A day of contrasts

Today, there were many things. The forecast announced 5bft roughly going where I wanted to go and light rain from 11 to 16. And it pretty much started as planned, some nice exhilarating long broad reach surf going up to 7–8 knots and feeling the waves' pressure on the rudder with the occasional shower of rain. At some point, the GPS was predicting I would reach my target by 16.00, perfect time for tea and biscuits. But about around 1pm, the wind suddenly disappeared and left me drifting between an island on one side and shallows on the other side. I was starting to wonder if I should start the engine to just go a bit further, scratched the backstays and that answered the wind picked up just enough that I could get 2 knots and stirring. It picked up a bit more, and it started raining more, spoiling the view of the surroundings, so I put the pilot on and did some crochet to spend the time (on deck obviously, blessed be the spray hood 🙏).

After 2 hours of that treatment the sky slowly cleared up, the wind picked up (but not as strongly as predicted) and it was back to cruising broad reach, and surfing on the occasional wave.

When I arrived to my destination, I almost took the easy option to reach for a Swedish cruising club buoy. But, there was a nice pontoon with only 2 boats on it and I thought it was the prefect occasion to try mooring “à-la-swedish”. I dropped the stern anchor with about 20m of this strange flat rope that everyone uses here (turns out I was too far, so I had to quickly add more). When I had Elivra's bow about 1m away from the pontoon, made it all fast and clean, doubled checked that the anchor was holding and turned off the engine. The good thing is that if I f-ed up the anchoring, the boat will only sway onto the pontoon, and that there are no other boats Elvira could smash into if that happened.

Now time for a swim and then to plan tomorrow!