I promised some updates after the cleaning and the beers, however, we decided to leave the cleaning for tomorrow, the beer was hard enough. The body is screaming that crossing the North Sea was one of an adventure. The numbers of bruises have increased enormously. Maria’s got one scary on her arm and my thighs and bum are blue spotted. There are numbers of ways to get bruises on board a boat and especially when the boat is fighting against waves and winds up to 20 m/s.

As Maria said I got little sea sick the first night, so I didn’t spend the night in my bunk, I slept outdoor in the cockpit between my watch keepings. I was steering when the swells started coming and didn’t notice them at first but then Maria came out wanted some air because cooking downstairs wasn’t that pleasant. She putted so called sea bands on her both wrists to prevent the sea sickness. Unfortunately, I didn’t put on the bands that early, which caused me some fish feeding. However, I am glad I usually just feed the fishes and then I am back to normal, or as we use to say in Swedish “jag styr och spyr”. We don’t know whether it is a placebo effect or the sea bands, which applies pressure on the Nei Kuan acupressure point on each wrist, really have a true effect. The sea band works for us and we intend to keep on wearing them when needed.

Crossing the North Sea wasn’t just about hard weather, new bruises and sea sickness. We also had some good sailing moments, experienced sparkling sea fire at nights (in Swedish we call it mareld, click here for more info) and got the chance to meet armed customs officers. Before we could enter Holland and the little Harbor Delfzijl some customs officers had to board the boat and make sure we weren’t some dangerous pirates or something. However, we had a nice little chat with the guys onboard Cantare and finally they let us in. And here we are, enjoying a calm evening in the cockpit, without big waves washing our faces or scary gale warnings. Now we’ll hopefully have little more relaxed sailing in the canals in Holland. Tomorrow we’re off to Groningen and then we’ll continue on the canals to Amsterdam and Rotterdam. We have uploaded some new pictures from the last couple of day’s adventures, if you would like to have a look, click here.

Before a well deserved full night’s sleep we would like to thank you all for following our adventure and giving us sweet and thankful comments. It’s so nice getting up dates from all over and we hope you all are doing just fine back home!

Sleep tight! /First Mate