Sail Life - Sailing full time after 5 year's hard work! ⛵

Hi guys, welcome back aboard good old Athena for hopefully not so much DIY this week, but more sailing. After five years of hard work, Athena is finally ready for us to untie the lines and start heading towards the UK. If you're new to our channel, this is Athena. I've spent the last five years on a somewhat extensive refit, complete with rebuilding the entire deck, a very extensive osmosis treatment, building a new rudder using vacuum infusion, painting the top sides, rebuilding most of the interior after having gutted it to make some structural repairs, and a bunch of other fun DIY projects that are documented right here on YouTube. That's mess, I'm Eva, and all that's left to do before we go is to put fuel in the boat and fill these jerry cans. That's it, the boat is ready to go, all our jerry cans are filled, the boat's tank is filled, we filled our water tank yesterday, we're ready to go. So yeah, this is my goodbye to Skive after eight years as a liveaboard. Sorry about the engine rumbling in the background, but there is absolutely no wind today, so there will be a lot of that. Our plan is to head from Skive over here to Strua, where we'll spend the night. The autopilot is in control, our next turn is coming up in 2.3 nautical miles. The trip to Strua is about 81 nautical miles, so we should get there sometime tonight. This is a beautiful part of Denmark. I think Len and Larry Paraday sailed through here many, many years ago, and they described it like sailing through a farm. In last week's video, I fiddled around with the alternator quite a bit to get it lined up because it was generating black dust. We've now been underway for a couple of hours, and look at this, zero black dust in here. I might have to tension the belt a little bit more, but zero black dust, that is good news. The first couple of hours, I didn't enable the alternator, I've done that now, so hopefully we should be charging the batteries. 65 glorious amps, that is awesome. About halfway between Strua and Skive, we crossed paths with Camilla and Sebastian aboard Edafix, fellow liverboards from Skive. They just returned home from a year of cruising the southern parts of Europe. It was really nice to see them again, we said our quick hellos, and then we set course for different marinas. Due to the weather, we'd end up running into them again the next day. We've been hanging out here in Strua for a day now, keeping a close eye on Predict Wind, and it looks like we can get a really nice weather window to go south to Helgoland. Helgoland, which, I'm sorry, I'm probably butchering the pronunciation of that, but it's a tiny little island off of the coast of Germany, way down here. From there, it's a short jump to the Netherlands, to Belgium, and then to the southern parts of the UK. If we leave Strua tomorrow morning at 6, then we should be out by 2.01, that's the green dot there, around 9 o'clock, so let's take a look at what that weather should, hopefully, be like. This is giving us four different options in terms of weather routing, but we're not really too concerned about that. I just want to get a general idea of what the weather is like, and as you can see, we're looking at highest winds early in the day, 15-20 knots, then as we get closer to night time, drops to 10 knots, and it stays at around 10 knots until we make it all the way down there, and more importantly, we are not going to be sailing to weather, because gentlemen don't sail to weather. Of course, this is all just forecast, so there is no guarantee that this is actually what we're going to get stuck in, but even if we look at all the different forecast models, it doesn't look like the winds are going to be horrible, it's going to be a pretty stable direction, and yeah, it doesn't look like a bad weather window. If we take a quick peek at the cruising guide, you can see we want to go from all the way up here to down there, but along this coast here, there are some good options for pulling in, in case we need to. When we exit out into the North Sea, we'll go right past Tobrunn, Torsminde, Lysanne, Esbjerg, Bäumer, and then there are a couple of places we can pull in in Germany too, before we get down to Helgoland. The reason that's nice is because, well, it's Athena's first bigger trip after the refit, and it's her first time in any kind of sea state, so let's see what shakes loose. It's nice to have options to pull in before we're stuck offshore somewhere, and also it is going to be Eva's first ever overnight passage, and my first overnight passage after this five-year refit. This is the glorious island of Helgoland. There are supposed to be some really pretty red cliffs here, that I'm very excited to see. Yeah, we hope to be able to make it there in one go, that would be a great milestone, our first overnight passage, and also a great shakedown cruise, but yeah, let's see what shakes loose once we hit any kind of sea state. The plan is to leave here early tomorrow morning at six, and that should put us down by Helgoland in favourable currents, but yeah, let's see how that goes. But also, before we can go, there are some things I need to fix. Right now, we only have a tri-colour nav light at the top of the mast, so we need to install some more nav lights in the pouring rain. Also, we have too much pre-bend in our mast right now, so we're having issues with the in-mast furling for the main, so I need to fiddle around with that. And last, but certainly not least, we need to get all of our paperwork sorted for when we arrive in Germany. In a rare instance of chivalry, I will take care of the wet jobs outside, while Eva sorts the paperwork here inside of the boat. Everything is more fun in the pouring rain, but fortunately, adjusting the standing rigging was just a matter of loosening the backstay, and then tightening the headstay, and checking the curve of the mast. After a bit of fiddling, the furling main seems to have worked much better. Before we leave Denmark, we want to make sure we have some documents that show that that has been paid by the original owner on Athena. That can be a little tricky here in Europe, and we've been hearing stories about how boats have been stopped by authorities, and asked to show paperwork that the original VAT has been paid. Now that's been mostly happening on new boats, so we're hoping that Athena doesn't have to worry about that. There's a rule of thumb that boats before 1985 don't have to show proof. Athena is 1987, so we're right on the cusp, but we just want to make sure that we have all of our paperwork lined up, and that we can show that that has been paid. We don't have the original receipt, but we do have this letter from Trident Marine, the yard that originally built Athena, and it says here that according to their records, VAT has been paid on Athena by the original owner, Dr. Bottomley. I love that name, it's great. And this is from 1997, and we also have this invoice from 1987 for part of the purchase, and it says right here that VAT was paid at 15 percent. If you hear some clanging around up top, that's just my future husband to be fixing the rigging. But we were a little nervous about not having the final official full payment receipt, but after talking to some friends who were stopped, they looked over our papers, we feel a little bit better about having an invoice and the letter from the yard. So if that doesn't prove that VAT has been paid on Athena, then we're not sure what will. I don't know, does it look like they're working out there or chit-chatting? This is all the paperwork we're going to have on hand ready for when we pull up into Marina if they need any of the information, or some of it's also for customs and immigration. We have this boat information sheet, it's just a quick rundown about Athena. It has a hull number and engine, all the information we think they would like to know. We have our insurance, our crew list, this is the ship station license, the bill of sale to prove ownership, we have our VAT paperwork. Also there is no registration for small pleasure vessels in Denmark and that could be an issue out in the world, but how some people get around that is getting a certificate from the Danish Sailing Association or Cruising Association and we are waiting on ours right now. Good morning guys, it is eight o'clock on a gray and well very gray Thursday morning. We've been underway since about six o'clock this morning. The first thing we had to do was to pass the Øresund Bridge. There was a little bit of a wait, I think there might have been a train that was delayed, but we finally got the two flashing lights and we just passed through the bridge. About an hour and a half that way is Tupo 1, that's where we're going to exit out the Limfjord and then head into the North Sea. And then from there it is straight south towards Helgoland, but let's get back to that later. As you can see we're both wearing our PFDs but we are not clipped in yet. That's because we don't have our jack lines in place yet, so let's do that now. This is what we'll clip into when we're in the carpet and then we have some jack lines for up on deck too. That is it, we're ready. We're both clipped in now, although it is very calm in here, but all we can do now is just cross our fingers that the sea state out in the North Sea is, well, acceptable. We're right on the outskirts of Tupo 1. There is a little bit of current and a little bit of wind and we can only do about three knots, so this is gonna take a little bit of time. There is Tupo 1 and out there is our first glimpse of the North Sea. We're about 10 hours in. We've both switched to our very fashion forward, very orange insulated suits, so we're both very nice and warm. Eva's doing a little bit of crocheting and I'm just doing a little bit of sitting around. I think I managed to fix the issue with the furling main, but I don't want to test it today, not out here, so for now we're just using the headsail. The wind is supposed to stay like this all night, so that is awesome. We're running the engine for a little bit just to give us a boost and make sure that the batteries are nice and charged. There was a slight change of plan last night. We ran into a little bit of entanglement issue with the headsail furler, nothing big, but it was just easier to come in and fix it, and also we had an issue with the charts on our chart photos. We fixed both issues last night, but we were noticing that when we were zooming in on Helgoland yesterday, there was just a giant white spot there. There was no chart data, but now we have working charts. In Strua, we ran into this really nice steel boat from the Netherlands with a really nice couple aboard. They're heading to Rømø today and then to Helgoland the day after, and well, we think we might just tag along with them and do 70 miles today to Rømø, and then 70 miles tomorrow to Helgoland. We're down to about 65% in the fuel tank, so we better get a jerrycan in there. We're not going to be topping up here in Vilsene, because we've heard that the fuel on Helgoland is a lot cheaper, like almost half the price of here, so that's an added benefit of going to Helgoland. I'm going to fill that jerrycan in the tank, and then we can get going. Like I said, it's about 70 miles to Helgoland, so we should be there around 9 tonight, so yeah, we better get a move on. We're leaving Vilsene. It was an industrial harbor, so we could hear boats coming and going throughout the night, but it wasn't too bad. It was good protection, good for one night. It might get a little bumpy out here at the entrance, but it doesn't look too bad. Well, it was a lot more bumpy coming in last night. This is not so bad, but we're going that way. I'm not gonna lie, when Matt suggested these big yellow suits, I was a little hesitant. I, of course, wanted like cool name brand offshore gear, but I'm so grateful for these. They are so warm. They're so nice. They're also good for practical pee reasons. You don't have to take off your jacket and your bib. All you have to do is undo one zipper, and you're ready to go. I love it. It is a stunningly beautiful morning out here, but there's not a lot of wind, so it looks like we can look forward to about 12 to 14 hours of motoring, which is not great, but we're just trying to make it to the UK before Eva's visa is up. It would have been much better to do this sail in the summer on a nice sunny day, but at least we had following seas. Those can be a little bit tricky for autopilots, but our brand new Garmin Reactor 40 did a great job. Good morning, guys. It is yet another early morning departure, this time from Bremer. It's around six o'clock in the morning, and today we are going to Helgoland, but yeah, we got in kind of late last night. It was 8 30, something like that. It was pitch black, and we didn't get to see any of this place, and that's thing about traveling for distance. You don't really get to enjoy in other places. It's just a lot of traveling, but it looks like we're going to be in Helgoland for an entire day before we then leave, so at least we'll get a chance to explore the island a little bit and relax. That will be really nice, but yeah, let me get the boat refueled, and then we'll shove off. We're leaving Denmark and going to Germany, so we're going to be putting up the German courtesy flag, and also because Eva is not an EU citizen, I do believe we're required to check in with customs, so we're going to fly the Q flag also. There may not be any wind at all this morning, but at least we're getting a beautiful sunrise. We have about 60 miles to go to Helgoland, and the winds are going to be very light. There's hardly going to be any kind of a sea state, so yeah, it's going to be more motoring. And right there are our Dutch friends from the last couple of days. We're heading the same direction. See this dotted line we've just passed here? That means we're now in Germany, so boo, it's time for the new country ritual. New country ritual! Next up, Helgoland, about 56 miles that way. By the way, there's something we're really puzzled by, because Helgoland is sometimes spelled Helgoland or Heligoland, and I have no idea if we're pronouncing it wrong, so yeah, but I guess we'll find out later today. The sail to Helgoland can best be described as uneventful. The highlight of the day was when Eva got a nice nap in the pouring rain, the luxuries of the cruising lifestyle. It's about 11 hours later, and well, here behind me is a big red rock, the rock that we're going to be calling home for the next couple of days. It will be in in about two hours. The annoying thing is that the way you tie up here is you raft up with other boats on their sides, and that's nobody's favorite, so we'll see how many people are in there. I'm guessing it's not gonna be super cramped this time of year. Sun is setting behind us, and straight ahead is the big red rock. That looks awfully windswept, but it sure is beautiful. It is Sunday morning. It's been a very rolly night here at Helgoland. It's not exactly the most comfortable place, and then early this morning, a great mayhem of a dance started when some boats needed to leave and other needed to stay, and there's just a lot of shuffling around of boats, and yeah, I think our Dutch friends are going to be refueling at 10, so we'll also be shuffling around, and yeah, it's not the most convenient setup. One of the things Helgoland is known for is the tax-free or duty-free shops, but of course today is Sunday, and I have a feeling they're all gonna be closed. This is the south harbor, and right there is Athena. As you can see, the boats kind of raft up on the outside of each other. They are tied to a pontoon, so we don't have to worry about tides, which is nice, but other than that, it's very rolly in here, not super comfortable. During the summer, apparently the boats raft up together all the way out there, and then when the harbor gets full, they turn on a light, which then forces people to anchor over here. There in the background is the town. From what I've heard, about a thousand people live here full-time, and other than that, it's a summer town, and also ferries come and dump off people because this is a tax-free zone. It seems very obvious that we're not in peak season anymore, but apparently ferries drop off a ton of people that then do shopping here, and then return to the mainland. I would kind of have liked to stay here for longer, because there's supposed to be a cool museum here, and there's red cliffs on the island that I'd love to see, but yeah, we gotta push on towards the Netherlands, and in fact, we don't even have a lot of time now, because we have to go back to the marina to shuffle around the boats one more time. Boat juggling all done, now we just have one more uncomfortable night here, and then we'll move on towards the Netherlands, but we are gonna be a little bit challenged next week. Monday, we're gonna have kind of light southeasterly winds, that's perfect for getting us down here to the Netherlands, but then a little bit later in the week, this rolls out. These are all the wrong colors, this is very high wind, so we're not going to be sailing offshore in that, so we're thinking about doing some of the standing mast route in the Netherlands. It's not the fastest way to travel, but if we're going to be stuck somewhere because of high winds anyways, we might as well make some slow progress, but progress. Hans and Anja from the Dutch Steelboat we've been tagging along with all week gave us this, this is the map of the standing mast route, but yeah, we'll hopefully get back to the standing mast route in next week's video. Hopefully next week won't be as hectic as this, I hope I can find a little bit of time to shoot some video about what has worked well here aboard Athena, and what might still need a little bit of improvement after our first shakedown cruise, so yeah, hopefully we'll also get back to that. We want to end this video by saying a giant thank you to all of the people that in one way or another have helped us over the years, and of course especially our patrons. This is the beginning of a dream I've had for almost 10 years now, and it feels amazing that we've finally gotten started. Everything is very hectic right now, like I said, we're just trying to get to the UK, so we can get Eva to somewhere where she can stay for a little bit of time, but yeah, thank you, thank you so much guys. Who knows, we might even find a few hours for some DIY fixes for some of the stuff we want to correct here aboard Athena next week, so maybe a bit of DIY, fingers crossed, but yeah, other than that we hope to see all you guys back here aboard Athena next week for the Netherlands, and so yeah, as always feel free to leave a comment down below, and don't forget, if you've enjoyed this video, please remember to leave a like. See you!