Month: June 2016

We are creating this site to share information about the rewards and the challenges involved in navigating a sailboat around in the world. We have been sailing the last 30 years, and have sailed further and further ashore. In the beginning it was Øresund in Denmark, then Kattegat and soon we moved on to The Atlantic, while we lived in USA. During the years of preparing ourselves and  S/Y North Star the third, we learned from fellow sailors experiences and it is our hope we can give some of that back to other people which follow their dream.

It all started with a dream and a very young man putting together a list of dreams with things to aspire for. Dreaming about a life with freedom and adventures and fortunately he met a girl who was dreaming even bigger. Sail around the world was one of these dreams and trying to finance the dream, before you reached high age and illness, was another.

This is about the world adventure, which have been prepared for during many years. The weekly readings of cruising magazines, the dinner conversations about the dream, the statement in Sydney of: “next time we arrive here it is by a sailboat”. Probably the first tangible action was the acquisition of a small 7 meters sailboat in 1992, a MAXI 68. Maybe not fancy, but certainly a great boat to learn the tricks of sailing a keelboat with a small family of three. It was my first real sailing experience as captain and Marie was so kind never to say that she was a little uncomfortable with my lack of experience – but together we learned by making mistakes in a small forgiving sailboat. But that is another story.

Later we moved up into a danish build Faurby 36 – a real sailing machine and sailing her in the atlantic waters around Boston, New Hampshire, Cap Cod and Maine moved everything to a very different level. Trillemus was her name, and she had been around the world and was probably ready for another tour, but today she sails out of Horta in the Azores and we bought our first Hallberg Rassy – a 39. She determined in so many ways our sailing destiny. She was very comfortable and the girls suddenly liked being away and onboard for longer periods, she was steady in larger seas and took us further away from home and she was unbreakable. She was followed by a Hallberg Rassy 43, same – same, just bigger and better sailing qualities and finally we arrived in the HR 48 we sail today. Looking back, the journey from simple and small to increasingly complicated to very complicated and technically challenging was the right learning  process – even though it was not planned like this, from the out spring. To sail a modern 50 feet boat, with all technical installations such as navigation tools, hydraulics, freezer, water maker, aircondition, generator and much more, put a great demand on the crew. You need to learn to fix and learn that some functionality is need to have and others are nice to have – and follow your maintenance schedules very closely. This way you can continue to enjoy sailing and not be focused on all the stuff which does not work and keep you in marinas, waiting for spares. Because it is all about being out their, enjoying the freedom!