450 mile North Sea crossing. Weaving through waves & oil rigs 🌊 🗼

I want to take a look at this wind vane. I think it just needs to be taken apart and cleaned. It's not working so good on my last couple of passages. I lost a nut and I lost a 10 millimeter socket. I'm really not on a roll today. At least this thing is moving smoothly now. There's a lot less friction. I had to straighten out this rod again. I really need to replace this. It's not strong enough. Today we're going to sail from Norway to the UK, somewhere on the east coast. I'm not really sure yet. It looks like we'll have light wind for the first couple of days and then they should hopefully fill in. I think it'll be about maybe four days to get there. 100 feet off the dock and the sails are up. We're gonna leave our way through the islands for a bit. Then we'll make our way around Linden Ness. That's the southern point of Norway. We should have nice calm weather. That's a place you don't really want to go in rough weather. From there we'll cross over the North Sea to the UK. I might head a little bit south first just because if the forecast is right we should get some really strong easterly winds and we'd like to have those at our back. Really good speed here. Five knots. We just cleared all of the little rock islands outside of Norway and now we are headed straight towards the UK. I got the wind vane steering. It's doing a good job. We're going really fast here. We're averaging about six knots. We even hit seven a few times so I don't know why the forecast said there wouldn't be hardly any wind to start off with. It's really great sailing right now. Hopefully it holds up for through the night at least and then I guess the wind's only supposed to pick up so we might have to reef down the sails and prepare for some strong wind in a couple days. Here's a look at our chart. You see we're leaving Norway and then we've got uh I think I'll go towards uh England down there but you can see there's these these oil rigs out here and when you zoom out they disappear so I add these these blue dots waypoints on kind of the groups of oil rigs so I can see them when I'm zoomed out on my chart because I really don't want to run into them. They get they get pretty bunched up down as you get closer to England down here. So yeah I just put a little waypoint on them and then when you zoom out the waypoints stay visible. I'm also going to turn on our AIS here receiver. I've got it set up to have a one mile activation range and then the CPA closest point of approach to half a mile. That seems to be the only way I can get this thing to uh not have constant uh false alarms. It's just it's if I have it set to any wider range or longer distance it just uh it's just going off constantly. It just drives you crazy and I always end up turning it off if it's if there are false alarms. Well the sun's going down uh we did pretty good for the first four or five hours and the wind's kind of lightened it up um but they finally started up and we're moving again so hopefully we'll be able to keep the boat moving through the night and get some sleep. We're just passing through the shipping lane now haven't seen a whole lot of ships. Sunrise and there's lots of birds circling us. The wind picked up to about uh 18 knots so I put a reef in last night. I'm not sure why there are all these yellow x markers out here. They say like observation station or something. They're just like kind of randomly spaced out uh out here. Anyone knows let me know. See there where's one here they're all over the place there's a bunch over here and then there was one back here where I almost ran into. It's day number three now we are sailing through our first oil field here. It's the end of day three. We've been holding some really good speed today. I think we're averaging uh 5.9 knots at least for the last eight hours. I finally decided to put the reef in the mainsail which means I just need to make it smaller so it's uh just because it's going to get dark and I think the wind might might pick up overnight it might not but at least uh I don't have to worry about reefing in the middle of the night. If I do I'll just go a little slower than I would like. We did lose a little bit of speed doing that but now we're down to about five and a half knots but yeah it's a trade-off. I don't think it'll matter too much. We should probably get there tomorrow late late tomorrow like a little after midnight around then if the wind holds up of it dies we'll get in the following morning and it's been quite good quite good sailing weather out here. The waves haven't gotten too big. It's been pretty comfortable. I've been utilizing my uh my tilting berth over here. It's quite nice uh because this is on the low side today. It's day number four uh 300 miles down 100 miles to go. Waves have gotten quite a bit bigger. We're heeling over a lot. Still a bit uncomfortable but it should be the last day. Maybe we'll get in there early tomorrow morning or late tonight. We'll see. A bird just flew into the boat. Is it Henrietta? No. We did 130 miles for the last 24 hours. Pretty happy with that and winds are finally starting to lighten up a little bit. We still got a bit of a leftover swell because it was it was quite windy last night. I think we'll we'll sail through the night. I think we've got maybe 35 40 miles to go so we'll probably get in Rio early tomorrow morning. I might have to heave to a little bit if I don't really if I want to rest before I go into the harbor. I'm about to start looking at these tides because the tides I think they get kind of crazy. We're coming into England uh the south coast and uh the currents and tides can be pretty strong. So we're we're getting near uh Lowestoft harbor which is where I've been aiming but it's uh about 1 a.m and uh the weather's a little crazy outside. I don't really want to pull in uh at night right now so I've decided to aim a little further. We're heading towards Ipswich now. That'll be another 35 miles so we should get it around maybe 11 a.m around noon or maybe noon tomorrow. Alternatively if it gets too crazy what I'll do is I'll sail about halfway to Ipswich and then I'll heave to and then we should be drifting in tomorrow morning uh back towards Lowestoft uh with this wind direction. The current's kind of crazy. We're getting a boost right now. We got our third reef in the sail and we're doing uh seven and a half knots. I don't really want to sail all the way down um so I guess we'll just keep on going this this fast. So I'm kind of regretting my choice to come down here because uh unfortunately the wind got real light and then the current got real bad so I'm fighting a two knot current now. I'm basically just sailing in place. We're not really moving uh over ground. Yeah so I guess I might have to wait maybe three or four more hours for the tide to switch and then hopefully we can sail into Ipswich. I just called the UK hotline and started the checking in procedure. This time they said they're gonna have the border for us come out. We'll see if they actually do. The current has finally turned in our favor. We've got a little bit of wind. You can see England over there. We're going to uh Harwick, Port Harwick I guess. Looks like it looks like Halfpenny uh visitor pier will be a good option. We're about two miles away. I cleared in with the border force on the phone so I'm good to go ashore. So I took my yellow flag. That's the key flag down and we just have the uh this is the UK maritime insignia flag. You can see it's like the union jack but it's on a red background. That's when you're supposed to use on a boat. It's a race. Someone crowded. I think we'll come up alongside this guy. There we are tied up next to this halibut grassy. It's nice to be on land after four days at sea. I'm gonna go get some fish and chips. Thanks for watching. Our next video will continue sailing on up through the Thames River and into London. And a big thanks to everybody who's contributed to help me support the channel and keep making these videos. It really really helps a lot. If anybody else is interested in getting any of these other videos I do have links in the description if you want to support. Otherwise no worries. I'll see you guys next time.