Author: captain

Sunday 5 August 2012

Today I sailed out to meet the Monsun skipper Jerk Oldenburg, with his no. 27 Monsun Vindela. He turned 80 years this winter and is taking it easy now. But still sailing long-range alone. It was great sitting in Vindelas cockpit and chatting with Jerk about all things possible, over a cup of tea/coffee.

Jerk sailed around the World between 1998 and 2007. He wrote a blog along the way, but said he did not feel like writing more on the way back to Sweden, somewhere in the Mediterranean. I used to read his website blog and was not sure if he continued sailing. But he has continued sailing Vindela. This summer he was in the Baltic Sea, Gulf of Riga, and also on Aland. He has sailed Vindela up along the Swedish westcoast, along the Norwegian coast up to the Arctic. Tranported the boat on a trailer truck to Haparanda in Sweden the next spring, and sailed back home along the eastern coast of Sweden the following summer.

Jerk rowed out to me in his dinghy and took over the helm in Isabell to navigate into the very stony and shallow waters around his sons summer house in the Stockholm Archipelago. Thank you Jerk, for some good advice and a very nice afternoon on Vindela.

I hope we meet again.

Here is a picture of Jerk rowing back the dinghy to Vindela…

Sunday 24 June 2012, we run into the guest harbour at Vaxholm to lay over for one night. It is time to celebrate Monicas mom’s 75the birthday. We walk up to the house and have a wonderful time with family. Good food and relatively nice weather. Hardly any wind today, so we run on the engine all of the 5 nM there. This harbour is not among my favorites, too crowded and sloshy, for each time the ferry boat goes by, the whole harbour turns into a soup bowl. But the town is nice. In the evening we sit in the cockpit and try to solve a crossword puzzle…

Day 5- we wake up to the smatter of rain. It is raining like mad out there. Continues through the morning to rain. We decide to wait for a wee bit better weather. We are on the low side of the dock, so Monica and I make plans on how to get out of the harbour. Not going to be easy. Mean while it is raining and raining… Will we go anywhere today? Weather report said it will be little better this afternoon. We wait and see.

The fortification at Waxholm, seen from the seaside.

Friday 22 June 2012, position 59*27’N 018*19′ E
We get the dinghy into the water already in the evening of the first day. Today we row into shore and walk to the party. It is far and one of our friends comes halfway and picks us up in his car. We have a wonderful time at the party.

When we take the bus back and walk the last bit to where we parked Isabell, we get to the bay after dark /around midnight/. Isabell is gone! First we panic a little, then we start walking around the shore to see if she drifted with the wind. No Isabell. When we are about to call the police, we look into the dinghy and find a nicely written note. Neighboring people had seen that Isabell was dragging anchor in the soft bottom, and they had with the help of another sailboat moved Isabell to the other side of the cove. We rowed over and found her all well and nicely anchored in clay bottom. Poooh! What a scare.

Now we need to rest. We stay in the cove tomorrow and just read, fix things good food and row around in the dinghy. Pick wildflowers in the roadside and walk thorugh a little park. Great! Here are some party pictures…

We are on our way North! At 10.15 local time (LT) we push off from the dock and are on our way to the first point of interest. Celebrate Midsummer with friends in the countryside. We have good wind and sail all the way to the point of destination at Åkersberga. When we get there early, which is lucky, because we do not find a harbour for guest boats. Looking everywhere, but do not find anything. Then we go into a covered bay and drop anchor. Nice in here, shallow and grimy water, but nice surroundings. From here we will walk to the party and back tomorrow. We sit in the cockpit late in the evening and just read and relax. We have vacation, so nice.

Here is a short list of preliminary points we might visit (weather and time permitted):

Waxholm, Stockholm Archipelago
Furusund, Stockholm Archipelago
Arholma, Stockholm Archipelago
Djupviken, Island Åland
Lokaön, Island Åland
Vaasa, Finland
Norrskär, Finland
Kemi, Finland
Haparanda Sandskär, Sweden
Kataja island, Sweden and Finland
Haparanda
Töre harbour (most northern commersial harbour in the Baltic)
Rödkallen island
Luleå harbour
Byske harbour
Gåsören, Skelleftehamn
Bjuroklubb
Ratan
Umeå harbour
Norrbyn
Järnäs-Sandudden
Trysunda
Mjältön
Lövvik, Härnosand
Kattskär, Sundsvall
Mellanfjärd
Hölicksskär, Hudiksvall
Storjungfrun island
Iggön
Örskär

We will post some updates when Internet is available.

On May 2, 2012 at 15.30 pm Isabell was ready for launching. In a matter of minutes it was done. Engine started at first turn of the key… Amazing. After launching I took a tour onto the lake and tested the engine and pumps and saw that nothing was leaking. Everything worked perfectly. Here are some pictures. In the evening it was completely still, no wind, perfect to get the sails up. Took a couple of hours to fix, sails, stack-pack, sheets, covers, and more… Now it is ready!

Today we were out at the dock again and painted the outside of Isabell. The weather was fantastic, and a lot of people were at the marina fixing and getting ready for launching day next week. Now it is time to start loading all the equipment back onboard.

Hope we have the same nice weather tomorrow!

Saturday 14 April 2012. It was snowing again today. I went to see the boat and work inside. Put in a new carpet and rewired some stuff inside. Up on deck thick wet snow. About 0 degrees Celcius outside. Luckily the heater is on inside and warming up nicely.

In the evening the snow stopped falling and the sun came out. Actually became nice. See some pictures of Isabell today…

The past weekend it was time to uncover Isabell, in spite of the snow flurries on Saturday. We worked hard both Saturday and Sunday to polish and fix things. When all the hard work was done, Monica got out the old hammock and a few km of rope and made a nice fancy seaworthy “slingerkooi” for the skipper. She herself prefers to sleep on the cabin floor when at sea. But here is how it turned out… Nice!

Testing out the new swing berth. Or whatever you call a “slingerkooi” in English.

Along the way I have passed a number of Monsun boats. I have seen one or more of them in nearly every other port in Sweden, both along the western and eastern shores. Most of the ships I have seen in real life where in very good conditions, judging from the looks of the hulls and riggings. It is always kind of special to see another Monsun sailing. And all of the ones I have seen are personalized, yet still Monsuns.

A beautiful occasion was when I sailed out to the most southeastern Swedish island of Utklippan one day to do some seal spotting with my daughter Ronja. We were out there late in September, and days had become rather short. Moored inside the inner well-protected harbor on the island, we had gone ashore and taken pictures and enjoyed the wildlife on this beautiful island. As we were getting ready to leave in the evening, another Monsun comes out of the East, lit up by the sun that was just about to tip behind the horizon in the west. It had a German flag and carried a father and son who were on their way home to Germany from a trip to Kalmar and Oland, Sweden. Moments like this are so nice that I have started to think about where all the Monsun boats have ended up after 30-40 years of floating about. Obviously, many were still in Sweden, but some also had been bought by owners very far away from the shipyard on Orust.

Then, as I started scouring the Internet about Monsun information for a while back I found out that many owners are in contact with other owners, and the exchange of technical innovations and ideas about sailing techniques with this special vessel was abundant. So I thought that it would be cool to provide all the Monsun owners with a platform for a connection, the Monsun ships listing.

So with some decent skills in SQL, database management, and PHP I put together the initial list. Then, of course it had to have some content in it to begin with. A good start was the Danish Monsun Club that had a listing of the member ships in their member section. I copied that into the list. Then I also am a member of the Swedish Cruising Association SXK. There were over 100 member boats listed, that I copied into the list. From Hallberg-Rassy Shipyard I heard that many boats had been sold to Sweden, Germany and Denmark. So I had to fix some pages on the web to catch the attention of German owners as well. I know that a few German boats sail in the Netherlands. And then I got so many nice responses from all kinds off people on the list, that I find it worthwhile to put it out to the Internet community.

I have email-addresses of many Monsun owners, but do not want to put them on the public side of the database. But in case you as a Monsun owner have questions to a specific other Monsun owner, please drop me a mail, and I will forward it to the person in question. I will on request post messages and links to sites on this site.