Before we started our second season in the Baltic, we realised that we did not want to sail Grace all the way home ourselves. Neither Anne or I like night sailing and the North Sea is not the place to make up for our lack of passage making experience.
We are, and always will be fair weather sailors! The obvious answer to our dilemma was to hire an experienced delivery skipper and crew. An internet search came up with a lot of great sounding candidates with glowing references. It should be a straight forward sail from Goteborg across through the Skagarack and then west towards the UK East or South coast. We would be happy for them to bring her to any port along the coast! So in May we set off from Augustenborg in Denmark, pleased that we had everything sorted!
We had a great season, it had been the hottest summer for years and the sailing around the Swedish archipelago was an amazing experience. Grace was fully provisioned; spare gas, a full set of charts, UK Navionics Card, spare diesel, a full set of engine spares and of course the hugely expensive and large liferaft. I had at least expected someone who wanted to go sailing! But at least his regular crew, an ex-RN engineer seemed to know what he was doing and I was reassured that he would not sail with someone who could not Grace safely back to the UK.
He then disappeared for the day to the opera house coffee shop to plan his passageβ¦β¦perhaps it would have been better if he had had some clue about where he was going before he arrived! We were where we were, our plane tickets had been long booked and with lots of things to do waiting for us in our new home, we set off for the airport.
They planned to sail out of the Elbe, skirt the Friesian Islands then hug the Dutch, Belgium and French coasts, finally crossing to Dover. The long way round! Possibly the worst possible route as you are going West all the time with the prevailing wind against you most of the way. He now kept telling us that he only had seven days left to complete the trip.
