Posted in Posts by Edvin on Sep 25th, 2011
We got up early in the morning and took the boat to the service dock. We had passed the mast crane several times in last week and we where worried the it might be to weak and that the wires and winches was rusty and i a bad shape. The crane does not lift the mast from the top as it is only 8 meters tall so I took us some time to figure out how to do the lift. Since I never lift the mast by the spreaders I climbed the mast and put a sling around it about 1 meters above the spreaders and tied the sling down with two halyards. Kevin and his colleague who works at the marina had came to help us out and with four people the lift when surprisingly smooth and our concern about the crane turned out to be unwarranted. Then we roped the boat over to the lifting dock where Kevin placed the slings under the boat.
With wobbly memories from lifting the boat with a mobile crane in sweden i was very impressed over how stable the lifting frame lifted the boat and once above the water Kevin shifted the old V8 into wheel drive and we moved to the layup with the boat hanging only 30 cm above ground. After placing and securing the stands Belzebub was on the hard again, but this time an the other side of the Atlantic.
Read Full Post »
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 19th, 2011
Once ashore we could really feel how tired we were from sailing and we spent the next two days resting in the boat. Several people had told us that it takes up to two weeks to fully recover from an Atlantic crossing. Since we were not feeling stressed we took it easy and finished the rest of the storm food while enjoying luxuries like warm showers, Internet and and clean clothes. After speaking to people in the marina who were all very interested and helpful we started to make a plan for winterizing the boat. We found a small company who rented stands and at the local hardware store we where able to rent a corner of the basement to store the boat’s batteries cushions and equipment that needed warm storage.
It took awhile before we built up enough energy to really start to work. We rinsed the sails and all the equipment that had been exposed to saltwater, winterized the outboard and took ashore everything that would go into storage. Jeff who owns the hardware store picked us up in a gigantic pick up truck for the first run to the basement. When the boat was emptied we took off the safety wires and the bowsprit to prepair for the mast lift. Around here people normaly store their masts on deck so we had to get some 2 x 4 s from the lumber yard to build saw horses for the mast.
When shopping for screws at the lumber yard we got an unpleasant surprise. The screws in Nefoundland were all Robertson head. We tried two other stores in order to find a better standard but in the end we had to get a bit set as well. I had been preaching the superioress of the metric system to Jeremy, Nick and Morgan for the whole trip but now I got a bitter taste of the modification we had to make for next year in a continent that does not recognize the metric system and international standards.
We wanted a durable PVC tarp for the boat but we couldnt find one so we had to do with a thinner cheep tarp and we have no expectattions for it to survive the winter storms. Back at the boat we built two sawhorses for the aft and bow and tried to track down the harbour master about lifting the boat the day after.
Read Full Post »
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 8th, 2011
When our customs quarantine was lifted there was only one priority…… Celebrate!!! It was Saturday and we got into Nicks brothers car to go to the second biggest town in Newfoundland; Gander. Our expectations where high and when we approached what we thought was a suburban area we stopped and asked a man for directions to the town center. “Well, this is pretty much it” he replied in a strong accent while laughing at our disappointment. He did point us out to the local hotel with a bar called Legends attached. The hotel was inhabited by workers from the nearby offshore oil rig and we shared a room and went straight to the bar. Nick had received an offer to go back to his old job if he could be there Monday morning and managed to get a flight that would leave gander at 6 am the next morning. When we woke up the next day 5 min before checkout time Nick was gone. We tried to reconstruct the night before from our blurry memories and decided to never party with oil rig workers again. How Nick got on that plane seemed to be a miracle and while Nicks brother drove me and Morgan back to the boat we where imagining the horrors of being hangover without sleep on a small propeller plane on a 12 hour transfer. It made us feel a little bit better.
Read Full Post »
Posted in Boat, Posts by Nick on Sep 5th, 2011
We waited for customs to clear us throughout the night. At 8 am they still had not showed up. I called them back and they said they would be there by noon. At noon they were still not there. My brother and friend had driven down to welcome us and drive us into town but we were stuck on the boat until we had cleared. We asked my brother to go buy us some lunch in town and bring it back to the boat. Finally at 2 pm they showed up and seemed pretty unimpressed that we had other people on board. They checked there ID and had them leave the boat and our clear in began.
As a Canadian I was shocked at how formal the process had become considering that I had been through the border hundreds of times before and never encountered any issues. Also we were in Newfoundland and Labrador an area known for there incredible hospitality. We were told that they thought we were trying to import the boat for sale (boat Swedish registered) and that they could not just trust our intentions to sail the Northwest Passage and that if we intended to leave the boat there during the winter that we had to comply to several customs regulations. Since we were there to do some boat modifications we hired some locals to do the repairs/modifications over the winter months to justify our stop in Canada.
Read Full Post »
