses. Our lovely decks, so clean only yesterday, are covered in sand and mud, spilt drinks, broken glass and worse, but we can’t reach our hose to the nearest water tap so there is nothing to do about it. By noon we are not nearly ready to go (among other things both of our heads (toilets) were totally clogged last night by party goers who didn’t know how to flush properly and will be out of commission until further notice) but a crowd has gathered to see us of and so we – the nine of us who are starting out - release the mooring lines and head out to sea.

Olve, despite being a wee bit hungover, is none-the-less trilled to be off. The boat has 4 co-owners but he is the captain, the one who had the dream to sail round the world, the one who convinced the others to join him in the venture, the one who has done the most work on the boat, the only one who will be on her for the whole trip.

As soon as we are out of the harbour we set sail without too much confusion, kill the engine, and sit back and sail past windmills and under bridges. Actually, there is quite a bit of confusion setting the sails. We initially rig the two foresails on the wrong forestays so have to take them down and switch them, also the genoa sheets keep flying off the clew no matter what knots we tie, and well, I won’t go into the problems we have with the main. And then we don’t actually sit back as we still have many chores left to do that really ought to have been done before leaving port such as finding a place to safely stow a dozen large gas cans. And, oh yes, Ida starts to try and de-clog the first of the heads, a process that will take over 12 hours, require significant digging in the tool shed for specialized instruments and spare parts, involve taking apart pumps and being literally sprayed in the face with bucket loads of crap. We are heading south close hauled in 20+ knots of wind and the ride is quite bumpy. Mase, a tall burly 6 foot fellow, turns green and begs for a bowl to be sick into.

Andreas at the helm and me on navigation duty before it gets dark.

 At 8 pm the wind seems to be picking up and we are constantly getting sprayed with sea water. I go below and make a huge pot of pasta with tomato sauce which is devoured as if no one had eaten for days, then decide to have a nap in case I am needed later on. Shortly thereafter I hear the engine being turned on and am happy to know that someone is watching the battery level and doing something about it. (Our regular generator doesn't work, you see, and neither our wind generators nor solar panels arrived before we left and so the only way to make power to keep the navigational computer running if the batteries get too low is to run the engine.) Five minutes later the very very loud fire alarm goes off and I pull myself out of my bunk, grab my foul weather jacket, and dash up on deck. The captain turns off the engine and he and Pete go below to try and figure out the problem. It turns out that the engine is not getting any cooling water but why this is so is unknown. Meanwhile I am up on deck with Adreas who is at the wheel. Without power we have no nav computer and therefore no chart, so no idea where we are or where we are going. It is dark out, no moon, and we are heading south between Denmark and Sweden towards Germany in an area of the sea that is full of islands and ships. And we don’t have a chart. I am not happy with this situation at all. I know where our paper charts are, I myself stowed them in a hidden cubby in the library. The only problems are 1) there are many things stowed on top of that cubby that would have to be moved, and 2) the hundreds of charts are all unsorted so even in the best of conditions it could take hours to find the right one and 3) I know if I go below and start the search I will end up seasick myself. Mase is lying on one of the couches in the salon. He has been puking on an off for hours and is not only sick but also terrified. Between regular dousing of cold sea water Andreas and I peer through the darkness to look for little things like ships or big things like countries that we might accidentally run into, and, frankly, I am not much happier with our situation than Mase.

In short it is not a good night.

When we stop the next morning beside a wall in a deserted industrial harbour to drop off Pete - who can’t leave Denmark - long story – four others jump ship and choose to catch the train back to Copenhagen with him. Olve, who has had 3 hours of sleep two nights in a row now, looks around at the tiny group of us who are left and declares a layover day. We all take a nap.