Gräddö and SNAFU!

Seeing as the weather was decent on Friday and promising to be rather bad on Saturday… I opted to go on and work on Saturday instead of Friday.

After a start in a very faint and changing wind (that had me stuck in the middle of the channel for half an hour), I was able to sail quietly between the various islands and the mainland without issues. It was a bit strange after days and days with the land only on one side to suddenly be surrounded by rocks again.

I took a reef before exiting the islands and entering the bay. That was a long passage but a rather nice and steady one. Although toward the end of that, the wind was more gusty and changing direction at times.

The entrance and the progression inside the archipelago was somewhat of a tacking match: going against wind and stream in a narrow path makes for a lot of zigzags.

At last, I was able to make a long close-hauled tack to take me within 1.5NM of the Gräddö marina.

It was a neat sailing: 44NM in 9H. But here came the big fuckup…

I was a bit too short on my stern mooring line and when giving some slack to it, I didn't pay attention to the cable's tension… One of the two lines got directly into my propeller, stopping the engine instantly… I called for assistance without success, got into my swimming suit and dived to see what the hell was going on. After a couple of unsuccessful dives, I managed to get a lift to the pontoon by a motorboat that was arriving.

Once securely moored sideways, I contacted the season sailors support again 😅. In the morning, I dived again and followed the advice I'd been given: cut the line, try to manually rotate the propeller, and finally I managed to wrestle it out. Once out of the water, I checked that the engine was indeed running, shouted loudly of happiness and relief.